Citlalli in the Sky With Cnidaria (original) (raw)
TOP SECRET
Transcript of Internal Briefing
The Situation Room, the White House, Washington, D.C.
[0903 — 6 May 2029 — Beginning of Transcript]
President Maria Guadalupe Jimenez: … on such short notice. I imagine a visit from an FBI unit during Sunday breakfast might have been alarming.
[Inaudible]
The purpose of this emergency meeting is to develop a response plan to the aftermath of an extraordinary event that took place aboard the Ho’ Chan Ahaw X1 spacecraft several months ago. As your handler communicated to you en route, an internal NASA memo referring to that event was leaked last evening. You have a copy of it in front of you.
As you can see, we may now be in contact with extraterrestrial beings who possess technologies considerably different from and possibly superior to our own.
You are here today to help humanity assess what we’re looking at. Your participation in this meeting will significantly influence how the world will respond.
[Pause]
By the way, if you were up late, you—or your children?—may have already witnessed some of the social media response to the content of the leaked memo. Slides? Sara?
Chief of Staff Sara Lopez: These social media posts are all AI generated images… You see an octopus in an aquarium, next to a porthole window, with Earth in the background. Then there are these song lyrics, “Strewn with time’s dead flowers, bereft in deathly bloom.” We don’t know what the hell that means.
President Jimenez: You’ll notice that some of the posts are bald political angling—which actually is providing us with a little extra time to respond. Morning pundits are suggesting that the memo itself may have been created by my political opponents so that the entire situation is simply fake news. That’s providing some cover, but once people start digging, they’ll find a trail.
Ms. Lopez: No way that line of attack holds up until campaign season starts.
Director of National Intelligence Robert Guthrie: Can we forget about the next election right now and focus on the matter at hand?
Ms. Lopez: We’re always thinking about the next election…
President Jimenez: Sarita, not now.
The supposed message referred to in the memo was received by a spacecraft that is still in lunar orbit. NASA has patched us through to Dr. Citlalli Magdaleno on board the Ho’ Chan Ahaw X1.
Dr. Magdaleno? Are you receiving this?
[Delay]
Dr. Citlalli Magdaleno: Roger, Madam President. And may I say first, though… I mean, I have to say that it’s an honor to meet you and… you’re an inspiration to so many.
President Jimenez: Thank you. Sincerely. As you can see, I’m here in the Situation Room with the Joint Chiefs and key members of my Cabinet. There’s a delay back and forth in our communication, so, let’s keep it tight.
[Delay]
Dr. Magdaleno: Roger that, Madam President.
President Jimenez: Dr. Magdaleno, why don’t you give us a brief tour of your spacecraft so my staff can see why we have images of an octopus in space all over TocTic right now.
[Delay]
Dr. Magdaleno: Roger Wilco. Did you hear that, Fernando? You’re famous!
President Jimenez: I was under the impression that you were the only astronaut on board?
[Delay]
Dr. Magdaleno: Ha! Yes, well, no, actually. We’re all astronauts up here—this is Fernando, he’s the octopus on board, Octopus briareus. He’s been part of this project since the beginning.
Okay, umm, all of our saltwater tanks are on this side of our control room, and the freshwater tanks are on that side.
Our sea fireflies—that’s _Photeros annecohenae_—they’re in the same tank as the cnidaria and fireworms, Odontosyllis enopla, but we keep Fernando in his own habitat. The same saltwater circulates through all of these tanks, but the dinoflagellate algae get their own sub-tank so they can be concentrated enough for their bioluminescence to be readily measurable.
Over here, we have our nanobionic plants nourished by the same freshwater that supports our tetras and our bioluminescent salamander, _Ambystoma tigrinum_… oh, and some limpets, Latia neritoides.
Some of these species have natural bioluminescence so they didn’t require any significant genetic modification, but the others we had to genetically tweak for the experiment.
Oh, and then there’s our axolotl, Henry. He doesn’t glow—but his movements and behavior patterns are just as critical to the overall ecosystem.
President Jimenez: Ladies and gentlemen, there’s your octopus in space. Now, Dr. Magdaleno, can you help us understand how—or maybe whether—any of these creatures are related to possible extraterrestrial communication?
[Inaudible]
President Jimenez: Right. I’m being reminded that I should also have introduced Dr. Jose Maria Ruiz, professor of Indigenous Studies at UC Santa Barbara, who is here with us today. He, too, is part of this team, and it was actually his memo of April 14 [2029], updating their work that was leaked last night. Professor Ruiz?
Professor Ruiz: Yes, thank you, Mrs. President…
Ms. Lopez: Ms.… or Madam.
Professor Ruiz: Excuse me. Ms. President. Well, as you can see in my memo, we were not certain at first that there was any message at all or even that it was a legitimate transmission. That’s what we were charged with finding out. My team and I were given all of the data from “the event” and NASA asked that we analyze it to see if in fact it could be a message… or if it was just a fluke, random set of patterns. Which is not impossible. You know Ramsey Theory tells us that patterns emerge in randomness even if they are not meaningful…
President Jimenez: Let’s be careful with digressions, Professor. Maybe you can start by informing us how it could have been ambiguous at all. I mean, a message is a message; you just have to know the language, right? And the encryption, of course, if relevant.
