Planetary Museum

"Tell me what you think."

In my impression, this was the first time the search and rescue team asked Wu Xiaoqing to express his thoughts. Before that, almost all the words spoken to him were orders, or orders with a suggestive tone.

This may be because the previous Wu Xiaoqing had no ideas, even if he had, he was very simple.

In any case, it was the first time that the search and rescue team gave Wu Xiaoqing such treatment before the start of a mission.

First of all, four of the five columns of information are text information (numbers can obviously be treated as some kind of text, especially binary), and the last audio is obviously used to explain the unfamiliar picture text in the fourth column.

When reading the first few pages just now, Wu Xiaoqing noticed a very important detail. The characters in the third column and the fourth column are all in strict one-to-one correspondence, just like the Chinese in the first column and the Chinese in the second. The English counterpart is the same.

Because the civilizations to which Chinese and English belong have been integrated to a great extent on the earth, basically all concepts will have a corresponding relationship-imagine, if you go back to ancient China, there must be a difference between Chinese civilization and European civilization. It is difficult to make such a strict corresponding translation table. I am afraid that the specific meaning of a certain word must be carefully understood before the final judgment can be made.

This precise correspondence between words often reflects the degree of understanding and communication between civilizations.

And in some options in the table, such as the common animal vocabulary on the earth, cow, pig, sheep... It is difficult to find the corresponding words in the third and fourth columns. In the table, those are either simple Blank, or some kind of vague description—an animal with four legs and horns on its head.

This is easy to understand, because there is a huge ecological difference between the target civilization and the civilization of the earth. On the earth, it is obviously impossible for pigs, cattle and sheep to exist in other worlds with the same form and social utility—if it is true Existence, that is called seeing a ghost.

And similarly, in the following, in the first column and the second column, there are also occasional blanks.This all shows that in the other party's world, there are obviously existences that the earth cannot understand.

Originally, different civilizations have completely different vocabulary and a large number of unfamiliar concepts, which is the most normal and common form.

Even if human beings belong to the same species, live on the same planet, have the same ancestors with each other, and live in similar environments, but thousands of miles away, it may be difficult to communicate with each other through language and writing. We communicated.

The West belongs to the alphabet culture, and this kind of gap is easier to deal with. If it is a collision between the East and the West, it is often only after a long period of integration that each other can have a basic understanding of each other. .

Before the establishment of the modern globalized economic system, each place in the world had its own way of life, and the social cultures among them were all kinds of strange things.

The one-to-one correspondence between Chinese and English is not difficult to understand, but there is also a correspondence between the numbers in the third column and the unfamiliar characters in the fourth column, and there are relatively unfamiliar words in the language of the earth When , they also maintain a consistent whitespace, which is very interesting.

To a large extent, this can almost explain that the third and fourth civilizations, like Chinese and English, are intermingled with each other.

But after seeing the bottom directly, this judgment appeared abnormal again.

Strictly speaking, the corresponding relationship between Chinese and English is not complete. When this table reaches two-thirds of the way, many scientific terms and highly rare professional vocabulary have begun to appear between Chinese and English. vacancy.

This is easy to understand, because even if there is communication between China and the entire English-speaking civilization, there will still be delays and hysteresis effects in such communication. In addition, the division of labor in the modern scientific research system is very detailed, and no country can do everything.

In some specific fields, the Chinese may have discovered a brand-new concept, but the English department has not discovered it, or has not paid attention to it, or the professional term for this phenomenon has not been recognized and included by the foreign academic system, it will be in the A vacancy appears in the second column, otherwise, a vacancy appears in the first column.

After reading it further, the comparison of the information in the third column and the fourth column becomes interesting.

Chinese and English are almost in the same area after one-fifth, and they are concentrated into a blank area. That is to say, after this area, the civilization of the earth is thrown away by the c civilization in the third column and the d civilization in the fourth column. gap.

The opponent's cognitive system, or conceptual system, has already produced a large number of things that do not exist on the earth in this field.But when you pull up from the bottom and look at it in reverse, you can easily find that the corresponding relationship between the two civilizations cd starts to disappear when the entire table is 9%—starting from this area, d Civilization ground to a halt.

If there is something in civilization C that cannot be described by civilization D with existing vocabulary, and on the contrary, all the vocabulary of civilization D can be found in c, then in mathematics, d means that it is a true child of c set.

This is very telling.

There is a high degree of correspondence between the two, first of all, it can show that there is a great connection between the two civilizations, and the existence of a proper subset shows that there are differences in the level of this mutual connection - a wider cognitive level , and a relatively narrow one.

This makes it easy for people to think about what kind of situation can cause such a small but real difference between the two civilizations.

This difference is not due to the mistakes and omissions in the details between Chinese and English in the first two columns, or even, from the previous strict correspondence relationship, between c civilization and d civilization, within the scope of the existence of correspondence, there is a corresponding The accuracy is far higher than Chinese and English.

