"Tell me what you think."

In my impression, this is the first time that the search and rescue team has asked Wu Xiaoqing to talk about his thoughts, and before that, almost everything that has been said to him is an order, or an order with a suggestive tone.

This may be because Wu Xiaoqing himself had no ideas in the past, and even if he did, it was very simple.

In any case, before the start of a mission, let Wu Xiaoqing express specific thoughts, and the search and rescue team gave this kind of treatment for the first time.

First of all, four of the five columns of information are textual (numbers can obviously be treated as some kind of text, especially binary), and the last audio is obviously used to explain the unfamiliar picture text in the fourth column.

Just now when looking at the first few pages, Wu Xiaoqing noticed a very important detail, the text of the third column and the fourth column are strictly one-to-one correspondence, just like the Chinese in the first column and the English counterpart in the second category.

Because the civilizations to which Chinese and English belong have been integrated to a great extent on the earth, basically all concepts will have a correspondence - imagine that if you go back to ancient China, between Chinese civilization and European civilization, it will definitely be difficult to make such a strict correspondence translation table, I am afraid that the specific meaning of a word must be carefully understood before making a final judgment.

This precise correspondence between words often reflects the degree of understanding and communication between civilizations.

And in some of the options of the table, such as the common animal words on the earth, cow, pig, sheep...... It's hard to find the corresponding words in the third and fourth columns, and in the table, they're either simple blanks or some kind of vague description—an animal with four legs and horns on its head.

This is easy to understand, because there is a huge ecological difference between the target civilization and the civilization of the earth, and it is obviously impossible for pigs, cows and sheep on the earth to exist in another world with the same form and the same social utility - if it really exists, then it is called a ghost.

In the same way, in the first and second columns, there are occasional blanks. This all shows that in the other world, there are obviously also existences that the earth cannot understand.

Originally, different civilizations have completely different vocabulary and a large number of unfamiliar concepts, which is the most normal and universal form.

Even human beings, belonging to the same species, on the same planet, with the same ancestors and living in a similar environment, are separated by thousands of miles, and it is difficult for them to communicate with each other through language and writing.

If it is a collision between the East and the West, it is often only through a long period of blending that each other can have a basic understanding of each other.

Before the establishment of the modern globalized economic system, all parts of the world were actually different, and the social culture of each other was also very strange.

This one-to-one correspondence between Chinese and English is not difficult to understand, but there is also a correspondence between the numbers in the third column and the unfamiliar characters in the fourth column, and they also maintain consistent blank space when the earth's language appears in a relatively foreign word, which is interesting.

To a large extent, this almost shows that the third and fourth civilizations themselves are as intermingled with each other as Chinese and English.

But after looking directly at the bottom, this judgment is abnormal again.

Strictly speaking, the correspondence between Chinese and English is not complete, and two-thirds of the way through this table, there is a gap between many scientific terms and highly scarce technical terms between Chinese and English.

This is easy to understand, because even if there is an exchange between China and the entire English-speaking civilization, there is a delay and lag effect in this exchange, and the modern scientific research system is very meticulous in its division of labor, and no country can do it all.

In some specific fields, Chinese may discover a completely new concept, but the English department has not yet discovered or paid attention to it, or the professional terms about this phenomenon have not been recognized and included by foreign academic systems, there will be vacancies in the second column, and vice versa, there will be vacancies in the first column.

And after reading it further, the comparison of the information in the third column and the fourth column begins to be interesting.

Chinese and English are almost in the same area after one-fifth, concentrated into a blank, that is to say, after this area, the earth civilization is thrown away by the C civilization in the third column, and the D civilization in the fourth column.

The cognitive system, or in other words, the conceptual system, of the other side has emerged in this field with a large number of things that do not exist on Earth. But when you pull up from the bottom and look at it the other way around, it's easy to see that the correspondence between the two civilizations begins to disappear when the whole table is 9 percent - from this area, civilization D comes to a standstill.

If civilization C has some kind of existence that civilization D cannot describe in existing terms, and conversely, all the words of civilization D can find their correspondence in C, then in mathematics D means that it is a true subset of C.

That's pretty telling.

The existence of a high degree of correspondence between the two can first indicate that there is a great connection between the two civilizations, and the existence of a true subset indicates that there are high and low differences in this connection between each other—one with a broader level of cognition and the other with a relatively narrow one.

It's easy to think about what kind of situation can make two civilizations have such a small, but real, difference.

This difference is not the first two columns, between Chinese and English, in the details of each other's mistakes, even, from the previous strict correspondence relationship, between C civilization and D civilization, in the scope of existence, the accuracy of correspondence is far higher than Chinese and English.

