Carl sagan’s thought about books:
“When our genes could not store all the information necessary for survival, we slowly invented them. But then the time came, perhaps ten thousand years ago, when we needed to know more than could conveniently be contained in brains. So we learned to
stockpile enormous quantities of information outside our bodies. We are the only species on the planet, so far as we know, to have
invented a communal memory stored neither in our genes nor in our brains. The warehouse of that memory is called the library. A book is made from a tree. One glance at it and you hear the voice of another person perhaps someone dead for thousands of years. Across the millennia, the author is speaking, clearly and silently, inside your head, directly to you. Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people, citizens of distant epochs who never knew one another. Books break the shackles of time, proof that humans can work magic.”
-Carl Sagan, Cosmos

#sagan #carlsagan

@triptych love this but also believe other animals record communal information in the external environment
@xian @triptych This is a fascinating subject to me! I know ants use pheromone trails. Do you have other examples?
@hosford42 @triptych one of the most common is using urine or scat to mark locations — dogs for example can “read” a lot by smelling which creatures peed on something
@xian @hosford42 @triptych I have a poodle mix & she’s a prolific “pee reader.” When I take her for a walk in the neighborhood it’s like she’s reading her social media feed. I tell her, ok, let’s go check your “pee-mails” 😄