Professor Ruiz: That’s what was so fascinating about this case. Especially because the experiment wasn’t planned to go to space at all. Originally, the goal was only to be able to observe interactions between different species here on Earth. That was the idea that Memo—mmm… Guillermo Villalobos—he was the engineer behind this bioluminescent ecosystem. He was trying to build a set of symbolic representations that the plants and animals were using to communicate. And that the whole system was operating in balance.
President Jimenez: The plants were communicating?
Professor Ruiz: Absolutely. Yes. So this is not new. We’ve known, for example, that if one leaf of a plant gets damaged—say it is cut by a weed whacker or bitten by a grasshopper—that leaf will emit a volatile organic compound, a VOC, which then other plants nearby may pick up. That is how they can recognize the injury and so a potential threat. And that’s where Memo started.
He followed up on some work—in Japan, I believe—that modified plants to fluoresce—using genetically encoded biosensors—when they received those VOCs. That is, they light up when they sense that another plant is injured. By expanding that idea to various types of interactions between different species, Memo developed the core of a self-sustaining ecosystem in the lab, and one that could visually monitor the signals between different creatures.
His experiment set up the possibility of “the event.”
It would probably be best for Citlalli to describe that for us.
[Delay]
Dr. Magdaleno: Okay. So that’s the data that we were—and still are—generating. The bioluminescence and behaviors all produce color patterns of specific intensities to show that the system is operating in balance. What you’re seeing now is our stable state. They also produce different signals when things get out of balance.
And so all of this was going on at the end of October last year, when suddenly, it all changed. All of the patterns changed radically. And it happened to me too.
President Jimenez: You’ve been genetically modified to glow?
[Delay]
Dr. Magdaleno: No, no. Sorry. No. Everyone started sending signals in patterns that weren’t like anything up until then and in ways that didn’t make sense relative to their programming. Like Fernando… I mean, sure, when he dreams, sometimes he’ll produce interesting patterns, but nothing like this. Anyway, I lost track of that almost immediately because I—and I remember this so clearly—I felt this wave of sadness come over me. It was deep and intense and I was sure I was going to just start sobbing. But then it just… it dissolved. And there was no break. It’s like inside of the sadness, there was this seed of excitement, and as it grew the sadness dissipated and then the excitement became overwhelming. And this process felt like it went on forever. I mean, one emotion into another… some lasting longer than others. Some identical to others. It was just really intense. Our AV recording shows that the emotional experience I was having coincided with the distorted patterns exhibited by the ecosystem.
President Jimenez: So that was “the event.” That’s what you thought was some form of extraterrestrial species communication?
[Delay]
Dr. Magdaleno: Well, at the time, not at all. We had no idea what was going on. Was it some technical malfunction? Was it some form of space madness? Did I make it all up? It freaked some folks at NASA out, so headquarters wanted to cancel the rest of the experiment and just bring us back. We already had tons of data, so that wasn’t an issue. And now we had a recording of this event. Right? We had AV recording of everything, because, as we said, that was how we were monitoring the ur-rational communication.
That’s when the question came up—here’s this record of bioluminescent life-forms—not just Fernando —all of them pulsing in patterns that differed significantly from normal signaling operation… were these patterns actually not random? Not just noise?
President Jimenez: Hold on. It sounds like you said “irrational communication.”
[Delay]
Dr. Magdaleno: Right. It’s a funky term. It’s not irrationality as in ‘_ear_-rationality’, but _ur_-rationality.
Mr. Guthrie: Um, that’s where we come in, Madam President. The term is ur-rationalities as in Ur, as in the original, or the earliest. Here it might be more like evolutionarily early. Believe it or not, we’ve had some people on this term and the people behind it for some time.
President Jimenez: You’re losing me. Evolution, bioluminescence, outer space… and CIA operations?
[Delay]
Dr. Magdaleno: I don’t know about the CIA, but the lab setup is definitely a complex system. That was the point of Memo’s dissertation research. As Jose—sorry, Professor Ruiz—mentioned, initially it didn’t have anything to do with space travel— Memo just wanted to see if he could build an ecosystem that demonstrated ur-rational communication between different species. But the thing is, he had zero luck finding anyone who was interested, let alone who would fund that.
Then he came across an article that made his concept potentially relevant to the goals of the NSF-Plus grant program.1 The article was about a history of efforts to support life on spacecraft with ecosystems, so, like… as opposed to elaborate mechanical instrumentation. Memo proposed to build a small-scale, self-sustaining ecosystem that could be used for life-support on spacecraft, and—here’s the link—the indications that the ecosystem was healthy and operating as intended would be monitored through symbolic representation of ur-rational communication. This idea did fit the NSF-Plus call for proposals, which, by the way, your administration has expanded, Madam President.
President Jimenez: I’m glad we did that. Sarita, take note of that.
It sounds like this Memo Villalobos is critical to this mission. Why isn’t he here?
Professor Ruiz: Ah… that is unfortunate, Madam President. Memo only saw the ur-rationally signaling ecosystem operating within the lab. During his fourth year in the program, just as he was planning to install it in the Ho’ Chan Ahaw X1, he died.
President Jimenez: How?
