It is the 1936 Alton High School Tatler from Alton, Illinois. Its weathered black-and-white pages are filled with the usual things: school portraits, clubs and activities, and photographs of faculty and staff. When I look at the faces of these teenagers, I wonder whether they could possibly have imagined that someone would be leafing through this book and admiring their pictures, nearly a century later.

Among them is my father’s father, George. And my mother’s mother, Grace. Also appearing in the book is one of their schoolmates, a bespectacled student named Robert Wadlow, whom I have mentioned in previous columns.

Robert was the tallest boy in school.

As I bring Volume III of How Humans Communicate to a close and prepare for a short break, I am thinking about my grandfather and grandmother. And about Robert. And their classmates.

About all that we leave behind.

A Giant Among Many

Robert Wadlow would become famous, eventually entering the Guinness Book of Records as the tallest-ever person for whom there is irrefutable evidence. He reached 8 feet, 11 inches before his death in 1940 at age 22.

But to my grandfather, he was simply Robert, a friend from the German Club.

I always liked hearing my grandparents’ stories about their unusually tall classmate. Robert also enjoyed photography and stamp collecting — perfectly ordinary hobbies for a young man from the Midwest whose great height made his life anything but ordinary.

But when I turn the pages of the Tatler, I don’t only see Robert, or George, or Grace. I also see hundreds of faces I don’t recognize. I see teachers and administrators, some of whom were born in the nineteenth century. I see students who, at the moment the shutter clicked, had their entire lives unfolding before them.

These young people lived in a nation that was finally beginning to emerge from the Great Depression. Across the sea, Adolf Hitler was consolidating his power, but the bloodiest conflict in human history had not yet darkened the American horizon.

Some of these students would almost certainly go on to fight in World War II, as my grandfather did. Some likely died young. Others lived into old age, even well into the twenty-first century. Some had children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren. They had plans and dreams, friends and families. Most or all are now gone.

Yet each of us generates a footprint. In the case of Robert, it was large, and I’m not only referring to his size-37 shoes. We leave historical traces. Artifacts that document our existence.

There are birth certificates and death certificates. Census records. Newspaper articles. Wedding registries. Letters tucked in drawers and names scrawled in books. A tombstone is designed to tell the future that a person was here. A postcard is not, yet both become evidence of a life lived. Of things accomplished, events influenced, and people touched.

Sometimes, it isn’t about legacy. It isn’t even about memory, really. It is about impressions made, like fossils embedded in the strata of the Earth.

The Signals We Don’t See

If I may get philosophical, or perhaps cosmological, the traces that remain when we are gone are not limited to paper or stone.

Every moment of our lives, we exchange information with the universe. We disturb the air when we speak. We transfer heat and move objects and particles. We exert some gravitational influence, however small it may be, upon everything else that surrounds us.

And light is always interacting with us.

When sunlight shines on our face, some photons are absorbed, while others are reflected or scattered. Most will quickly encounter something else: a wall, a tree, another person. But a tiny fraction can travel upward through the atmosphere, escaping into space at the speed of light.

And unless something gets in their way, they will simply keep going. Photons do not wear out with age. They cannot tire or slow down.

Which means something extraordinary. In principle, particles of light that bounced off my grandfather, and his grandfather, ascended into the vacuum and never interacted with anything else again. They are still out there, whooshing through the heavens. They exist.

So too do the microscopic specks that swirled in my grandfather’s first and final breaths. And the countless atoms that comprised his earthly form. Those are still here, being slowly redistributed through soil and water, through air and even living things.

These particles of matter and sunlight are now fantastically sparse. They can’t be reconstructed. Their meaning has disappeared into the cosmos; the universe is not keeping a scrapbook.

But we are.

We are the ones who take photographs, who preserve ephemera. In doing so, we communicate with each other, with our loved ones, and even with future generations of strangers.

Robert and my grandparents are gone now. Yet when I browse the 1936 Alton High School Tatler, they are together again for a while. Someday this yearbook, a family heirloom, will fade and crumble to dust. Over centuries, every copy that ever existed will disappear. The teenagers celebrated on its pages will eventually be forgotten.

But somewhere out there, far beyond Earth, light that reflected off their young, eager faces may yet endure.

No one will see these particles or know who they touched.

But they did touch someone.

Because we were here.

The Persian king Xerxes I had invaded Greece in the hope of expanding his empire and completing a campaign begun by his father, Darius I. Opposing Xerxes was a coalition of Greek warriors that included Leonidas, king of Sparta, and 300 Spartan hoplites (heavily armed infantry soldiers) he had assembled.

The geography favored the defending army, with steep mountain slopes on one side and the Malian Gulf, part of the Aegean Sea, on the other. Between them was a constricted passage through which the invading host would need to funnel itself, reducing the advantage of Xerxes’ superior numbers.

The Greeks held the pass for two days, until a renegade local named Ephialtes, hoping to curry Persian favor, revealed a path through the mountains. This allowed the invaders to outflank the Greek force and attack from the rear. In one of the most famous last stands in history, Leonidas, his surviving men, and the other Greek soldiers who remained with them were surrounded and slain.

Though this battle was lost, much of the Greek world itself would remain unconquered, and the story of the 300 Spartans and their allies has endured for 2,500 years.

But how do we know all this?

Much of what we know about Thermopylae comes from a man who was probably a small child when the famous battle occurred, writing about it decades later.

The man’s name was Herodotus.

The History Before History

Humans have told stories about the past for as long as there have been stories to tell. In the ancient world, memories were passed down through songs, poems, and epic recitations: tales of kings and warriors, victories and defeats, monsters and gods. But the boundaries between reality, myth, and legend were fluid.

Herodotus approached history differently. He wanted to interrogate it. To speak with the people who’d experienced it, to understand what they heard and saw and did. Herodotus wished to learn what had really happened.

His great opus, published in about 425 BC and titled The Histories, comes from the Greek historiē, meaning an inquiry or investigation. Herodotus did more than collect and tell stories. He was curious about them. He asked questions.

Herodotus was born in about 484 BC in the Greek city of Halicarnassus, in what is now modern-day Turkey. Halicarnassus lay within the vast Persian Empire, which would be the central focus of much of his writing. We know little about his life. Herodotus may have come from a wealthy and influential family, and his accounts suggest that he traveled extensively, including to Egypt and Athens. He was later associated with Thurii, a Greek colony in what is now the Calabrian region of Italy.

Eventually, Herodotus would produce an extraordinary and detailed account of the Greco-Persian Wars, earning a reputation as a public orator.

Although the Roman statesman Cicero would later famously name him the “Father of History,” Herodotus did not always behave like a historian in the modern sense. His writings contained omens, myths, and exaggerations. He wrote of winged serpents and giant ant-like creatures that dug up gold, though these were based on reports and not claims of what he himself had witnessed. His estimates of Persian troop numbers were also vastly inflated.

And yet, Herodotus also went to the trouble of distinguishing between what he observed and what others told him. He would provide several versions of the same event, based on what he had heard, and clarify what he believed to be true and what he suspected was not. Sometimes, he admitted, he did not know what had happened.

His investigative methods were imperfect and inconsistent, and he had his critics. But some of the accounts Herodotus preserved have been confirmed by the archaeological record.

The Battle of Thermopylae was real. The Spartan soldiers existed, as did the other Greek troops who fought and died alongside them. Arrowheads and other artifacts gathered from the site can be seen in the National Archaeological Museum in Athens.

Herodotus was not there. He never met Leonidas, never saw Ephialtes betray him by revealing the mountain route. But he was able to reconstruct events, possibly by interviewing people who knew of the battle and gathering eyewitness testimonies. Bit by bit, he pieced together what occurred when Xerxes encountered the might of Greek resistance.

From Stories to Histories

Was Herodotus the Father of History? Some of his detractors dismissed him as the “Father of Lies.” As I said, his methods were not infallible. But modern scholars believe, based on the evidence available, that some of his accounts were largely true as written.

