I’ve
never before tried to figure out a creature’s life history based on their
language. This is because there is no other species on Earth with which
scientists could do this. Scientists have methods to infer the anatomy or
lifestyle of organisms that are difficult to study because they are rare and difficult
to find, like deep-sea fish or small nocturnal rodents that live in complex
tropical rainforests on uninhabited islands, or because they are difficult to
contain for observation, like whales. Given only a blurry video or photograph
of a new species, scientists will classify its morphology, relate it to similar
animals, and logic out the functions of its structures. Of course, there would
never be an opportunity to use this approach with a species that has developed language
and technology comparable to our own unless we encounter an alien species—which
the narrator of Ted Chiang’s “Story of Your Life” does. Like scientists with
only visual evidence that an organism exists, the people in Chiang’s story
cannot physically interact with the aliens they would like to study.
If I were to guess at the life
history of the Heptapods, I would start with their physical anatomy. They have
barrel-shaped torsos supported by seven identical limbs, which, judging from
the narrator’s description of their rippling movement, probably evolved from
tentacles used for swimming by an aquatic ancestor. Heptapods are radially
symmetric and therefore their movement is multidirectional, rather than
unidirectional as is in the case of bilaterally symmetric humans (and every
other land animal on Earth). This is an important part of the story, since this
fact is used by the narrator to figure out that Heptapod writing is also
multidirectional; it doesn’t matter what direction you turn their characters
because they mean the same thing at any angle. In contrast, English letters
lose meaning when they are twisted or attached to each other in odd ways.
It so happens that the vast majority
of radially symmetry animals on Earth are aquatic (think sea anemones or jellyfish—which
are both considered sessile during at least one stage of their life cycle),
further supporting the theory that Heptapods evolved from an aquatic ancestor. One
might think of Heptapods as a hypothesis of what intelligent life would look
like if radially symmetry never evolved. Bilaterally symmetric animals
outcompeted radially symmetric animals because they are better suited to
purposeful movement (which is useful if you are a heterotroph and need to move
around in order to find food). If bilaterally symmetry never arose,
jellyfish-like creatures might have eventually evolved into terrestrial
organisms, become social, and developed the concept of language as we know it.
They might even have been more successful with higher thinking because they
have a complete view of their environment (have eyes surrounding their entire
head part), rather than the limited view that we have (having only two eyes on
the front of our face).
If the Heptapods really do have
their origins in the ocean, then that might explain their system of mathematics
that has Gary the scientist so excited. The first human concept of physics that
the Heptapods recognize is Fermat’s Principle of Least Time, which explains light
refraction when it travels from air to water. If the Heptapods remained close
to water as they evolved terrestrially (perhaps continuing to hunt aquatic prey
or find mates there) then light refraction would be a very important concept to
them. It would make sense that they would start their study of physics there.
Motion and gravity were the first concepts explored by humans. Humans needed to
know how to best manipulate projectiles in order to hunt wild animals, which
involves all the basic principles of two dimensional motion that physicists
like Newton were interested in. Instead of time and velocity as basic units,
the Heptapods may have started out with units of fluidity or light refraction
as well as the “action” that is mentioned in the story.
Similarly, their basic units of
mathematics might be influenced by alternative senses. The narrator ponders “what
kind of perception made a minimum or maximum readily apparent to them?” Do the
Heptapods really perceive the world with senses that humans do not have and
have never imagined? If so, this implies that they have sensory organs and
receptors that do not exist on Earth! How cool would it be to find out how they
work? And if we discovered how a new sense worked we could probably design a
tool to measure whatever it detects for ourselves! That is probably the only
way we could implement any sort of Heptapod mathematics to solve real-world
problems. Hooray for biology!
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