Mr. Guthrie: You’re not going to like this.
Professor Ruiz: Mmm… Memo worked at one time with an indigenous elder who used to say that to take ur-rationalities seriously—really seriously—you had to engage in plant medicines… psychedelics. Memo seems to have been doing this on the side, and one day it killed him.
Mr. Guthrie: Well, it wasn’t the psychedelics that killed him. From what we’ve been able to put together, it looks like one day he used a new connection for some LSD—which was unusual really for two reasons: because he mainly avoided synthetics, and because he always used his one trusted connection. Turned out this LSD was laced with fentanyl.
[Inaudible]
President Jimenez: All right. Let’s get back to this term. It looks like we need to understand ‘ur-rationalities’?
Mr. Guthrie: Right… that’s what caught the attention of our intelligence community. You see Madam President, the idea of ur-rationalities wasn’t originally Memo’s idea. He borrowed it from an elderly Mayan woman who we’ve had eyes on for decades.
President Jimenez: An “elderly Mayan woman?”
Professor Ruiz: She’s the indigenous elder. K’iche’ Mayan—that’s a language and an ethnic identity in the highlands of Guatemala. Memo used to describe her as Maria Sabina meets Lila Downs.
Mr. Guthrie: Our staff prepared a report. We can start by going back to the early 1970s. That’s when Sandra Xiloj pops up on our screen. She was twenty-some at the time.
President Jimenez: Shee-low-huh?
Mr. Guthrie: Yes: X.I.L.O. J. Xiloj. In 1971, Xiloj attended a lecture by Richard Feynman…
President Jimenez: Richard Feynman?
Mr. Guthrie: The physicist. You know: “Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman”? An intellectual giant. Feynman Diagrams? Quantum electrodynamics? That Feynman.
President Jimenez: Now physicists?
Mr. Guthrie: Technically, Xiloj wasn’t there just for the physics. Here. Our report says that Feynman had, I quote, “a penchant for digressions into light philosophy of math, fed by a truly peculiar and unconstrained curiosity.” In the 1960s and ’70s, that got him into Mayan hieroglyphic writing. And it says here: “Mayan glyphs in turn led him to begin including reflections on ancient Mayan mathematicians in his metaphors about the philosophy of science.” Actually, Caltech archived the audio of his speeches. There’s a link to the one Xiloj attended in the report.
Ms. Lopez: I just found it on YouTube.
Richard Feynman: “Relax. You don’t have to know mathematics. All you have to know is what it is. All it is… is a tricky way of doing something, which would be laborious otherwise.
So what. It’s true… that in the years we’ve developed enormous abilities in mathematics, and it takes a long time to train a student, so therefore they’re very highly educated in that.
But if we ask them why, now we go back to the Mayans. If we ask them why… why when you fill up a cup eight times with three-hundred and sixty-five day-markers it comes out that Venus is up five times… they don’t know. They don’t understand at all. The more accurately they can do it… the fact that they know that they have to change it by six days so forth adds nothing to their understanding of it.
The student who has learned all this mathematics and is able to make these calculations not only of Venus of the Moon or the Sun or eclipses, and everything is a super-priest…doesn’t know why.”
President Jimenez: That’s enough, Sara.
So, okay… why did Xiloj care what this physicist might be saying about Mayan math or mathematicians?
Mr. Guthrie: Circumstances. The report says that in the 1950s, a Yuri Knorosov—he apparently was a Russian linguist—he published “a tentative decipherment of much of the Dresden Codex”—and… oh, the Dresden Codex is a fourteenth-century manuscript written in Mayan hieroglyphs. The one that Feynman was talking about…containing records of Venus.
President Jimenez: I know what the Dresden Codex is.
Mr. Guthrie: Right. Well, I most certainly did not. But hmm… so he, Knorosov, claimed to have “cracked the code”–that is, deciphered Mayan hieroglyphic writing. But he was Russian, and it was the Cold War, so American scholars rejected his work. Says here:
“…the most respected Maya archaeologist at the time, Eric Thompson, wrote in review that Knorosov’s proposed decipherment “could be an authentic example of the effects of strict Party cooperation by a small group who work in research in Russia. For the good of the Free World, it is hoped that it is so, as far as military research is concerned.”
I don’t know anything about linguistics, but that sounds like a political response to me. In any case, then in 1960… right, Tatiana Proskouriakoff—another Russian… no… wait just a second… “a Mayanist of Russian descent,” but an American citizen—she cracked “a key historical thread within Mayan hieroglyphic inscriptions more broadly.”
Professor Ruiz: Actually, Proskouriakoff’s work was really clever. You see, at the time, no one could actually read the hieroglyphic texts, but the calendric system was well understood and had been for decades. So Proskouriakoff went through a specific set of inscriptions from one archaeological site—Piedras Negras in Guatemala—and she noticed that the dates on the monuments were spaced out in time so that they might have corresponded to significant events in the lives of rulers within a dynasty. Births, accessions, deaths, that sort of thing. She hypothesized that the inscriptions might be filled with historical information—not impenetrable religion or astronomy as Thompson and others believed. And her colleagues did accept Proskouriakoff’s work—even Thompson. There actually are some great documentaries on this if people are interested.
