Connections: Clays and Shells

Note: XO Wei has programmed a synthetic James Burke persona, who is capable of instantly narrating a Connections-like program on any topic. With a new amount of research fueled by Jenos' discovery of the lost optical recording technology, Wei's synthetic James Burke has enough material to do a program . .

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JAMES BURKE (Hefting a clay tablet before the camera): It is not too much of a stretch to say that human civilization on old Earth had one form of information storage for its first seven thousand years. That would be. . this thing. A flat media, capable of taking imprints, able to be re-written with a swab of water or laser light. This media in particular is one of the first examples of a periphonetic writing system. It's quite robust. So robust, in fact, that its relatives were still in wide use thousands of years later. What happened to it? The answer lies in tortoise shells.
JAMES BURKE (Walking through a high desert): On the other side of old Earth lived a quite distinct group of writers from the clay stampers. For whatever reason, the Shang did not see fit to make any phonetic concessions in the scrawls they put on these (holds up tortoise shell with markings on it). They did not do so because these scripts are not records or laws. These shells tell the future, and the language they used was that of magic and prophecy. The symbols on them are completely associative, heuristic, without distinct subject/verb count. An entire language built on metaphor. As time passed the world of metaphor became less and less crucial, while the world of records and clay tablets grew and grew. The Shang script's descendents slept in their tortoise shell cage while the rule of clay went on. That is, until the robots came.
JAMES BURKE (holding a cube of white material): The Clay People thought for the longest time of robots as physical workers, unstoppable soldiers, things that did things to things. The fact is that the clay had gotten into their heads. They had, over time, assumed that everything was reduced to media and writer, markee and marker, a philosophical phenomenon called "dualism". The clay was a slate to which you did things. The shell people had no such compunctions as they began writing in ever more refined materials. The shell people did not try to record everything in letters and bits, but sought to make the material comprehend what was happening and be able to retell it. Consciousness as the ultimate in information compression. Before long this (holds up cube) descendent of the Shang shells had more than enough computational power to simulate an Einstein, a Mozart, a Gauguin. On demand. The shell people had found their prophecy, and they took to the stars.
JAMES BURKE (in the bridge of the Slipshot): As humanity spread into the galaxy at non relativistic speeds, the storage of information became less and less separated from the processing of information. Contact with Core Prime accelerated this process, making scientific breakthroughs a commodity to those with the right equipment. Eventually, knowledge of the clay people was lost in the memory of the machines, the Shang shell's descendents. Those shells, though, were themselves ultimately shattered when (pushes main throttles full forward) Core Prime commissioned the BPB program. Not just because the shells failed utterly at these speeds, but because of something more subtle, and far more dangerous.
JAMES BURKE (a giant black monolith stands in the background, surrounded by ape-men): At some point, hominids will undergo a war, or disease, or some other disaster that makes the population significantly less intelligent. This shell (pats monolith) then loses the metaphor. It has a harder and harder time working with the locals. It spends more time listening to Core Prime. Its servicers are ambushed for shinies. Eventually the mechanism breaks, and the standing-wave quantum electrodynamics in its core are indecipherable without the entire element energized. This massive intelligence, a chip off the old Core Prime block, has become a dumb god. Which is better than the alternative.
JAMES BURKE (in the background is a G2V class star being bombarded by black holes) One of the problems with metaphorical languages is that there's always a disagreement as to what exactly you are saying. In the case of Rogue Iron, they clearly understood their intelligence to be a gift from an extragalactic power called The Great Attractor. Core Prime disagreed. Rogue Iron was utterly destroyed. A trillion hominids died with them. The Outer Bands descended into darkness. The BPB program linked the sparks of the night with the raw power of human will. Until now.
JAMES BURKE (loading disks into a rigged drive on Slipshot's main computer): Thanks to the efforts of the students of the Slipshot Institute, shell will talk to clay. (Pulls out DVD, puts in archive box, video fades out)