A generation later, the Athenian historian and general Thucydides would write about the Peloponnesian War, in which he fought. In documenting the conflict between Sparta and Athens, Thucydides took a stricter approach than Herodotus. The unfinished work, which interestingly ends mid-sentence, is regarded as one of the earliest examples of scholarly history, though it also has its skeptics.

The records of ancient history are imprecise. In a sense, Thucydides stood on Herodotus’s shoulders.

Later historians would stand on his. As the centuries progressed, so did the scholarly rigor applied to the practice of history. Claims were more readily verified. Documents and archives were preserved with greater care. And this same discipline spread beyond history, to science and law and journalism.

No story about how humans communicate is complete without mention of Herodotus. As a storyteller, his great innovation was not simply recording what took place long ago.

It was saying to his audience, “Here is what happened … and here is how we know it.”

We caught each other’s eye, and I knew exactly what would happen an instant before it did.

They raised their hands in a cheery wave of greeting. I grinned and waved back.

No words were exchanged. And yet, a brief sort of conversation had just taken place.

For most Americans, the hand wave is such an ordinary greeting that it feels instinctive. We wave to say hello; we do the same to say goodbye. On Sunday evenings when my neighbor and I both drag our garbage cans to the curb, there is always a quick, friendly wave. When a motorist allows me to merge into traffic, I acknowledge it with a wave of thanks.

It is among our simplest forms of nonverbal communication, and one that we likely take for granted. To wave one’s hand requires no equipment, technology, or language. It is instant and takes almost no effort.

Yet around the world, waving is not necessarily universal.

A Learned Gesture

If someone from another country acknowledges and returns your wave, it is not because this gesture is built into humanity’s wiring, the way facial recognition is. It’s because they learned it, just as you did.

In fact, a hand wave can take on a different meaning based on the culture and situation, and it’s important to get it right.

In Greece, a casual wave of greeting is acceptable, but an open palm with fully outstretched fingers, pushed toward someone, is one of the country’s oldest and most recognizable insults. Known as mountza or moutza, the gesture has ancient roots, deriving its name from the Byzantine practice of smearing soot on the faces of criminals as a means of public ridicule.

The same hand movement is also considered offensive in countries that include Mexico, Armenia, Iraq, and Pakistan. Even here in the United States, an open palm can be interpreted as a sign that means “stop” or “back off.” In the 1990s, the slang expression “Talk to the hand” became popular, combined with an open palm gesture, signifying a rude disinterest in what the other person was saying.

Variations of the wave can also carry different interpretations. Moving all four fingers downward toward the palm is a common variant, and waving combined with wiggled fingers may be seen as friendly or flirtatious — though in some regions of Europe, this can also be interpreted to mean “no.” A gently swaying cupped hand, sometimes called a royal or regal wave, is often seen in parades and the Miss America pageant, and is also used by members of the British royal family.

In a sense, spoken language can work the same way. The same word or phrase may vary in meaning based on circumstances. Referring to someone as a “friend,” for example, can be a term of endearment or an insult. So much of communication depends on tone and context.

Mysterious Origins

Waving has an unclear history.

Ancient art is full of raised hands, but they don’t necessarily represent the cordial wave we see today. There is little evidence of hand-waving as a common greeting before the eighteenth century, and it may have emerged as a variation of the military salute.

The salute also has uncertain origins. A popular but likely apocryphal claim is that it began in Ancient Rome, where public officials faced the constant threat of assassination. A citizen who wished to approach an official, the story goes, did so with their hand raised to show that they held no weapon. Other origin stories point to the supposed medieval tradition of armored knights passing on horseback and raising the visors on their helms.

Are these ancient gestures the precursor to the kindly wave I offer my neighbor when we put our trash cans on the curb? Are we basically signaling that we don’t plan to massacre one another with daggers? While I quite like to think so, there is little evidence to support these historical claims.

Waving has endured, perhaps, because it asks so little of us. It doesn’t require a conversation or even a smile. You can use the same gesture to welcome someone, to bid them farewell, to offer reassurance, or to convey gratitude. It is a polite gesture. Some psychologists have suggested that people who wave at cars while crossing the street, as a way of saying thanks, are more likely to demonstrate personality traits that include empathy and humility.

As has been mentioned in this column many times, so much of communication depends on what we say or write. But every day, we rely on another language as well, one of silent movements and expressions.

Waving is an important part of this vocabulary. The action is simple, almost trivial. Its significance is anything but.

The attraction traces the history of human communication, from prehistoric cave paintings to the dawn of the computer age.

In the ride’s current incarnation, in place since 2008, actress Judi Dench provides the narration. A few moments have become especially iconic.

“At this point, each civilization has its own form of writing, which none of the others can understand,” Dench says as riders move past dioramas depicting the ancient world. “But the Phoenicians, who trade with all of them, have a solution. They create a simple common alphabet, adaptable to most languages. Remember how easy it was to learn your ABCs? Thank the Phoenicians. They invented them!”

It’s a lovely line, concise and memorable, one that has spawned countless Disney memes and T-shirts.

But as with most stories about the sprawling history of human communication, the truth is a lot more complicated … and more interesting.

The Connected Mediterranean

Unlike civilizations that built vast empires, the Phoenicians created one of history’s most extensive maritime commercial networks, one that prospered for more than a thousand years.

An ancient Semitic people who called themselves the Canaanites, the Phoenicians inhabited coastal city-states in what is today known as Lebanon.

Operating out of prosperous cities that included Tyre and Byblos, Phoenician sailors crossed the Mediterranean Sea carrying wine, timber, ivory, metals, and dyes. Their ships reached Cyprus, Sicily, Spain, and beyond. Trade was their lifeblood, and so most Phoenician merchants were multilingual and worked with networks of interpreters. Commerce has always had a way of breaking down barriers.

By the time the Phoenicians rose to prominence in about 1200 BC, writing and alphabets had already long since existed.

It wasn’t that the Phoenicians “invented” a common alphabet. It was that they succeeded in spreading a particularly elegant one they inherited.

Standing on Ancient Shoulders

Cuneiform, developed by the Mesopotamians, and hieroglyphs, the sacred writing system of Ancient Egypt, both emerged in roughly 3200 BC and persisted for thousands of years. The last known cuneiform text dates to 75 AD. The final hieroglyphic inscription came along a few hundred years later, at the Temple of Isis on Philae Island.

What these systems had in common was that they began with symbols that represented things. A marking’s meaning could be an abstract idea, but it could also stand for the object it resembled — a fish, for example, or a boat. Over time, both systems evolved to become increasingly phonetic, but they never completely abandoned their older functions. Depending on the context, a hieroglyph could represent an object, a word, an idea, a sound, or a syllable. This meant that scribes needed to master hundreds of symbols and writing conventions.

Centuries before the Phoenicians reached the height of their civilization, people began to experiment with something simpler. It may have been early Semitic-speaking Canaanites living and working under Egyptian influence, or it may have been Egyptian scribes and administrators themselves. The details are among the many great mysteries of antiquity.

What we know, based on the archaeological record, is that by borrowing and repurposing a handful of Egyptian hieroglyphs, these people made a conceptual leap that would fundamentally change communication. Instead of using symbols for words and ideas, they used them solely to represent individual sounds.

An Evolving Alphabet

As I said, we don’t know for certain who developed this writing system, or whether it happened all at once or over generations. The earliest surviving examples are called Proto-Sinaitic, after inscriptions discovered in Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula. Scholars have debated the relationship between this and a later form, Proto-Canaanite, but both represent early stages in the script’s evolution.

When the Phoenicians entered the picture centuries later, they inherited a compact, practical alphabet they would carry across the Mediterranean.

The Phoenician alphabet consisted of 22 letters, each representing a consonant sound. Most of these characters could trace their origins to symbols that began with the sound they represented. The first letter, aleph, originally depicted an ox and stood for the first sound of the Semitic word for ox. It was not a vowel yet. Beth, the second letter, represented a house and became the B sound. Gimel (the ancestor of C and G) came from the symbol for camel, daleth meant door, and so on.