Mr. Guthrie: Getting back to the point: Knorosov, Proskouriakoff and now Feynman—in the late 60s and early 70s—supposedly reading hieroglyphs and maybe even connecting Mayan mathematics to quantum physics… well that’s what caught the attention of the Sindicato. This was just too much to overlook. So they sent Xiloj to investigate.
President Jimenez: Sindicato?
Mr. Guthrie: Right. That would be the Sindicato Clandestino de Mayas Indigenas. It was a secret society… it says here “a clandestine, international organization dedicated to preserving Mayan culture With origins in the highlands of Guatemala, they claim genealogical ties to the authors of the Popol Vuh.”
The Popol Vuh, Madam President?
President Jimenez: I’m familiar with the creation story for the K’iche’ Maya—you know, Hero Twins, Lords of the Underworld, the Ball Game. Then it gives the genealogy of the rulers of Q’umarkaj—one of the last indigenous Mayan cities before the conquest.
I read it in college.
Professor Ruiz: Nice.
Mr. Guthrie: The Sindicato intended to preserve its secret status, which they claimed to need in order to “preserve traditional Mayan culture and ceremony in the face of cultural suppression and economic oppression, through colonialism and neoliberalism.”
That’s a mouthful.
In any case, that didn’t prevent them from sending representatives to investigate international developments relevant to their interests. And the 1960s and ’70s appeared to be just such a time. That, Madam President, is when we initiated surveillance. You see, from an intelligence perspective, we had a member of a secret society attending a lecture by a top physicist. That raised suspicions they might be developing military tech, and when we eventually picked up their use of the term ‘ur-rational communication,’ that seemed like potential confirmation.
President Jimenez: Okay, so Xiloj shows up on the CIA’s radar when she attended Feynman’s lecture.
Mr. Guthrie: We have some of Xiloj’s diary, which we were able to… um…obtain, in the report.
Let’s see here. Okay. Here. I’ll quote from the translation that our people produced.
President Jimenez: My Spanish, I’m sure you know, is quite good, Robert.
Mr. Guthrie: Oh, yes, of course. But her notes were mostly in K’iche’ Mayan.
President Jimenez: Right. Go on with the translation.
Mr. Guthrie:
Xiloj: “17 May 1971. Caltech. Arrived at the talk early. Gustavo agreed to accompany me, which I was pleased with. El Sindicato said it was for security, but I’m beginning to enjoy his company. We kept to the back of the room—the audience was large, and everyone was talking, animated, excited. Most looked like older professors, but there were plenty of students, and interestingly many young women. I felt conspicuous, so we stayed in the back.
“F[eynman] started talking about the scribes who wrote the Venus Table. ‘They didn’t understand the why’ —he says. It was a bit disappointing that such a powerful intellect had nothing new to say about the Dresden Codex. He talked about the tracking of Venus’s visibility, but Förstemann published that in the nineteenth century. He referred to corrections for long-term observations, but that was Teeple’s work in the 1930s. Gustavo says he’s just using our ancestors as a prop, so he elbowed me to get up and leave. But this was my chance to hear F lecture on modern physics, so I pulled Gustavo back down into his seat.”
Professor Ruiz: Oh wow. May I see that?!
Mr. Guthrie: I’m afraid not. Classified.
Professor Ruiz: But those are her notes on when she first started formulating her ideas. I mean, everything we know about Xiloj is second hand—through Memo. Is there more from that day?
Mr. Guthrie: We do have a bit more of the diary here that is not redacted.
Professor Ruiz: I’m sorry, but, please, you have to read some more. I’ve been trying to look into this since Memo died, and I have never come across her own writings.
Mr. Guthrie: Madam President?
President Jimenez: We haven’t gotten back to ur-rationalities yet, so if it’s going to help us wrap our heads around your supposed extraterrestrial communication, then go ahead. Also, I may need it for the conversation that I’ll inevitably be having with [President of Guatemala] Eva [Morales] if it turns out that we were spying on their civilians.
Mr. Guthrie: The CIA regularly surveilles citizens of foreign countries, Madam President.
President Jimenez: I know, I know. But Guatemala?! Haven’t we done enough already?
Ms. Lopez: Madam President…
President Jimenez: Fine. You were saying, Robert?
Mr. Guthrie: Quoting Xiloj. Yes. This is from the same date, May 17th. Again, I quote:
It seems that he can’t get outside of the perspective of most ‘Western’ physicists, who take mathematical physics as the ultimate measure of reality. Gustavo agrees with me that the perspective seems both arrogant and overly reductive. I was tempted to stay to talk to F[eynman], but could not risk revealing my cover.
Okay… redacted… redacted… and then:
During his talk, an alternative thought occurred to mesomething I’ve only had glances of in the corners of my mind. What if mathematics is just one language invented and used by humans—not a language of the universe like Galileo or Einstein thought. That brought to mind a dog I saw while I was walking to the lecture hall this morning. I remember seeing it playing on the lawn, catching a tennis ball. That dog wasn’t solving polynomial expressions in its brain to predict a projectile trajectory, but it caught the ball easily. Does a human brain solve polynomials to interact with projectiles? Or is math more like a secondary human tool—and other creatures have their own cognitive tools, even for performing similar actions. This might mean that math is part of a construct, part of human rationality, but that’s not a rationality that all creatures engage.
