By ANDY ANDREWS
Los Alamos World Futures Institute

Every day we receive information through our senses, primarily through sight and sound.

As we advanced as a species, we created coding, the energy transmitted through the structures of the sounds or images in the form of languages and graphic representations of them.

Of course, one can expand and modify the simple perspective with other sounds such as music and warning signals or visual media such as art and other signals.

The key, however, is that these energy transmissions are created by humankind to send information. It is highly sophisticated information. We frequently communicate through talk in close proximity to others while concurrently sending visual signals through facial expressions and posture.

This form of communication has been occurring for a very long time and was a key element to the evolution of the species. One might point out that other species also communicate and clearly they do. Humans, however, developed much more sophisticated mechanisms in complex languages and behavior.
But if the means of communication had remained person to person, I could not write this and you could not read it.

In the history of humankind, we find images on building, caves, walls, and on and on. Did these images communicate and do they now? Probably so, but individuals had to see them, they had to get to a specific location and perhaps interpret the information. Somewhere along the timeline writing, more as we know it, came along. It was more than the use of pictures or symbols to convey an idea. It was a way of encoding words using a set of symbols (letters and punctuation) to represents words of the language.

If you look it up, writing began somewhere between 3,400 and 3,100 BC or 3,250 BC depending on your preference for Mesopotamia or Egypt. And writing has been determined to have been independently created in other places including Southern Mexico and Guatemala around 500 BC. As time progressed, writing was done on clay, papyrus, wood, slate and parchment. And in Rome, wax tablets were used. The sources of writing were limited and it was difficult to widely distribute it.

Then 3,400 years after the creation of writing, Ts’ai Lun invented paper in China (105 AD). If you look him up in The 100 – A Ranking of the Most Influential Persons in History, by Michael H. Hart you will find that Ts’AI Lun ranked seventh on the list. Paper reduced the cost of writing material and greatly eased its distribution.

While we take it for granted except when in short supply, the invention of paper made writing communication and the distribution of information more plausible. If you continue reading Hart’s book you find Johann Gutenberg at number eight. He invented moveable type for the printing press, somewhere around 1450 AD, only 1300 years after the creation of paper.

Moveable type sped up the process of creating written (OK, printed) material in multiple copies. One can argue “so what? Very few people could read.” But the greater availability of written material, information, made learning more exciting and inspired the continued growth of humanity.

Jump forward about 445 years and you find the telegraph and its ability to send messages in Morse code over long distances rapidly. While it is rather common knowledge that dot – dot – dot, dash – dash – dash, and dot – dot – dot means SOS or “help!”, most people cannot communicate in Morse code and need a skilled telegrapher to send or receive a message.

But the birth of the telegraph marked a significant increase in the speed of communication over greater distances, albeit reduced in content. Samuel Morse received an honorable mention in Hart’s book, perhaps an indication of the relative importance of speed of communication when the amount of communication content is reduced.

Then came Guillermo Marconi and the working device he patented in 1896 that we all call a radio. At first his technology only allowed sending signals (messages) wirelessly. But wireless meant anywhere, without the mass of paper, and very, very quickly. More importantly, in 1915, the coding in radio messages became voice, an older but widespread code.

If you layout the dates of these inventions the list is 3,250BC, 105 AD, 1450 AD, 1845 AD, and 1896AD, at least approximately. The intervals calculate to 3400 years, 1845 years, 395 years, and 41 years in the speed of communication for the distribution of information. What is the acceleration, noting that acceleration might influence the size of information distribution? And what would Alexander Graham Bell have to say?

Til next time…

The Los Alamos World Futures Institute website is at LAWorldFutures.org. Feedback, volunteers, and donations (501.c.3) are welcome. Email andy.andrews@laworldfutres.org or bob.nolen@laworldfutures.org. Previously published columns can be found at https://ladailypost.com or https:////www.laworldfutures.org.