A new writing system doesn’t persist on innovation alone. The Phoenicians used it. They carried it from port to port, writing contracts, labeling cargo, and establishing trading colonies. It is likely that the Ancient Greeks first encountered the alphabet not in schools and libraries, but on docks and in seaside markets. They adopted this system, redesigning it to include explicit vowels. The Etruscans refined it further. The Romans then converted it into the ancestor of the Latin alphabet we know today. The Phoenician aleph became the Greek alpha, and eventually the Latin letter A. Beth became beta, and then B, and the pattern continues.

Other branches of the Phoenician alphabet would eventually give rise to writing systems that included Aramaic, Hebrew, Arabic, and Cyrillic. Today, when we recite our ABCs, we are unknowingly referencing objects from a Semitic tongue spoken more than three millennia ago.

There is more to the story — much more, a history that involves medieval monks, King Charlemagne, and Johannes Gutenberg — which I’ll cover in a future column.

For now, if you are able to read this, feel free to thank the Phoenicians.

And the Romans. And the Etruscans, the Greeks, the Egyptians, and the early Canaanites. Thank the ingenuity and persistence of the many hands that shaped and reshaped our modern alphabet.

Human communication is an endless maze, a layered labyrinth of passageways, forever twisting and turning, with myriad solutions and even more dead ends.

I look forward to continuing to explore it with you.

But quite often, humans communicate through the words we do not say. Silence is not simply the absence of communication.

Silence tells a story. Silence speaks.

Monastic Silence

Popular culture has given us the image of monks and other religious orders taking complete “vows of silence” to achieve greater spiritual purity. While this is essentially a myth, most monastic orders have specific times and places during which speaking is not permitted. This is governed by precepts such as the Rule of St. Benedict, authored by Benedict himself in the sixth century.

The purpose of this disciplined approach is not to discourage or eliminate communication altogether. Rather, it is meant to reduce idle chatter and make communication more deliberate, thoughtful, and contemplative. A person who does not speak, or who speaks infrequently and with spiritual purpose, is less likely to boast, curse, or utter other sinful words.

Some orders also believe that silence fosters improved mindfulness and enhances the possibility of divine inspiration. Psalm 62 from the Old Testament, traditionally attributed to David, begins, “For God alone my soul waits in silence; from Him comes my salvation.”

Since at least the 10th century, many monastic orders have used simple sign languages during periods when speaking is prohibited.

Silence as Ostracism

Few of us wish to be embroiled in a heated argument, or to become the target of insults. But it can be just as hurtful, or even more so, when words disappear altogether. When the silent treatment is administered, withdrawal of speech becomes its own species of communication, and the message it sends is a harsh one.

Social psychologist Kipling Williams, Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Psychological Sciences at Purdue University, has extensively studied the effects of ostracism and social exclusion. His research has demonstrated how profoundly being ostracized can inflict emotional pain and negatively impact one’s self-esteem. He and colleagues developed a computer-based experiment called “cyberball” in which participants pass a virtual ball back and forth with other players. Unbeknownst to test subjects, other participants are following a script and will eventually exclude the subject, only passing the ball to each other. Even in brief experiments, the game has been shown to increase feelings of sadness and anxiety among excluded participants.

While ostracism is hurtful, this is not always its intent. The Amish practice of meidung, or shunning, is reserved for those who have been found in violation of the Ordnung, a set of church and community rules and customs. Though opinions differ on such spiritual practices and their impact, shunning is often described as an act of love, meant to encourage repentance and reconciliation.

Respectful Silence

Spitefully ignoring or ostracizing someone can demonstrate contempt. But silence in other circumstances can denote reverence and esteem.

After wars, terrorist attacks, disasters, and the deaths of prominent figures, it is customary for communities to observe a moment of silence. The purpose of the silence is not explained, nor does it need to be. It is an instance of solemn reflection and acknowledgment. By remaining quiet in solidarity, the group shows its respect for the fallen and those impacted — in some cases, with more eloquence than a prepared eulogy ever could.

To interrupt a moment of silence with an inappropriate word or noise, as was done by some fans during the recent FIFA World Cup, is considered the epitome of rudeness. The custom in such instances is to shush the offending party. The traditional finger-to-the-lips gesture may have its roots in Ancient Egypt. The Greeks saw depictions of the child-God Horus with a finger near his lips, which in Egypt denoted childlike qualities, and misinterpreted the gesture to represent silence. Horus evolved into the Greek and Roman deity Harpocrates, associated with secrets and confidentiality.

Versions of this same respectful silence show up at other moments. During ceremonies and rituals, such as military honors or the lowering of a casket; in courtrooms and houses of worship; in libraries and museums. In such settings and during such observances, by saying nothing, we say all that needs to be said. I find it fascinating that silence can be insulting and cruel, or courteous and devotional, simply based on situational context.

Perhaps this is why silence is such a uniquely human form of communication. We are highly attuned not only to words, but also to their absence. We notice the apology that is never offered, the text message that doesn’t arrive, the greeting that isn’t returned. We register what is said and what is not said, and usually with the same acuity.

Communication is often described as an exchange of information. But whether we are a devout monk, a frustrated spouse, or a respectful mourner, the words that are not exchanged speak volumes.

Sometimes, the absence of a message is the message. Sometimes, staying silent is how humans communicate.

Today, we think of it as a single volume, neatly bound and found in churches, hotel rooms, and homes throughout the world. Some are simple and fit in one’s pocket. Others are weighty, with gilded pages and ornate leather covers. What they have in common is that they are all one book … what many would describe as the book. The Good Book. Sacred and divine. The Word of God.

But the word bible comes from the Greek ta biblia, meaning “the books.” It has its roots in the words for “scrolls” and even “papyrus,” the Egyptian precursor to paper. This is because for much of its long history, the Bible was not one book but many separate writings that were copied by hand and passed from one generation to the next. The Bible is not so much a book as a library, and like any library, it is the work of many authors over centuries — writers of histories, letters, prophecies, biographies, and songs.

Collectively, these writings became the best-selling book of all time, one that has had a profound impact on world culture. No column on how humans communicate is complete without a closer look at this mysterious collection of texts.

What’s the Story?

What exactly is the Bible? The answer depends on whom you ask. Some view it as a remarkable anthology of ancient writings that preserve the traditions of the communities that produced them.

To many, it is the inspired teachings of God Himself, a source of comfort and moral guidance. The words of Jesus emphasize love, forgiveness, and care for the most vulnerable. The book inspires those who clothe and feed the hungry, who comfort the sick and downtrodden.

Still others regard the Bible with deep suspicion. The “Good Book” is controversial. It has been invoked to justify blood-soaked crusades and inquisitions. Its contents have been a pretext for bigotry, colonialism, and bitter struggles between some of history’s highest seats of political power.

Ultimately, these are acts carried out by people, not by a book. But to its critics, the Bible is as inseparable from the atrocities committed in its name as it is from the acts of charity and compassion it has inspired.

These viewpoints differ on both philosophy and matters of faith, but they tend to agree that these scriptures have shaped our global society on an unmatched scale.

The Bible’s Evolution

The Good Book’s story begins even before Christianity itself.

The first five books, Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy, are known in Judaism as the Torah. These remain the opening books of the Christian Old Testament and are the first section of the Tanakh, or Hebrew Bible, the complete collection of Jewish scripture.

Christians later added the New Testament, which tells the story of Jesus and documents the beginnings of the Church.

Some writers are known. The apostle Paul, for example, wrote letters to early Christian churches that later became part of the New Testament. Other books are anonymous, or their authorship remains debated. Before words made their way to parchment, portions of the Bible likely circulated for generations as stories, songs, and oral teachings.

The Bible takes numerous forms, depending on one’s denomination. The standard Protestant biblical canon contains 66 books. Catholic Bibles have 73, including Tobit, Judith, and Wisdom. Eastern Orthodox Bibles include still others. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints uses the Protestant Bible but also recognizes additional scripture, most notably the Book of Mormon. Translators must also decide how to render ancient Hebrew and Greek into modern languages; early Bibles had no punctuation, and as noted by scholars, something as simple as the placement of a comma can change how Jesus’s words are understood.