Professor Ruiz: Honestly, that is incredible to hear. I have researched this history and I thought I understood what Xiloj was doing. But how she first started contemplating what Memo worked with? That is totally new… to me.
President Jimenez: Go on…
Professor Ruiz: What he told me—what Memo told me he had heard from Xiloj was like this and had nothing to do with military technologies. He said she was thinking about how language and cosmology might be intertwined. How so much meaning in the English language—and most if not all Indo-European languages—is built on the grammatical copulative verb ‘to be.’ And she took this as an interesting _constraint_—one that might be avoided.
Speakers of Indo-European languages—you know, Spanish, English, German, et cetera—she thought, those languages built meaning based on discrete binary oppositions. That’s an idea that a few of my colleagues here in the U.S. have worked on as well, by the way. Xiloj felt that in particular, English grammar leads speakers to noun-based meaning and to things as being either something or not-that-something. That conditions how they see the world. More importantly, she recognized that that was not the way of Mesoamerican languages. Xiloj’s own K’iche’ did not utilize a copulative verb to construct fundamental forms of meaning. In her language, meaning is verb-based and not binary and it is not permanent. Meaning is created by juxtaposition and by context—it exists in shades of gray, not black and white.
President Jimenez: I don’t think that helped as much as you hoped, Professor.
Professor Ruiz: Okay, an example. One of the standard ones I use in class is a very simple phrase in Yucatec Mayan: awiniken.
President Jimenez: Ah-wih-nic-en?
Professor Ruiz: Right. In English we would translate that as ‘I am your servant.’
President Jimenez: That’s an odd example.
Professor Ruiz: Yes… I agree. But look. In English, we build this sentence in a noun-centered way. Servant is a noun that is possessed by you, and I fill that position. “Am”—“to be” – is what defines the relationships between the nouns. In Yucatec, though, it is one word. The ‘a’ is a prefix and the ‘en’ is a suffix to the main root ‘winik,’ which means person. But it is really not even that noun-ish because winik personhood can be human, but it can also refer to members of other animate populations as well. So in Yucatec, ‘a’ refers to you and ‘en’ refers to me, so we might more strictly translate this as ‘your-person-me.’ Which is heavily conditional—juxtaposition and context. Is this making sense?
President Jimenez: So it’s not at all transparent why we had eyes on her. On Xiloj. Great. Where’s Memo’s project in all of this?
Professor Ruiz: Oh, yes, of course. The point. You see, this work led Xiloj to understand Classic Mayan politics completely differently…and it is a form of politics that is at the core of Memo’s ur-rational ecosystem experiment. According to him, Xiloj went back to a specific political term found throughout hieroglyphic inscriptions: k’uhulajaw. Which we can now read, by the way, because it turned out that Knorosov really was onto something, and his work became very productive in the 1970s and ’80s, leading to a secure decipherment of the Mayan hieroglyphic writing system by the early 2000s. And…uh…
But I digress. Where was I?
President Jimenez: K’uhulajaw.
Professor Ruiz: Yes. Exactly. This is a very familiar term in Maya Studies, which scholars regularly translate by taking the ‘_k’uhul_’ part as ‘holy’ or ‘divine,’ and ‘ajaw’ as ‘ruler’ or ‘king.’
President Jimenez: I’m familiar with it.
Professor Ruiz: Nice. So for their anthropological purposes, scholars understood Mayan leaders to be ‘holy kings’ or ‘divine lords.’ This is intellectually very convenient since this means that social structures and hierarchies from all over the world can now be imported into Mesoamerica for scholarly interpretation. You know: were Mayan cities more like Ancient Greek city-states or Medieval Europe’s petty kingdoms? That sort of thing. But like I said—that is a modern anthropological interpretation. Not an indigenous one.
Mr. Guthrie: Here’s something on that, also from her diary. I quote:
What about k’uhulajaw? Aj-aw, person who shouts. K’uh-ul, in a k’uh way. Los academicos always refer to k’uh as ‘god,’ but even the Popol Vuh tells us otherwise. The Hero Twins take their place as k’uh after they’ve learned to nourish their family with food and shelter, after they’ve learned to vanquish their enemies, and after they’ve learned to heal themselves and their father. K’uh is just an agency in nature, in the cosmos, that has the capacity to heal, to nourish and to poison. If it has those three capacities, it is k’uh. Then k’uho’ob have agency at all scales—from human to animal to plant to even the Earth itself, and a k’uhulajaw would be charged with representing his or her human community as k’uh relative to the other k’uho’ob as a negotiator. And the k’uhulajaw communicated with these other k’uho’ob through ur-rationalities. The other entities out there—animal, plant or whatever—they already use ur-rationalities among themselves and across species. The k’uhulajaw had to learn how to engage them and then include them in the politics of her or his city.
This makes me think of our trip to Copan [that’s in Honduras] last summer. Such a beautiful site, and so much has been archaeologically restored. Walking through the Great Plaza, seeing Waxaklajun Ub’aah K’awiil, the thirteenth k’uhulajaw of Copan, on those stelae, carved in the full round, larger than life. It makes me wonder, do they show him interacting ur-rationally with nature and with his ancestors? Maybe all of these stone images of him don’t reflect an inflated ego. Maybe he just intended them to show everyone the work that he was required to do?