It is not surprising that in Chinese and English, there is often a phenomenon that one word corresponds to multiple words, or multiple words correspond to multiple words, which is determined by the ambiguity of the language itself. For example, the idiom to describe concentration, from the Chinese can find dozens of words of different lengths to describe, concentrated, concentrated, concentrated, and distracted......

However, Wu Xiaoqing found that there seems to be no such phenomenon between civilization C and civilization. From this point of view, Wu Xiaoqing once suspected that C might just be some kind of permutation mark of the word order of the D civilization.

But the fact that C is longer than D later denies this suspicion, suggesting that CDs either belong to the same civilization at all, but are only two linguistic interpretations within the same semantic range, just like between the English and German language families, which are in fact the product of a broader, Western cultural concept. Either that, or the two civilizations have an unusually intimate relationship—so intimate that it goes far beyond the existing state of civilization on Earth.

It is not difficult to imagine the intimacy between civilizations, but, after intimacy, one of the civilizations, there is a period of resolute redundancy, which is ......

Imagine if Chinese had more than English on the planet today, what would that mean?

It means that there is information that Western culture is completely incomprehensible to, and it is impossible to even refer to it in one word. Is it possible that such a phenomenon exists on Earth? With the simplest method in translation, transliteration can solve the problem of making up a new word, but why not? With a richer association, it's easy to come up with the answer - what if a civilization has lost such capabilities.

If all the hieroglyphs of the ancient Egyptians were deciphered by the almighty search and rescue team, and they were also placed in such a table, then the column to which the ancient Egyptian civilization belonged would definitely be the smallest.

In their language system, it is impossible to find the corresponding computer, mobile phone, car, satellite, rocket,*...... These are the words of concepts that do not exist at all for their civilization.

But being wiped out is obviously not the answer, because if Civilization D has been wiped out, then why did the search and rescue team come to him and show him this list? Remembering a civilization that has passed away? Obviously, the table itself is related to the task, and their task is always to save civilization - a civilization that is already dead, and the word salvation does not apply.

Think about it again, why is the difference between CDs so small as one-tenth?

If we follow the mainstream thinking about science and technology on the earth now, the information of the future will definitely explode, that is to say, in the future at one end of the time, this table belonging to the earth will begin to expand rapidly, and it may only take less than a hundred years to expand to more than CD. And the one-tenth gap between CDs, in the eyes of the current earthlings, I am afraid it is just a matter of more than ten years, a matter of raising one's feet.

If it were two rapidly developing civilizations, the correspondence between them should not be so high. The correspondence is so high, and this small gap is maintained, and the search and rescue team is needed to intervene - Wu Xiaoqing almost instantaneously thought of the most easily associated possibility.

Imagine the current Chinese and English, advance the time to 50 years ago, when the content of the Chinese vocabulary list is estimated to be 9% of English, and more than 10% of the high-end content is beyond our reach.

What if by that time, there was a third world war in the Cold War? Perhaps, the vocabulary correspondence of these two civilizations has been preserved forever with such a gap.

"You are more sensitive than I thought," the search and rescue team praised after listening to Wu Xiaoqing's analysis, "The key element of this mission is indeed war." ”

"A war between two civilizations?" Although Wu Xiaoqing was excited, he couldn't help but worry when he looked at the glossary in front of him, "The vocabulary of the earth...... No, the planet is only one-fifth as technologically theirs... Are you sure we can intervene? ”

"No, it's three civilizations."

"Three?"

"Yes, three," the search and rescue team said, "do you know where this form came from?" ”

"You didn't do it?"

"No," said the search and rescue team, "I don't know much about the civilization to which the third and fourth columns belong. How long do you think it will take to reach this encyclopedic accuracy? ”

Wu Xiaoqing only then noticed this problem - it is not difficult to make a judgment after seeing such a table. Wu Xiaoqing believes that if such information is taken to the earth and money is given to hold a consultation meeting, the opinions given by those experts will be a hundred times more detailed than his own. But the key is how the form itself needs to be made.

After flipping through it at random again, it is not difficult for Wu Xiaoqing to find that many of the words on the earth involved in it are already quite specialized and esoteric, such as mathematics majors, anti-homomorphism, anti-isomorphism, and upper cohomology groups...... Wu Xiaoqing didn't know these concepts, and he couldn't understand them at all when he saw them.

You must know that Wu Xiaoqing is now a person who has gone to university and learned a lot of professional knowledge in mathematics.

Such a comprehensive and precise understanding of a civilization...... Seeing that the conceptual vocabulary of civilization A is five times that of the earth, this did not make Wu Xiaoqing feel afraid, but the simple sentence of the search and rescue team made Wu Xiaoqing have goosebumps all over his body.

"There are three civilizations involved in this mission," the search and rescue team said, "and the civilizations to which the third and fourth columns belong belong are the two professors, and you are facing the civilization that gives this table." ”