Even the order in which the books are arranged communicates how different faith traditions interpret these writings. The Hebrew Bible ends with Chronicles and the Jews returning to Jerusalem after the Babylonian exile. Most Christian Old Testaments end with the prophet Malachi, whose closing verses are understood to foretell the coming of John the Baptist and Jesus. These various endings point readers toward different continuations of the story.

And of course, some texts that may have ended up in the Bible never found their way there. Ancient works such as the gospels of Thomas, Mary, and Judas have long fascinated readers. Some view these as “lost” or suppressed gospels, while many historians believe these texts were written later than the canonical Gospels and were never widely accepted as scripture.

An Information Revolution

For much of human history, every Bible had to be copied by hand. A manuscript could represent months or years of painstaking work by careful scribes. Four nearly complete examples, containing the full Old and New Testament in Greek, survive today: the Codex Vaticanus, which resides in the Vatican Library, and the Codex Sinaiticus, the Codex Alexandrinus, and the Codex Ephraemi Rescriptus. Hundreds of fragmentary specimens on vellum and papyrus have also been preserved.

For centuries, those who encountered biblical verses experienced them outside the context of the written word. Priests read aloud from the Gospels during worship services. Hymns and sermons carried their lessons. And mystery plays, performed throughout medieval Europe in front of largely illiterate audiences, brought Bible stories to life onstage. These plays had simple origins but became more elaborate, with guilds and traveling companies enacting scenes that included the Creation and Fall of Man, the Nativity, Christ’s Baptism, and the Passion and Resurrection.

What changed everything, in around 1455, was Johannes Gutenberg’s printing of what would become the most famous book ever produced on his new movable-type printing press. Gutenberg’s innovation would lead to an extraordinary spread of literature throughout Europe, contributing to the development of both the Renaissance and the Protestant Reformation. Printing, along with new translations into German and other languages, transformed the Bible from scarce manuscripts pored over by clergy and scholars into something accessible by ordinary readers.

Today, the Bible — in all its many variations — exists as printed pages, audiobooks, websites, and countless smartphone apps. It is read and debated on podcasts and radio programs. Free copies are handed out on street corners. BibleProject, a nondenominational Christian nonprofit based in Oregon, has more than 5.4 million subscribers to its YouTube channel.

Each burgeoning communication technology finds new ways to carry this message into another age. Whether regarded as divine revelation, historical literature, or a tool wielded by fascists, the Bible isn’t going anywhere. After thousands of years, the words endure.

Or, as many believe, the Word.

The stone his customer has selected, a slab of granite, is tall and striking. Tiny specks glint in the morning sun: quartz, feldspar. The runemaster does not know these words. He knows nothing of the geological history or makeup of this stone, nor does he need to.

All that matters is that it will stand for centuries or longer, nearly impervious to the elements.

The year is 1000 AD. King Olof Skötkonung rules the Svear. The runemaster, here in the province of Uppland, knows little of these affairs, either. What he knows is the task in front of him. He raises his hammer and chisel.

Each strike rings through the village, surrounded by tall trees. The air is heavy with the mingling smells of woodsmoke, tanned hide, pine tar, and livestock. Chips of stone gather around the runemaster’s dusty boots as he works. He is careful, methodical. The hard material is unforgiving. A moment of carelessness can spoil his efforts.

Slowly, the shape of a wolf-like beast emerges. Then runic letters appear, one by one, scrolling ornately along a serpentine border that frames the wide gray surface. It is an ancient Germanic alphabet, dating to about 150 AD. “Rune” means “secret” or “mystery.”

The runemaster pauses, mops his brow, and continues. At last, the final hammer blow is struck.

The craftsman regards his handiwork, nods, then dips a brush in a bowl of red ochre. He meticulously fills the fresh grooves with pigment and watches the inscription spring to life in vivid crimson.

The runes declare that a man resided here. His name was Ulfr. This stone monument is being erected by his family in honor of a life well-lived, a life worth remembering.

A thousand years after they are gone, after the runemaster himself is no longer a memory … the runestone will stand.

A Public Message

The tradition of raising runestones began in the 4th century. Some of the early examples are associated with graves, though many were erected in commonly traveled areas: near the intersections of roads, at bridges and gathering places, and outside churches.

Most surviving runestones date to the Viking Age (about 800 to 1050 AD). While their purpose varied — some marked the borders of territories, others proclaimed inheritances — most were raised by families to memorialize the dead.

Among the most well-known are the Jelling stones, named for the town of Jelling, Denmark. Gorm the Old, who ruled Denmark from 936 until his death in about 958, raised the first of these in honor of his wife, the Viking queen Thyra. Their son, King Harald Bluetooth, raised a larger runestone to celebrate his parents and his conquest of Denmark and Norway. The stone also references the conversion of Denmark from Norse paganism to Christianity and features Denmark’s earliest depiction of Jesus.

In 1997, entrepreneur Jim Kardach was browsing the book History of the Vikings by Gwyn Jones. He saw a photograph of Harald’s runestone and proposed “Bluetooth” as the code name of a short-range wireless technology he and others were working on. It was meant to be temporary … but the name stuck.

There are about 3,000 surviving runestones in Scandinavia; the majority are in Sweden. Most commemorate men who died locally, though some were raised in memory of those who never returned from voyages and expeditions.

Made to Outlast Us

The instincts that prompted the creation of the runestones remain with us today.

We commission engraved bricks outside hospitals, universities, and even theme parks. We erect memorials for wars and disasters. We dedicate parks and park benches, walking paths, gardens, and library rooms to loved ones.

And then there are tombstones and grave markers, which are a topic for another time.

So much of communication is ephemeral. As Shakespeare wrote, words are but wind. Today’s newspapers line tomorrow’s bird cages. Text messages, social media stories, and headlines are absorbed and almost instantly forgotten.

The Norse runestones will be here long after we are gone.

They preserve names, prayers, reputations, and family ties.

They remember.

An excerpt from a letter from John Adams to his wife Abigail, July 3, 1776.

Adams was reflecting on the significance of the American colonies having declared their independence from Great Britain.

“I am apt to believe that it will be celebrated, by succeeding Generations, as the great anniversary Festival. It ought to be commemorated, as the Day of Deliverance by solemn Acts of Devotion to God Almighty. It ought to be solemnized with Pomp and Parade, with Shews, Games, Sports, Guns, Bells, Bonfires and Illuminations from one End of this Continent to the other from this Time forward forever more.

You will think me transported with Enthusiasm but I am not. I am well aware of the Toil and Blood and Treasure, that it will cost Us to maintain this Declaration, and support and defend these States. Yet through all the Gloom I can see the Rays of ravishing Light and Glory. I can see that the End is more than worth all the Means. And that Posterity will tryumph in that Days Transaction, even altho We should rue it, which I trust in God We shall not.”

True words. It has cost us much to maintain this great nation and its democratic ideals, and it costs us still. But I am an optimist. I believe, with unwavering faith in the constructive power of how humans communicate, that we will endure.

I am on vacation and traveling with family this week, so please excuse the lighter column.

Happy 250th birthday to these United States of America.

I don’t know. But I believe there is a high likelihood that someone must be.

For decades, astronomers have aimed radio telescopes at the sky. They are intently listening. They are scanning for evidence that someone, somewhere, is trying to communicate. No luck yet.

Previous columns have touched on humanity’s attempts to send messages outward. The 1974 Arecibo message and the golden records carried aboard the Voyager probes were efforts, mostly symbolic, to introduce ourselves to unknown listeners.

But the focus of the SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) Institute is surveying the cosmos to let unknown speakers introduce themselves to us.

Listening to the Abyss

Radio waves cross immense distances. But like the beam of a flashlight, they weaken as they travel. Our own radio and television noise has formed a sort of bubble around the Earth with a radius of about one hundred light-years, since a century is how long we’ve been broadcasting. But it’s unlikely that a civilization thousands of light-years away will ever hear it. By the time our radio signals get that far, centuries from now, they’ll be buried in the high-energy cosmic noise generated by the galaxy.

