Art Garden

by Brett Biebel

Many Carl Sagans exist, distributed across space and time, and they’re all launching unmanned interstellar vehicles from their home planets, and each of these vehicles is filled with culture.  With art.  With photos and sound and text, and all of these bits of experience (experience that is sometimes human and sometimes humanoid and sometimes something unrecognizable and perhaps humanly unimaginable) are flying between galaxies and stars and mostly never passing anything remotely habitable (let alone meeting each other), though (in a potentially infinite universe) there will come a time when somebody (perhaps some other Carl Sagan (though more likely it will be some sort of impersonal space exploration corporation)) is able to intercept one.  To read the signals.  Or, at least, to recognize that the signals exist, that they are in fact a message, an attempt to communicate across distance as measured along multiple axes (psychological distance, physical distance, temporal distance, etc.), and this hypothetical (though basically certain to one day exist) recipient will have no idea what the fuck any of it means.  May not even experience light the same way, let alone sound, let alone language, and this will happen again and again, messages received without being understood, and then one day one enterprising Carl Sagan (and, really, probably several, scattered and independently coming to this realization from their own respective positions along the continuum) will decide that future unmanned interstellar vehicles must contain cultural artifacts rendered in a truly universal language, a language developed from elements common to all experiences and all consciousnesses, and so, these Carl Sagans will look to the atom.  This will not be uncontroversial (at least, not most of the time, though there will (again, in an (essentially) infinite universe) be instances in which it is uncontroversial, in which it sails through without resistance and indeed with widespread, even unanimous, endorsement).  There will be too many arguments (and counterarguments and rejoinders to the counterarguments and so on down the line) to name, but one will involve the idea that using a version of atomic language (which will have infinite possible permutations and potential grammars but will always depend on the ability to see (and ultimately manipulate) atomic and molecular structures (orbitals and nuclei and the like) to create something like “letters,” something like “sound,” something like “color,” etc.) is elitist and industrialist, depending, as it does, on a deep understanding of physics and on the development of technology capable of “seeing” protons, for example, and therefore this choice excludes all “pre-atomic” cultures, renders them locked out, unable to decipher any message that they may come into contact with (and the (usually prevailing) counterargument to this is that this is as it should be, that any culture capable of sending a message into interstellar space is by definition atomic (or post-atomic), and any contact of a pre-atomic culture by an atomic one would be inherently colonialist and destructive, would either create an automatically exploitative dynamic or set off a chain of events bound to lead to disruption and probably mass death), and this is perhaps considered (or perhaps not), but atomic language is created often enough.  Sent out often enough.  And so a point exists where a second generation of unmanned interstellar vehicles flies through space, and, eventually, these too will be intercepted, will (incredibly rarely) bump into each other or come within comm range of a habitable, post-atomic culture planet, and, slowly, these differing atomic languages will become known.  Atomic Rosetta Stones will be crafted.  Studied.  Machines will learn to “read” and translate (into whatever kind of experience is perceivable by the inhabitants of the recipient planet) the information contained therein (and, eventually, storage capacity will grow to the point that it will become possible to send entire fields of study (indeed, entire cultures (albeit in artifactual form)) via a single, unmanned interstellar vehicle cargohold), and universal academics will build entire disciplines around cultures they know only through the arrangement of atomic and subatomic particles while universal librarians will seek to build searchable databases capable of cheaply returning interstellar results to individual users, and a species of universal terrorist will arise who will seek to possess whole works of art rendered in atomic language and then make them fissionable.  Fusionable.  To weaponize their content and thereby destroy entire other cultures (because, of course, interstellar weaponry will also exist) with (for example) Gravity’s Rainbow or Luftgnbar Zf Tskungd, and a subspecies of this kind of universal terrorist (who you might call a universal propagandist) will be constantly attempting to “hack” the interpretation machines revolving in fixed orbits at various strategic points located throughout the universe (perhaps even embedding corrupted (or corrupting) lines of atomic code within the original payloads of unmanned interstellar vehicles) so that received works will be chaotically misinterpreted in a way that aligns with a particular set of political goals (or perhaps simply out of a desire to sow some form of confusion and uncertainty and a kind of all-consuming fear about the limits of not just one individual’s but one culture’s experience), and the end result of all this is that all Carl Sagans everywhere will ultimately surrender themselves to the following facts.  All art will be atomized.  All art will drift (usually unencountered) through space.  All art will one day be made to explode.