Raw notes plus two fiction bits from me.
Jeffrey Lockwood was at a conference in New Mexico, funded by the Templeton Foundation. Doug Backoff, from SETI Institute. Doug was supposed to design a program from active SETI. Insteading of shotgunning the universe with messages we can now target them. Doug was working with visual artists asking what sort of images should be sent. Jeffrey asked if he’d done anything with writers. He hadn’t. Some stuff with Sagan, but nothing with fiction.
5 C’s motivation (for crafting fiction for aliens)
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Craft – That this would stretch them in ways that they hadn’t encountered before. Different problems, pushing outside comfort.
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Consciousness – To push writers in deeper inquiries of themselves. The act of crafting a message for another intelligence pushed them to inquire more deeply about what it meant to be human. In ways that we simply in our ordinary writing lives we don’t have to do. When you can’t take any of that for granted, you have to ask really hard questions about the nature of the mind.
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Could happen – It’s a stretch, but it is greater than zero. There’s an element of immortality, influence, power, and responsibility. That focused their attention in ways other things hadn’t.
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Culture – One of the things that NASA wanted them to do is to foster an appreciation of space science.
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Connections – The connections between the sciences and the humanities is where some of the best work is being done. An understanding of science can be a powerful creative force.
Four or five small writing prompts each session. Assume you have made preliminary contact with some intelligence that is travelling through at a high rate of speed. Moreover let us assume that there is no serious limitation between each other with respect to language.
We each wrote 5, then traded and picked the best one of our partners questions. These are
What does home mean?
Why?
What’s the most important thing you have to tell us?
What would you like to learn from us?
What is your origin?
How does your ship work?
What life forms have you encountered?
Could you swap our beings for one of ours?
What is biological basis?
How is your craft moved?
Is your consciousness housed in a physical body?
When will you come again?
How would you describe yourselves to us?
Will you send us images of yourself?
Will you trade goods or information with us?
This was a way to getting them to focus on some important aspect. So pick a question to answer, as if the aliens had sent these same questions to us. This is what I wrote in answer to “What does “home” mean to you?”
“Home” represents different things to different cultures and individuals. For most people the connontation is different from “house,” which is merely a dwelling and represents a place of emotional safety and comfort. In English language, we have an idiom. “Home is where the heart is,” which means that “home” is where a person’s passion is, be that another person or place or activity.
But in simpler terms, “home” is called the planet Earth which is the third planet from the sun. I, personally, live on the North American continent, which is the smaller of the two land masses in the northern hemisphere.
Complementary modalities.
Quality of being prime is that which we can not reduce to anything else.
Prime numbers
Craft a piece, a poem, a meditation, a scene about something about human beings that is prime. BUT you have to craft it according to the prime numbers. For instance, a poem might have the first line have one word, the second line two, the third three, the fourth five, etc…
Fibonacci series.
1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55… pattern we see all kinds of places.
Craft a piece, a poem, a meditation, a scene about the importance of pattern, prediction, rhythmicity. Use fibonacci numbers as the structure.
I chose the Fibonacci sequence and wrote this.
Eve. Adam. Two people. A child comes. The first family is born. Then they reproduce to make their own families. This pattern repeats, carrying humanity forward through the ages with parents and children. We reach our time, where a woman sits heavy with her child; behind her, in a hospital bed, rests her mother. This is not the first time that a woman has watched her mother die, but she feels it as keenly as if she were watching Eve and the first death in the universe had finally ripened as the vicious fruit of the knowledge of good and evil here in this hospital, with its antiseptic smell. As she sits watching, time stretches out into the shallow space between each contraction, so that if she could have a choice, she would sit balanced between them until her mother had left the world, so that she could see her out of life before focusing on the new life pushing urgently to exit her body, but there is the sharp pain again and then the gush of wetness and she knows,she knows that she must call the nurse and welcome the next generation before her mother leaves.
Ten lessons in the class he taught.
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I don’t know. — You know about publishing, but you don’t know the first thing about being an alien and so you don’t know what will be good communication for them.
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Writing? — send complementary modalities hoping that one might be the Rosetta Stone for them.
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Absurdity
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Alien — Think about terrestrial aliens and then magnify the challenge to imagine extraterrestrial alien
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The 1st Act of Creation – It’s the creation of your reader. We assume that they are like us, but you can’t make that assumption with an alien.
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Universal and particular – What it is to be human is the particular. Use the particular to articulate the universal. To communicate with the alien, it would almost have to be a collection of vignettes demonstrating the range of experiences like grief or happiness.
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Whole being – The nature of being human is to be an embodied mind.
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Serious play –
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Complementarity – Using multiple modes of communication.
- Prayerfulness