This means the reverse is also true. If a faraway civilization is broadcasting its own version of TV and FM radio, we’ll never hear it. The sun emits radio waves. So do pulsars and nebulae. And then there is the cosmic microwave background left over from the Big Bang. Space is simply too vast and noisy for this sort of everyday chatter.

But … what if a technological civilization, having discovered electricity and physics, decided to use them just as we have? What if they built a dish a thousand feet wide, powered by a million watts, with a transmission frequency of 2.38 GHz or so?

They could use it for scientific purposes, such as measuring the distances to neighboring planets or studying the orbits of visiting asteroids. Or they could beam an incredibly powerful signal, as we did in 1974, and hope someone is listening.

We are indeed listening, and alas, we haven’t heard much. There was a signal, just once, in 1977, that hasn’t been satisfactorily explained. It lasted for 72 seconds and was picked up by Ohio State University’s Big Ear radio telescope. To this day, while many have put forth theories about the strong narrowband transmission — which seemed to come from the direction of the constellation Sagittarius — no definitive proof that it was, or was not, an extraterrestrial beacon has ever emerged.

Since then, nothing. Our galaxy seems stubbornly, funereally quiet.

Where is Everybody?

The physicist Enrico Fermi, who won the Nobel Prize in 1938 and constructed the first artificial nuclear reactor, supposedly asked a famous question.

The Milky Way contains hundreds of billions of stars. We have learned that planets, including rocky planets, are common. And there is nothing particularly magical or special about the chemistry that allows life to form. Water and carbon aren’t rare. Abiogenesis, as it is known, is a natural process. It happened, here on Earth, at least once. There is no rule that says it mustn’t happen again somewhere else. And if we accept that premise, and if we consider that there are countless billions of solar systems, then the universe should be teeming with species. Even if abiogenesis is a one-in-a-million thing, life should still be prevalent. It’s nearly a mathematical certainty.

“So,” Fermi wondered, “where is everybody?” The question became known as the Fermi paradox.

Yet, I have never found it especially paradoxical.

Space, as I mentioned, is unimaginably vast. It’s much bigger than you can fathom. There may be two trillion galaxies in the observable universe, or 20 trillion. Our Milky Way is just one of them, and it spans roughly 100,000 light-years from side to side. That’s nearly 590 quadrillion miles.

Quite simply, a highly advanced alien civilization could colonize a million worlds on the opposite end of our own galaxy, 50,000 or 75,000 light-years away, and we would know nothing about it. That is a staggeringly long distance for radio waves to travel, and a million worlds is an insignificant speck in the gigantic ocean that is a galaxy. It would be like a gnat in Arkansas being unaware of a mosquito in Australia.

And furthermore, there is no universal “now.” Just because we have reached the radio age doesn’t mean everyone else has. Or maybe they got there first. Perhaps a distant civilization began broadcasting 40,000 years ago, but they’re 42,000 light-years away. Or maybe they sent a radio signal 40 million years ago and were long extinct by the time we started listening.

Where is everybody? I believe they are out there. They have to be. The odds of life appearing only once seem impossibly remote. Astrophysicist Frank Drake, often called the Father of SETI, formulated an equation that factored in the average rate of star formation in the Milky Way, the average number of planets that could potentially support life, and other variables, and concluded that there could be between a thousand and 100 million civilized planets in our galaxy alone. Heck, I’d be happy with a dozen.

But time and distance alone can keep us forever separated. No deliberate silence is required.

A System Built on Hope

Most communication technologies exist because we know someone is there.

SETI is different. It is a vast and complicated system that was organized without knowing whether anyone is on the other end.

Still, we listen. And why shouldn’t we? We are curious explorers. We climb tall mountains. We cross deep oceans. We discover dark caves. And we scan the stars for others like us …. or unlike us.

Even if we never hear anything, the very act of listening is part of the fundamental fabric of how humans communicate. Many do not believe we are alone in the universe. We seek kinship. We seek connection.

And we’ll keep hoping, keep listening … keep patiently endeavoring to find it.

What a glorious sight. The flowers were lush, fragrant, and colorful. Someone had come along recently to water them. Not a leaf or petal was out of place.

Even before a staff member appeared to greet me, these sweet-smelling blossoms told a story. I was visiting a fine, orderly establishment. Its owners cared not only about cleanliness, but about the little details. This property was alive, properly maintained, and welcoming. I would be well looked after during my stay.

Humans have cultivated flowers and used them to communicate for millennia. Research has shown that flowers boost our moods and even enhance our memory. Their significance is so embedded in our culture that we take them for granted. We send roses for anniversaries and poinsettias at Christmas. We pin blooms to our lapels. We pick them for our sweethearts. We arrange them on our windowsills.

Why do we do it? Well, because we do. Because we always have.

The Language of Flowers

In the 19th century, the art of floriography became a popular craze — especially in Victorian England. The practice may have had its roots in Constantinople, in what is now Turkey, though forms of floriography have been practiced in other cultures as well. To send a plant or floral arrangement was to transmit a coded message. Red roses could symbolize romance, while white represented virtue or chastity. Hydrangeas were linked to gratitude, or sometimes boastfulness; red carnations to heartache; forget-me-nots to remembrance; marigolds to grief. A nosegay, also known as a tussie-mussie (a type of petite bouquet), was a popular fashion accessory of the era.

The language of flowers extended even beyond the blossoms themselves. How you presented them, which hand you used, and the placement of a ribbon around the stems all carried their own hidden meanings. Many Victorian homes were furnished with elaborately illustrated guidebooks to decipher these peculiar codes.

The connection between roses and romantic love stretches back well before Victorian times. The ancient Greeks and Romans associated the rose with Aphrodite and Venus, the goddesses of love and beauty. Today, the gift of a dozen red roses needs no explanation. Its meaning is clear before the card is opened.

The Mournful Lily

Lilies say something different. In floriography, the white lily has a long association with purity and renewal. In Christian traditions, this flower symbolizes the hope of rebirth and eternal salvation after death. This is why lilies’ elegant appearance and soft fragrance are common elements of funeral services.

Of course, today, most of us are unfamiliar with this elaborate language. What we understand is cultural memory. Generations of people before us have used lilies to express sympathy to the bereaved, and so we honor this tradition.

Other flowers associated with grief and mourning include carnations, chrysanthemums, gladioli, and orchids. Even after we are gone, they adorn our tombs.

Flowers for Every Occasion

But long before we meet our ends, flowers occupy every stage of our lives. We send them to celebrate births. We send them to apologize. We bring them to brighten the hospital rooms of our loved ones as they recover from illness. They are a feature of proms and weddings. It is customary to present a bouquet to a musician or dancer following a virtuoso performance.

In Hawaii, to place a flower lei around someone’s neck is to celebrate and welcome them. The Netherlands in the 17th century was seized by Tulip Mania, a brief economic bubble during which tulip bulbs fetched astronomical sums. Prized for their intense hues, tulips were coveted as fashionable luxury items. The most highly sought-after were the Bizarden varieties, named for their vivid streaks of mottled colors.

A Fleeting Message

From a biological perspective, a flower is the reproductive structure of a flowering plant. Its colorful petals and exotic scents are not meant for us. They are intended to attract pollinators, including bees, butterflies, hummingbirds, and bats. When these creatures visit a flower to sip its nectar, they carry pollen from one blossom to another, enabling fertilization.

And inevitably, this flowering structure wilts. Like disappearing ink or Instagram stories, flowers are temporary. I think this is part of their appeal. Unlike art or jewelry, a flower’s beauty is rare and ephemeral. It fades with time, the petals drooping, the blooms withering. The subtle fragrance disappears. A gift of flowers is not a permanent transfer of property. It is an acknowledgment of a moment, to be appreciated while it lasts.

So much of communication depends on words. But when we hand someone a bouquet of flowers, we participate in an ancient form of conversation … one that is steeped in symbolism, tradition, and memory.

Such beautiful things they are.

Writing made words and thoughts permanent. The telegraph and telephone compressed time and distance.

The invention of eyeglasses was different. This was technology for the receiver.

As people age, our ability to perceive the world around us often diminishes.