In Chinese and English, there are often phenomena where one word corresponds to multiple words, or multiple words correspond to multiple words. This is determined by the ambiguity of the language itself, which is not surprising.For example, the idiom to describe concentration, from Chinese, you can find dozens of words of different lengths to describe it, concentrate, concentrate, concentrate, and have no other distractions...

However, Wu Xiaoqing discovered that there does not seem to be such a phenomenon between Civilization C and Civilization D.From this point of view, Wu Xiaoqing once suspected that c might just be a certain arrangement mark of the word order of d civilization.

But later, the fact that c is longer than d denies this suspicion, which means that cd and cd either belong to the same civilization at all, or they are just two language interpretations within the same semantic range, just like the difference between the English language family and the German language family. They are the same—in fact, they are both products of a broader concept of Western culture.Or, the two civilizations have an unusually close relationship—so close that it goes far beyond the current state of civilization on Earth.

It is not difficult to imagine the intimacy between civilizations, but after the intimacy, one of the civilizations has a period of resolute redundancy, which is...

Just imagine, if there is one-tenth more content in Chinese than in English on the earth, what does it mean?

It means that there is such information that Western culture cannot understand at all, and it is impossible to even use a word to refer to it.Could such a phenomenon exist on Earth?Using the simplest method in translation studies, it can be solved by transliterating a new word, but why not?If the association is richer, it is easy to come up with the answer - what if a civilization has lost this ability.

If all the hieroglyphs of the ancient Egyptians were deciphered by the omnipotent search and rescue team, and they were also placed in such a table, then the column to which the ancient Egyptian civilization belongs would definitely be the smallest.

In their language system, it is impossible to find words corresponding to computers, mobile phones, cars, satellites, rockets, ***... These concepts do not exist at all for their civilization.

But being wiped out is obviously not the answer, because if Civilization D has been wiped out, why would the search and rescue team come to him and show him this list?Remembering a lost civilization?Obviously, this form itself is related to the mission, and their mission is always to save civilization-the word rescue is not suitable for dead civilizations.

Think about another detail, why is the difference between CDs only one-tenth so small?

According to the current mainstream thinking about technology on the earth, the information in the future will definitely appear explosively, that is to say, in one end of the future, the table belonging to the earth will start to expand rapidly, and it may only take a hundred years. time, it can expand to exceed cd.As for the one-tenth gap between CDs, in the eyes of people on Earth today, I'm afraid it's just a matter of more than ten years.

If it is two rapidly developing civilizations, the correspondence between them should not be so high.The correspondence is so high, and the small gap is maintained, but the search and rescue team is required to intervene - Wu Xiaoqing thought of the easiest possibility almost instantly.

Imagine the current Chinese and English, and advance the time to 50 years ago. At that time, the content of the Chinese vocabulary was estimated to be 9% of that of English, and more than [-]% of the high-end content was out of our reach.

What if at that time, the Cold War broke out into World War III?Perhaps, the vocabulary correspondence tables of these two civilizations will always be preserved with such a gap.

"You are sharper than I imagined," the search and rescue team praised after listening to Wu Xiaoqing's analysis, "The key element of this mission is indeed war."

"A war between two civilizations?" Although Wu Xiaoqing was excited, but looking at the glossary in front of him, he couldn't help worrying, "The vocabulary of the earth... no, the technology of the earth is only one-fifth of theirs... are you sure?" Can we intervene?"

"No, it's three civilizations."

"Three?"

"Yes, three," said the search and rescue team, "do you know where this form came from?"

"You didn't do it?"

"No," the search and rescue team said, "I don't know much about the civilizations in the third and fourth columns. How long do you think it will take to achieve such an encyclopedic understanding?"

It was only then that Wu Xiaoqing noticed the problem—it was actually not difficult to make a judgment after seeing such a form.Wu Xiaoqing believes that if such information is brought to the earth and a consultation meeting is held for money, the opinions given by those experts will be [-] times more detailed than his own.But the key is how to make the form itself.

Randomly flipping through it again, it is not difficult for Wu Xiaoqing to find that many of the words involved in the earth are quite specialized and profound, such as mathematics, anti-homomorphism, anti-isomorphism, cohomology group... these Wu Xiaoqing didn't even know the concept, and he couldn't understand it at all when he saw it.

You must know that the current Wu Xiaoqing has already gone to university to learn a lot of professional mathematics knowledge.

Such a comprehensive and precise understanding of a civilization... Seeing that the concept vocabulary of civilization a is five times that of the earth, this did not make Wu Xiaoqing feel scared, but this simple sentence of the search and rescue team gave Wu Xiaoqing goose bumps all over his body .

"This mission involves three civilizations," the search and rescue team said. "The civilizations in the third and fourth columns belong to two professors, and what you have to face is the civilization that gave this form."