Local environments are just as important as human needs for indigenous leadership.
That last sentence just kind of floats out there at the end of her entry for the day.
Professor Ruiz: But there it is: the origin of this notion of ur-rationalities. Wow.
You see, by combining her perspective on language with her perspective on math, Xiloj was provincializing math as part of one rationality– as one part of human rationality. In other words, she was proposing a provincialization of rationality itself. That would mean that rationalities exist within all creatures—they are just rationalities of different scales. She was replacing binary opposition with scale. It wasn’t that creatures—animals, plants, bacteria—were rational or not, but that all worked with their own forms of rationality. She dubbed these “ur-rationalities.” Not rational or irrational, but a spectrum of ur-rationalities.
President Jimenez: Got it. A Mayan worldview might have different species communicating through ur-rationalities.
But wait. Who was he—Memo—that he got to meet this Mayan elder? This member of a secret society?
Mr. Guthrie: Kind of a mystery. He was nowhere on our radar. Seemed an unconventional vagabond type. Engineering degree. No steady work. Took jobs to save money for traveling—mostly through Latin America. His early notes describe his wanderings as “weaving a cultural jacket,” so that he can “wear his memories for warmth” when he returns to the U.S. But here you go… from his travel journal.
Professor Ruiz: Wait… why do you have his journal?! His parents were looking desperately for that.
[Inaudible]
Mr. Guthrie: This is from July 6, 2020.
Memo: “2020.7.6
Caye Caulker. Wrote up more notes on this wild idea I had in class last Spring. Yes, Artificial Neural Networks are extremely over-simplified models of neural networks in our brains. But even very simple ANNs can perform logical operations—they seem made for that. Arithmetic is also incredibly straightforward with very tiny networks. But it goes a lot further since large ANNs can operate as dynamical systems and in clusters they perform operations very much like mathematical functions. Back-propagation algorithms are like embodiments of minimization operations.
So might it be possible that mathematicians create and have created math as a language by a form of meditation on their own neural processes? Math as Meditation? We can perceive and describe our emotions, which are just biochemical reactions…why wouldn’t we be able to perceive and describe our neural operations?
Also met an intriguing woman at a restaurant on the beach today—Sandra Xiloj. Apparently, she lives here now, but is from Guatemala. She says she may have a granddaughter that I’d like to meet?”
President Jimenez: Aha. Abuelitas…
Mr. Guthrie: Huh?
Ms. Lopez: Abuelitas are Mexican grandmothers.
Professor Ruiz: Well… Latina grandmothers…
Mr. Guthrie: I thought she was indigenous?
President Jimenez: I’m sorry but we are NOT having this conversation right now.
Mr. Guthrie: Right… right… umm… Here’s one more unredacted section from a few days later. Again, I quote from July 9, 2020:
Memo:“So if math isn’t just human invention. If math results from a form of meditation—not some universal language— and if rationalities take forms appropriate to the life-forms in which they are embedded, then doesn’t this fit with indigenous cosmologies built upon pantheism—God is in everything? Is this what Xiloj is getting at?
Today we talked about the ramifications all of this might have for modern notions of the nature of the universe. She thinks that what folks have been calling “pantheism” might be better translated today as starting with a field of agency which is just as fundamental as the strong or weak nuclear forces. A field of agency as fundamental as electromagnetism. Just pure agency. Not consciousness. The force of will. What if, she wonders, time as we think about it in a Western perspective is simply an oversimplification—a dimensional reduction—of this agency field? Sure, it would be easy to model non-living objects with a single time dimension—a baseball has no agency of its own, so to model it, we strip down the agency field to the single dimension of time. But modeling living organisms would require the full multi-dimensional (5-tensor?) field of agency?
Is this related to the Long Counts at Quirigua?
President Jimenez: Okay. Now we’re in the woods. Let’s get back to how this relates to an extraterrestrial message?
Professor Ruiz: And so…
Dr. Magdaleno: Well, it’s actually the next step because that’s when they got into a fightor a serious disagreement—and Memo came back to the States. Because Xiloj…
Oh, I’m sorry, Professor. I didn’t mean to interrupt you.
Professor Ruiz: No… please. Go ahead.
[Delay]
Dr. Magdaleno: Okay, thanks. Right, well, they had a falling out because they had very different positions on which direction to go. Xiloj apparently wanted to start from the beginning and re-derive the Standard Model of Physics using an agency field in place of time as a dimension. And Memo wanted to prove that ur-rationalities existed as something other than just an interesting metaphor. He thought they could form the basis of a new complex of experimental science. But obviously, Xiloj didn’t want to expose these indigenous theories to Western science. She thought they should be maintained in indigenous communities for indigenous needs. Memo thought it could be useful beyond that—for, like, saving the environment. That’s when he came back to the US to apply to graduate school.
Professor Ruiz: And so—finally—that’s what brings us to our situation today. Memo decided against his first inclination, which was to attempt to create symbolic languages for ur-rational communication. He hoped instead to engineer visual or audio signals that would indicate that intentional ur-rational communication between non-human species was occurring. That’s what he was able to build in the lab.