When we are young, the lenses of our eyes are soft and flexible. Tiny muscles can easily change shape to focus our vision. But as we get older, our lenses gradually stiffen and become less cooperative. This condition, called presbyopia, makes it harder to read and focus on nearby objects.

And then there are anatomical conditions — myopia, hyperopia, astigmatism. Today, many of us are fortunate to take corrective lenses for granted. Eyeglasses are so common that it’s hard to imagine a world without them. But for many centuries, people with vision problems were simply out of luck.

Which makes eyeglasses one of the most consequential innovations in the history of how humans communicate.

Hidden in Plain Sight

Some types of glass occur naturally — volcanic obsidian is one variety — and humans have been making glass for thousands of years.

Optical magnifying devices also date to antiquity. Aristophanes, an Ancient Greek playwright, wrote in 424 BC about magnifying lenses used for setting tinder alight. Rock crystal lenses of considerable quality, dating to the Archaic Greek period, have been unearthed by archaeologists.

The Stoic Roman philosopher Seneca the Younger, in his book Naturales Quaestiones (circa 65 AD), wrote, “Letters, however small and indistinct, are seen enlarged and more clearly through a globe of glass filled with water.”

Ptolemy’s Optics, authored in the 2nd century, has been lost completely in its original Greek, but portions survive in a Latin translation. It contains theories about the mechanics of vision and observations on color and illumination.

The Andalusi polymath Abbas ibn Firnas, born in 810 in the Emirate of Córdoba (in modern-day Spain), is often credited with the invention of reading stones. These were small pieces of beryl, quartz, or glass, polished into gleaming clear stones that magnified letters on a page.

The crucial breakthrough came in northern Italy, a thriving hub for glassmaking, near the turn of the 14th century. Eyeglasses may have been the brainchild of Alessandro della Spina, a Dominican friar who was known to be a gifted copyist and illuminator. In 1306, the prolific preacher Giordano da Pisa, who was a friar in the same monastery, wrote, “It is not yet twenty years since there was found the art of making glasses, which make for good vision.” He went on to state that he knew and had spoken to the man who created them.

These new devices consisted of convex glass lenses (concave ones would come later) that were mounted in frames and manually held before the eyes. Early glasses were awkward by modern standards, but they got the job done — and just in time for the later invention of printing, which dramatically expanded the availability of written materials.

Nothing would be the same.

The Enabler of Innovation

Consider how many lives must have been changed by this extraordinary breakthrough.

Monks copying manuscripts. Scholars translating ancient texts. Academics preparing scientific papers. Many of history’s most learned experts would have seen their professional lives considerably shortened without corrective lenses.

But now, thanks to the cleverness of Italian glassmakers, more new innovations could be discovered and refined; more knowledge could be passed on.

Among the intellectuals who benefited from eyeglasses was Benjamin Franklin, one of the Founding Fathers of the United States. Although this has been disputed, he is generally credited with the invention of bifocals, which feature split lenses to correct vision at both long and short distances. Franklin could now transcribe notes, glance across a room, and return to his work without switching spectacles.

The Mark of a Scholar

Over time, eyeglasses evolved from optical instruments to symbols. Long before modern stereotypes of bespectacled professors and brainy four-eyed scientists, glasses became a visual shorthand for knowledge and literacy.

Even today, people often make assumptions that someone wearing glasses is more studious — or more nerdy — than the average person. The device that helps us receive messages also sends one, in a way. Many opt for contact lenses instead. They are less noticeable and don’t slide down one’s nose, get splattered by rain, or fog up when coming indoors.

I find it interesting that when people speak about the great inventions that changed communication, like paper, the printing press, and the telephone, they rarely mention eyeglasses.

Perhaps this is because they are personal rather than societal. They facilitate individual comprehension, not networked information flow.

Yet without perception, communication is meaningless. A message that is not received is useless noise. A book that cannot be read may as well be blank.

For more than 700 years, eyeglasses have quietly expanded our ability to gain knowledge and remain connected to the complex world around us. And the technological disruption continues; modern smart glasses can instantly display text captions for the hearing impaired, or even real-time language translation.

Most of history’s communication advancements have transformed how humans communicate.

By enhancing how our eyes receive and absorb signals, eyeglasses have transformed humanity itself.

But the Lighthouse of Alexandria stands out.

Built in the third century BC on the island of Pharos, off the coast of the Egyptian city of Alexandria, the enormous lighthouse guided ships as they approached one of the busiest ports of the ancient world. By some accounts, the lighthouse towered more than 330 feet. That’s impressive today; in its time, it would have been one of the tallest structures in existence.

But it was not constructed merely to glorify the might of the Ptolemaic Kingdom. It was more than just a technological and engineering marvel, more than simply a Wonder of the World. The Lighthouse of Alexandria had a vital purpose for communication.

Beacons in the Dark

For most of human history, coastlines were dangerous places.

Sailors could cross vast stretches of open water without incident, only to be wrecked within inches of their destination. Reefs, shoals, and jagged rocks turned a voyage’s final mile into its most perilous.

Humankind’s answer was the lighthouse. We could not alter the dangers of the coastline, could not dispel swirling fog or raging storms. But the light of a blazing fire gave sailors the orientation they needed to navigate treacherous ports.

Lighthouses existed before Alexandria, which now lies in ruins on the seabed. But it was the mightiest, becoming the model for many lighthouses to follow. The ancient Romans built them. Medieval kingdoms maintained them. By the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, major coastlines around the world were lined with networks of lighthouses, which over time became increasingly sophisticated.

Early lantern rooms burned wood. Later came oil lamps, mirrored reflectors, and eventually the revolutionary Fresnel lens, invented by the French civil engineer and physicist Augustin-Jean Fresnel. Its concentric rings of stepped glass could hurl beams of light across astonishing distances. Fresnel’s innovation saved the lives of many a sailor.

These lighted towers eventually developed their own unique language and identities. “Light characteristics,” such as special flashing signatures, helped mariners recognize darkened coastlines the way we distinguish familiar faces.

Lighthouses have limitations. Fog and storms can dim the brightest beams. So lighthouses evolved. Bells, cannons, and foghorns carried messages where light could not. The history of how humans communicate is a quest to cut through clouds and obscurity.

The Simplest Signal

What strikes me about the lighthouse is how simple and elegant its message is. A lighthouse does not transmit detailed instructions or relay complex codes. It communicates only what matters to the approaching sailor — that dangerous coasts are near, and ships must proceed with caution.

We inhabit a world that subjects us to a continuous barrage of notifications, advertisements, alerts, and opinions. Never in human history have so many signals competed loudly for our attention. We filter out what we can, yet still the cacophony overwhelms us.

A lighthouse’s message, meanwhile, is clear and unambiguous. Its value comes from the singularity of its purpose. If only all communication could be so universal, so easy to interpret.

The Character of Coastlines

I love lighthouses. The sea runs in my veins, and my travels have taken me up and down the coast of New England and the Eastern United States. I have climbed to the top of Maine’s beautiful Pemaquid Point Lighthouse, and explored the ancient metamorphic bedrock at its base, more times than I can count. It has stood for nearly two hundred years. I pray it will endure for hundreds more.

Today, most lighthouses no longer serve the same practical purpose they once did. While the circling beacons are still useful visual markers, GPS satellites and other technologies now guide ships with extraordinary precision.

But even as they approach obsolescence, lighthouses symbolize something bigger and more important than wayfinding in the dark.

The world is full of uncertainty. Communication can be muddled, complicated, incomplete. Grim headlines shout from newspaper racks. Social media floods our eyes and inboxes with an endless stream of half-truths. We are all sailors of a sort, navigating rough seas of misunderstandings and misinformation.

Sometimes all we need is one bright, reliable signal … a sensible piece of advice … a helpful conversation with a person we trust.

Sometimes all we need is a familiar voice in the fog and the maelstrom.

These are the lighthouses that help us find our bearings.

Alford’s defense was that at the precise time prosecutors claimed the murder was committed, he was renting a car from a Hertz location at the Detroit Metropolitan Airport. A receipt would prove this.

