Time
Answering a temporal Quora question, causes you to question some things you yourself may never have questioned
This Quora question was most intriguing. I had to share it.
I'm not into science fiction. I am science fiction.2m
The first people to measure Time had a tool which the species still carries.
Stories.
Humans all tell each other stories. All the time. Even during sleep.
This tool can teach the aliens about the humans’ place in Time with words. Words written as pictures. A linear narrative.
Hands. A Stone Age cave painting. A bronze tool. A plough. Grain. Bread. A fire lit by humans. Weaving, a bolt of cloth. A ceramic pot. A plant growing in a pot.
A community - one cis male, one cis female, a trans person, diverse in skin colour as much as gender. Something to show many hands united in communal activity. Clothed and unclothed figures, to show that we wear protective sheets of woven fabric over bare skin, as much for aesthetics and status designation as for basic protection from the elements.
A piece of mathematics - Newton’s Second Law, F = ma, and its derivative E = 1/2mv^2.
Three alphabets - the modern Latin, Greek, and Japanese hiragana / katakana.
A commercial jet, followed by a rocket.
Last, an image of the probe itself.
And show them in that sequence.
The only way humans can measure their location in Time is through the stories they tell one another. This is how to tell the aliens when to find you.
Us.