[Delay]
Dr. Magdaleno: Right. And very early on, the work was successful and he had plenty of grant money, so he recruited two other graduate students to work with him, along with me as a postdoc and pilot for the mission. We continued the project, along with his original advisor. We launched the spacecraft—the _Ho’ Chan Ahaw X1_—on September 16, 2028.
And that was successful, really the whole operation was, but we didn’t get any attention in the press or even much on social media at the time. Even when everything went haywire—“the event”—on October 31, 2028. Still it stayed quiet.
[Inaudible]
President Jimenez: Robert?
Mr. Guthrie: We may have had a hand in that, Madam President.
President Jimenez: Hmh.
Professor Ruiz: And this is when I was pulled into the project. According to NASA, when they heard about the event, some people very tentatively suggested that the data might reflect something intentional. A kind of non-random symbolic transmission. At least one idea was that all of the bioluminescent reactions reflected an intentional message transmitted through outer-space and intercepted by _Ho’ Chan Ajaw X1_’s ur-rational ecosystem. Some suspected it might have been generated by an as-yet unknown military technology originating from the Asian subcontinent… aha! I see, Mr. Guthrie… But the spacecraft was in orbit around the Moon on its dark side at the time, so impossible. Anyway, that is what they wanted me to investigate: was it a message or not?
My team was given access to all of the data recorded. We built a number of deep-learning engines to assess whether or not there appeared to be enough regularity for the patterns to constitute an expression within some known or unknown language.
President Jimenez: So now we’re there. The leaked memo.
Professor Ruiz: Almost. Because again, we didn’t know if it was a message or not. And it was not trivial. From the very beginning, though, two factors became critical when we attempted to code the data. We concentrated on the following variables: the species of life-form, the biochemical mechanism for producing visible light, the segment of the light spectrum, and the period of the flashes of emitted light. Those were the key variables, although we included others.
We found out right away that our results were very sensitive to changes in species adjacency as well as the bin size for bioluminescent flashes that is, how much of the EM spectrum we used for a bin. The first part… umm… ruffled some feathers in our group because what we take, I mean scientifically, what we take to be adjacent species taxonomically did not produce intelligible results. We only found interpretable results when we freed up the relationships and ran all possible adjacencies, independent of our taxonomic preconceptions.
President Jimenez: You ran these deep learning engines in your lab on campus? Guthrie, would that have been secure?
Professor Ruiz: Actually, NASA helped us out here. Given the extensive computation necessary, we needed access to a supercomputer. Fortunately, I have connections in Mexico, so through NASA, the Mexican government gave us unlimited use of one of theirs, Kan Balam. It’s an older model—not with the capacity of the latest supercomputersbut because we did not have to get in a queue and schedule our runs, it proved the best possible opportunity.
President Jimenez: Mexico knows something about this?
Professor Ruiz: No. Kan Balam was going to be retired, so they just gave us the keys.
Mr. Guthrie: It’s fine.
Professor Ruiz: And yes. That is what did it. We used this layering of data to run it against grammars, genres and vocabularies. We allowed for any combination of our data to represent phonemes, letters, hieroglyphs, or whole words.
Our first results were productive and generated a probability that the signals were non-random: 92%. Our second results suggested with 78% probability that the signals were regular and sufficiently patterned to constitute an expression in a language. That’s what we were comfortable with, and that is what we first reported back to NASA.
But they came back with pressure to decipher what the expression might have been. For that, we were clear that the dataset was far too small to attempt a decipherment were it not in a known language. But they told us to try anyway. So with that caveat in mind, we ran our data through all known human languages—and we included constructed languages, like Sindarin and Klingon, to explore any and all possibilities. The results were surprising. And that is what was in the memo that now you’re telling me was leaked.
You can see there that with a 48% probability, our AI came back with the identification of the song lyrics “strewn with time’s dead flowers, bereft in deathly bloom,” along with their musical accompaniment, and two phrases also in English: “nihilistic inspiration” and “narcissistic species individualism.” No other possibilities—even, for example, as images or sounds—came back with anything higher than 2% probability of being accurate and none could make sense of the entire data set.
So we reported these results in the memo and received silence. Well, silence and a gag order.
Ms. Lopez: I have to be missing something. You’re telling us that you’re worried that this system, this ecosystem, accidentally picked up a bunch of signals that have some—somewhat decent—chance of being interpreted as a message from extraterrestrials. That’s what you’re concerned about?
Sure, I remember all the excitement in 2021 when the Pentagon released Navy jet video recordings of UFOs. But in this case, at the very least, we have plausible deniability about anything they might suggest about a conspiracy. To quote your political nemesis, Madam President: “it’s a nothing-burger.”
Mr. Guthrie: I’m afraid it’s not, Madam President.
Professor Ruiz: As of yesterday morning, it would have been that simple. But as of yesterday afternoon, that has changed entirely. Yesterday afternoon, we received proof that we are right. Not just probably right.
President Jimenez: So this is the latest development.
Professor Ruiz: We received another message. Citlalli received it in the Ho’ Chan Ahaw X1, and we received it through the ur-rational ecosystem that still operates in our lab. We then processed the new message through our deep-learning engine.