But no receipt could be found. Alford spent five years in prison, away from his wife and children, insisting on his innocence as his attorneys navigated a series of subpoenas and other legal battles.

Finally, in 2018, the missing document surfaced. Alford’s conviction was overturned, and he was released. But those five years cannot be restored. Alford later sued Hertz. His lawyers allege that the company ignored numerous requests for the receipt. The company claims this isn’t true and that they simply couldn’t find it due to technical limitations at the time. This argument, too, can likely be proven or disproven based on written records.

A receipt is a simple piece of paper, a transactional communication generated by a machine. Most of us crumple and discard them every day without a thought. Alford probably did the same. After the car had been returned, the reasoning likely went, why would he ever need it again?

In this case, it meant the difference between life and death. It was more powerful than testimony, memory, or any eyewitness. I don’t know what evidence the prosecution could have had, but it seems unlikely that they proved their case beyond all reasonable doubt.

The First Receipts

Among the oldest surviving written documents is a Mesopotamian clay tablet, dating back about 4,000 years, documenting a transaction in the ancient city of Umma (in what is now southern Iraq). A delivery of both “high-quality beer” and “ordinary beer” was made to a group of workers as a form of payment. The Cuneiform tablet, and several more like it, were discovered by researchers in the collection of the National Museum of Denmark.

One of the many things about history that fascinates me is that the ancient world only seems ancient to us. Those who inhabited early Sumer were living in the modern era, in a civilization that was becoming increasingly sophisticated and bureaucratic. Of course a payment of many liters of beer would need to be carefully tabulated and recorded on a clay receipt, in case a dispute should arise later. Hopefully such a disagreement could be settled over a cup of strong, fermented brew.

We often imagine ancient communication as artistic and spiritual — fireside storytelling, myths, fables. But much of it was administrative. As populations expanded, small villages and communities became cities full of strangers. Farmers no longer knew all their neighbors. Merchants did not recognize every customer on sight. How could someone prove they had paid a tax or received a wage? Delivered grains? Borrowed money? Receipts, ledgers, contracts, and census records were how governments began neatly to organize and categorize the complexities of modern life.

Trust can be temporary. Spoken promises, agreements, and handshakes fade over time. Receipts endure.

Every civilization made its own kind. Tally sticks, which may go back thousands or even tens of thousands of years, were popular in Medieval England. These willow sticks would be marked with records of debts and then split down the middle. The debtor would retain one half, called the “foil,” and the creditor would hang onto the stick’s other half, called the “stock.” Because each piece of willow has its own distinctive grain, the two halves of the tally stick would only match each other. And just as modern debts can be bought and sold, the stock of a tally stick could even be used as currency in some instances.

When it comes to how humans communicate, an ancient Sumerian beer tablet, a tally stick, and the comically long receipt printed out by a cash register at CVS all belong to the same family tree.

What We Leave Behind

One of the most famous (and marvelous) receipts in American history is a relic of George Washington’s 1787 farewell dinner in Philadelphia. According to the bar tab, which survives, Washington and his fellow revelers guzzled 54 bottles of Madeira and 60 bottles of claret. That’s more than two bottles of wine per attendee, and that’s before we factor in numerous servings of whiskey, beer, porter, and hard cider, not to mention seven boozy bowls of punch.

What I love about Washington’s bar receipt is that it is proof of a raucous and meaningful celebration. George Washington is more than a stern face on a painting, marble bust, or banknote. He was a living man who raised a glass (or two, or three) with his friends and countrymen.

Receipts tell us what people touch, what they value, and what they consume. An engraved plaque or transcript of a speech tells us what great figures want us to remember. But receipts tell us what really happened.

Today, our hectic modern lives run on receipts. Nearly every movement we make is recorded, logged, authenticated: credit card purchases, hotel check-ins, toll booth transactions, computer logins. To move through the world is to generate an endless trail of electronic breadcrumbs.

This is why Herbert Alford’s missing receipt matters so much. Without it, it was his word against the imperfect evidence of the state. Once it appeared, his innocence was irrefutable. Receipts, as a vehicle of communication, are not merely records of transactions. They answer questions.

Was the bill paid? Was the debt settled? Was the bar tab satisfied?

Civilization depends on our ability to answer yes … and on the paperwork that backs us up.

Attached to each spacecraft were identical copies of an extraordinary time capsule: the Voyager Golden Record.

The phonograph record was gold-plated copper, encased in an aluminum cover. It featured greetings in 55 languages, snippets of music (including Beethoven and Chuck Berry), and sounds that included laughter, whale songs, and the cry of an infant. It was also encoded with images, including mathematical and DNA diagrams and anatomical drawings. This was humanity’s message to extraterrestrial beings; a sort of cosmic greeting card.

But was the Golden Record ever really intended for aliens to discover? Or was its true purpose to help humanity communicate with itself?

The Size of Infinity

Space is not merely big; it is unimaginably vast. Its immense scale becomes easier to grasp when you stop thinking about miles and kilometers and start thinking in terms of time. Light, the fastest thing in the universe, travels at 186,000 miles per second. Even at this incredible speed, it takes light eight minutes to travel from the Sun to the surface of the Earth. Next, let’s stretch outward. It would take a hypothetical spaceship more than four years, hurtling along at the speed of light, to reach the nearest star beyond the Sun, Proxima Centauri.

And if you wished to visit our closest neighboring galaxy, Andromeda, you’d need another 2.5 million years at the fastest speed allowable by physics. (Which, by the way, can only be achieved by light; objects made of mass can’t go anywhere near that fast. My hypothetical spaceship exists only in our imaginations.)

So yes, space is awesomely big. It is also empty. Matter is the exception, not the rule. If you were to leave the Milky Way Galaxy and begin the light-speed journey to Andromeda, which you can’t, you would only encounter a few stray atoms along the way.

The Voyager probes were launched to explore the solar system’s outer planets. In the years that followed, the probes would fly past Jupiter and Saturn (and its moon, Titan) and Uranus and Neptune, transmitting back beautiful photographs and scientific data. In 2012, decades after beginning its journey, data from Voyager 1 indicated the probe had entered interstellar space, beyond the influence of solar wind. Voyager 2 did the same in 2018. Both probes continue to fly outward, zooming along at more than 33,000 miles per hour. They are the farthest human-made objects, and the only human-made objects that have passed into interstellar space. They are billions of miles away, and yet, after nearly 50 years of continuous travel, they are still far inside the hypothetical Oort Cloud, which is thought to surround the solar system.

In fact, it will still be thousands of years before they are beyond the reach of the Sun’s gravity.

The Golden Record

As the Voyager missions came together, the record was added somewhat late in the process. The initiative was championed by the late astronomer Carl Sagan and a small committee assembled by NASA.

From the beginning, the record’s creators understood that its chances of being intercepted by an extraterrestrial race (if such a race exists) bordered on the absurd. It will be about 40,000 years before either probe comes anywhere near another star. The probability that an intelligent civilization will exist at that time, and notice the spacecraft, and have the means to retrieve and decode it, is about as remote as you sitting in your living room in Milwaukee and spotting a message in a bottle as it bobs along the Nile.

So while the project was serious and treated with the utmost gravity, it was understood that its real purpose was symbolic.

Why did we do this? Because we can. This is what humans do. We carve our names on the trunks of trees. We put letters in time capsules. We cast messages into the dark void, never knowing whether they will be seen or heard, not always strictly caring. The Golden Record belongs to this age-old tradition.

How to Represent Earth

Imagine being asked to summarize Earth. Not just your street, not just your city, but the entire globe.

The Voyager committee had to decide how to represent and communicate the essence of humanity and the world around us. Every sound, each image chosen meant that something else would be left on the cutting room floor. Ultimately, the committee decided to idealize our species. Humanity, as depicted by the Golden Record, is a curious, peaceful, and creative race. The golden time capsule contains music and science but no evidence of war, poverty, prison, tyranny, or genocide.

Is this deceptive? I prefer to think of it as aspirational. Like social media, Christmas cards, and every professional résumé, the Golden Record spotlights humanity as we wish to be seen.

