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Do you ever think about what it would be like to time travel? I do. Specifically, I sometimes sit and ponder what it would be like to find oneself in the far past, without knowing the language. I find myself attempting to figure out how I would explain new ideas without a common language. It's as much an exercise in learning a new tongue without any help as anything. What's remarkable is how much you can actually express purely through hand motions and facial expressions. I found myself in the shower this morning thinking of how to simply convey the idea of things smaller than the eye can see, such as germs, atoms, etc. Sound waves would be simpler to convey, as they work much the way that waves in water do, so you could visibly tie sounds from your mouth to ripples in the water. I think for showing the idea of atoms and such, you would have to keep breaking things into smaller and smaller pieces, showing a progression beyond the point of visibility. Not exactly a difficult idea, though, as the idea of atoms were first written of by an ancient greek thinker, and by various thinkers since.
Unlike what people want to think, we "modern" people aren't more intelligent than people were thousands of years ago. If anything, we take less time to think about things. We simply have more access to knowledge. Even then, the vast majority of people today have as little understanding of the workings of electronics as your average farmer did six thousand years ago. I have a CS degree, and I don't even understand half of it. It's pretty cool to figure out simple ways of expressing concepts without the use of common speech.
Unlike what people want to think, we "modern" people aren't more intelligent than people were thousands of years ago. If anything, we take less time to think about things. We simply have more access to knowledge. Even then, the vast majority of people today have as little understanding of the workings of electronics as your average farmer did six thousand years ago. I have a CS degree, and I don't even understand half of it. It's pretty cool to figure out simple ways of expressing concepts without the use of common speech.