Mr. Guthrie: And I’ve just received a text message that NASA also received a radio-wave transmission in English, Spanish, and Mandarin.
President Jimenez: Dr. Magdaleno, do you have it there? To read for us?
[Delay]
Dr. Magdaleno: Yes, Madam President. Here it is:
People of the planet you call Earth. We understand that you unintentionally intercepted a message sent by one of us. We would like to confirm that you have interpreted the message accurately. The message was part of a set of notes being transmitted by residents of our planet who had been observing your planet. We ask that you accept our confirmation as sufficient. We also ask that you do not seek to contact us.
For centuries, we have avoided your planet after our leadership assessed it to be insufficiently mature for contact.
We observe that the most technologically proficient among you have singled out one species and privileged it abusively over all other life-forms and non-living residents of your planet.
We have no interest in contact with such an approach to planetary management and request that you honor our perspective.
The message you received was accidental and you will encounter no others. A group of artists among us who transmitted the message were using a technology we all believed that you would not be able to detect. They had become fascinated by your species’ narcissism and the nihilism it embodies and sought inspiration for their own artwork from these observations. They understand that they are now to be satisfied with the data they have accumulated, and they have agreed to never return.
With trepidation, we add here that there is a group among our leadership who speculate that mutually beneficial contact between our planets may be possible in the future.
In our observations, we have recognized a potentially important contrast. On our planet and on several others with whom we are in communication, multiple species evolved with comparable power—not just comparable intelligence, but comparable technological power. We understand these factors to have guided our evolution such that we have learned to work collaboratively with each other as well as with countless other species across our planets.
On your planet, we observe that humans have taken advantage of tools and technologies asymmetrically, without the kinds of collaborative opportunities that we have had. This appears to have led you, even within your species, to abuse asymmetries of power rather than seek genuine collaboration.
But that may have changed.
Some among us propose that your new AI technologies constitute the basis of a non-human species that may serve as a competing ur-rationality. We observe that you have given elements of this AI species access to all of your most asymmetrically powerful tools and technologies. You cannot now simply “turn it off,” nor can you assume that it won’t be maliciously developed and deployed if you were to attempt to destroy it. This suggests that you must learn to collaborate with—rather than conquer—this AI species in order to survive.
Some among us speculate that if humans can actually learn collaboration for mutual benefit with AI, that may lead to new relationships with other species on your planet. And if that becomes the case, then we may find alternate interest in reaching out to you.
We reiterate that this is highly tenuous speculation by only some among us, but our leadership feels compelled to share it.
That is all.
[Inaudible]
President Jimenez: That’s it.
Folks, buckle up.
[1021 — 6 May 2029 — End of Transcript]
My goal was to explore the defamiliarization of outer space through ancient Mesoamerican cosmologies. In particular, I wanted to highlight what I’ve come to appreciate over the years as a type of indigenous Mesoamerican cosmological humility.
I first encountered this concept in graduate school as I contemplated the hieroglyphic text inscribed on the stone tablet in Temple XIV of the Classic Mayan archaeological site of Palenque in Chiapas, Mexico. In it, the k’uhulajaw (or “ruler” of Palenque), K’inich Kan B’ahlam, is described as re-enacting a ceremony performed by a ‘deity’ in primordial times. It was not uncommon in such inscriptions for ancient paramounts to have appealed for legitimacy through association with Creator deities, but something else caught my attention: the earlier event recorded on the tablet occurred 931,000 years before Kan B’ahlam’s own event in the 8th century AD. Various other Classic Maya inscriptions describe the mythological ‘creation’ events that led to humanity’s population of the Earth as occurring circa 3,000 BC, so Kan B’ahlam’s inscription suggests that the practices and relationships that Classic Mayan communities engaged were developed and maintained in the universe long before humans were even a hint in any primordial deity’s imagination.
This tablet’s contents, alongside countless other cases in historical and archaeological records—as well as my experiences with members of contemporary indigenous communities—have led me to theorize an alternative conceptualization of indigenous Mayan leadership. Mutually beneficial relationships were established in the cosmos eons ago, and humans were charged with entering into them as collaborators in ways that actively maintained a healthy balance. Such a cosmological humility stands in opposition to the idea that a singular, hierarchically superior being—i.e., humanity—is ordained by an all-powerful deity to use earthly resources without regard for greater impacts.
As this piece developed, I began to contemplate how we, modern humans, might re-encounter a sense of cosmological humility. What might it mean for an extraterrestrial species to be not only technologically but also morally superior to humans? It occurred to me that this might not result from greater intellect, but perhaps simply from an evolutionary accident. By analogy, we might consider what would happen if dolphins had evolved to grow primate-like hands. Would they have presented humans with challenges to societal development that encouraged a sense of responsibility to and collaboration with other species as opposed to ideologies that emphasized exceptionalism? To bring these ideas together in the piece, I leaned heavily on Octavia E. Butler’s fiction to create an alternative historical future in which humans have not yet interacted with extraterrestrials simply because they have been avoiding us on moral grounds.
The piece ultimately asks the reader to ponder whether a rediscovery of cosmological humility inspired by ancient Mayan cultures might change how we interact with other residents of our planet, and perhaps even enable first contact.