To send his thoughts across space, man has to embody them in symbols. And what kind of symbols do you think he would
chose? He has had tens of thousands of years to develop more and more sophisticated symbols, moving from crude
pictographs to ideograms to phonetic signs, branching off into syllabic systems and alphabetic systems, evolving complex
grammars, inventing Morse code and computer language. With so much learning to draw from, what super-sophisticated
symbols would man chose to carry his consciousness into space? Pictographs.
Man's first efforts at sending histhoughts beyond his own planet have taken a very ancient form. The first message, on a
plaque aboard twoPioneer spacecraft launced in 1972 and 1973, featured a simple picture of two
humans, one male and one female, the male holding up his hand in greeting, and drawings of the solar system, with a
spacecraft emerging from the third planet. The next message, broadcast from the Arecibo radio telescope in
1974, included images of a radio telescope, the solar system, a DNA molecule, and a human. While it is true that this second
message involved electromagnetic waves and a system of binary pulses to encode its meaning, these sophisticated devices
were only employed to send a primitive picture. All the accomplishments since man first scribbled pictures in the sand have
led us right back to where we began. The long development of writing — from that first pictograph all the way up to the
binary code — has made it possible for us to begin making pictographs again. We have simply graduated to a higher level of
isolation, and now we have to start all over by mastering the most elementary skills at this level. The sophisticated symbol
systems we have worked out among ourselves will not help us penetrate the minds among the stars, for those minds will not
recognize our symbols or feel the meanings they were meant to evoke. To communicate withvery different species we can
only return to the simplest form of symbol availableand work upwards from there. Once again we are using pictographs to
join brain to brain, but now the brain we are trying to reach is much vaster. Long ago human brains were isolated from one
another, but now we have joined our brains in a planet-wide flow of thoughts. Today we are trying to break out of the
isolation of our planet and join a flow of thoughts that may fill the whole universe. Space may be swarming with energies
carrying the thoughts of countless civilizations; thoughts may be flowing between galaxies like impulses leaping between
neurons. Billions of galaxies may be involved in a massive metabolism of consciousness. The cosmos may be like a
giant brain, a brain unbelievably rich in ideas and feelings and experiences.Thousands of years after we used pictographs to
join isolated brains together, we now are using them to connect human brains to the cosmic brain.