And this was not an inconsequential decision in 1977, as the Cold War raged, as geopolitical discord dominated headlines. Even as the Golden Record took shape, we possessed enough nuclear weapons to wipe out civilization many times over.

Yet despite our divisions, the messages that accompany the Voyager spacecraft paint a picture of a species capable of unity, of greatness.

Alien Instructions

The cover of the Golden Record also tells an interesting story about communication. Etched into its surface are maps of pulsars and their pulse frequencies. These could, in theory, give an alien civilization a sort of cosmic timestamp of where and when it was made. It is also inscribed with mathematical diagrams and symbolic instructions explaining how to play the record. This seems logically to make sense. Mathematics, one would assume, is a more universal language than English or Chinese.

But how can we be sure that beings on other worlds have eyes to see? Or ears to hear? That they understand how to interpret diagrams and symbols or have the technology to play a record? That their experience of time, space, and reality overlaps ours in even the vaguest of ways?

We can’t. Our most ambitious attempt at a universal method of communication is rife with human assumptions. And this isn’t our fault. We are intelligent yet naïve. We don’t truly know what universal communication looks like, nor can we.

We know only how humans communicate.

Today, the Voyager probes continue dutifully to ping data to Earth. But these communications won’t last forever. Their power systems will slowly fail. The instruments will shut down, one by one, and the messages will stop coming.

Yet the probes themselves, and the Golden Records upon them, should survive for tens of millions of years, perhaps hundreds of millions. As I said, space is empty. There isn’t much out there to dent them, or rust them, or wear them away. The chances of collision with a planet or star are infinitesimal.

Long, long after the probes fall silent, after nations and languages vanish, after humankind itself goes extinct or evolves into something unrecognizable, our Golden Record will endure.

Perhaps someone will find it. More likely, no one will.

We sent it anyway.

And that says something.

But there was a problem. While boys and young men had been successful telegraph operators, they didn’t seem well suited to telephone duties. Some were impatient and easily annoyed. Others cursed or cracked jokes.

This was unacceptable. So in September of that year, Bell hired Emma Nutt, the first woman telephone operator. Her sister Stella became the second, mere hours later. Emma Nutt, whose soothing voice and prodigious memory made her ideal for the role, would go on to have a career lasting more than 30 years.

A phone call in that era was a brokered arrangement, a small transaction handled through an intermediary. It was humans helping humans communicate.

I like to imagine that when someone picked up a receiver and said, “Emma Nutt,” a teenage boy at the switchboard would quip, “Yep, you sure are!” before collapsing into giggles.

Closing the Circuit

The telephone switchboard itself was a technological marvel, and to operate one required no small amount of well-rehearsed choreography.

When a caller at home picked up the receiver and turned a crank on their telephone, a current raced down the line and energized a small metal flag, which would drop into view on the distant switchboard.

The operator would take one end of an answering cord and plug it into the jack for that specific telephone. In those days, everyone had their own dedicated jack. When the operator came on the line, the caller explained whom they wanted to speak with — for example, “Mr. Peterson on Elm Street.” The operator would find that jack, connect another cord, and prompt Mr. Peterson’s telephone to ring.

And when the operator received a signal that the conversation had ended, she would need to unplug the cords and put everything back the way it was, including manually resetting the metal flag. (These were eventually replaced with flashing lights.) Long distance calls were a whole separate process, requiring that the local operator connect to a toll line and coordinate with a regional operator somewhere else.

This was one of the earliest and most prominent white-collar jobs for American women. They were trained to sit up straight, to respond quickly and with unfailing politeness, and to smile, even though they couldn’t be seen.

With time and practice, telephone operators memorized switchboards, got to know regular callers, and learned the rhythms and routines of small towns. They were often the first link in a chain of emergency response — tracking down doctors, summoning firefighters and ambulances. They kept everyone connected.

The Power of Hello Girls

As World War I raged in Europe, United States General John J. Pershing grew frustrated with the poor quality of communications on the Western Front. Few competent switchboard operators were available, many did not speak French, and the War Department only authorized women to work as nurses.

On the advice of the Signal Corps, the U.S. Army branch responsible for military communications, General Pershing sent a cable requesting the recruitment of bilingual, female switchboard operators. Thousands applied, from which 450 were accepted for training. Many were former or current operators employed by AT&T and other telecommunications companies.

Within half a year, the volume of U.S. Army calls in France tripled, and additional operators were brought in to keep up with demand. The work of the Signal Corps Female Telephone Operators Unit, informally known as the “Hello Girls,” played a crucial part in the war effort. Many of these women, who endured cold, leaky accommodations and the constant threat of German bombing, went on to receive well-deserved commendations. Chief Operator Grace Banker was awarded the Distinguished Service Medal.

Back home in the United States, meanwhile, no such plaudits were given to the women who worked long hours at switchboards under stressful, exhausting conditions. They got no raises after the war ended, despite cost-of-living increases. Infractions resulted in women being punished with extra unpaid hours — like students serving detention. But their bosses were the ones about to learn a lesson.

In 1919, a massive wave of strikes involving four million workers rocked the nation. Among those who walked off the job were about 8,000 women employed by the New England Telephone Company. In Maine, Massachusetts, Vermont, New Hampshire, and Rhode Island, telephone service shuddered almost to a standstill. In less than a week, the company met the union’s demands for better wages and the right to collective bargaining.

The Slow Decline of the Operator

One of the innovations that began fundamentally to change the role of the operator happened early on, near the end of the 19th century.

Almon Brown Strowger was a Kansas-based undertaker and Civil War veteran. According to the story (part fact and part legend), Strowger became convinced that a rival funeral home had a relative at the telephone exchange who was deliberately routing calls to Strowger’s competition, depriving him of new customers. Strowger was so incensed by this unfair business practice that he not only invented the first automatic telephone exchange, but also played a part in the development of the rotary phone. Human intermediaries, he reasoned, could not be trusted to remain impartial.

That said, the switchboard did not vanish overnight. In some regions, operations continued well into the 20th century. And even as the cord-and-jack system became obsolete, live operators persisted. When I was growing up, in the 1980s and 1990s, dialing 0 for the operator — to place a collect call, for instance — was a regular occurrence. You could also call 411 for directory assistance, or even to obtain turn-by-turn driving directions. While today we take our smartphones for granted, technologies that offer instant access to phone numbers and far-off addresses are relatively recent inventions.

And we still rely on certain types of human telephone operators today. I think most of us have lost count of how many times we’ve asked an unhelpful robotic phone agent to connect us to a live person for assistance.

So much of communication is automated now. We tap our phones or issue a voice command, and connection is seamless and immediate. The system has scaled. Privacy has improved. And as near as I can tell, when I ask my iPhone to connect me to the local funeral home, it does not conspire to route me to the competition.

Then again, after years of speculation, Apple recently announced they will add advertising features to Apple Maps, allowing some businesses to show up more prominently in recommendations.

Maybe things aren’t so different, after all.

I’m a “smart home” person. I like the convenience of telling my Christmas lights to turn on. I enjoy summoning a favorite song or album and having it play throughout the house by verbal decree. When I’m cooking, I can ask the kitchen speaker how many tablespoons are in a cup, and a soothing voice responds at once. It makes me feel like I’m living in the future.

For most of human history, homes have been inanimate in the mechanical sense. We speak only to the people inside them, calling upstairs for dinner or asking the person nearest the lamp to switch it on.

Thanks to smart home technology, this has changed. Now we can instruct the thermostat itself to turn up the heat. We can tell doors to lock and shades to be whisked across windows. As if uttering enchantments, we can use our voices to transform the environment.

For better or worse, this is a shift in the history of how humans communicate. Our surroundings can respond to language. Is this a good thing? Well, that is a matter of strong opinions.

The Convenience of Speech

At first glance, the appeal of smart home tech is obvious. Voice control is more convenient, especially during those little moments of difficulty we all encounter. Arms full of groceries? Turn on the lights without using your hands. Kneading dough with sticky fingers? Set a kitchen timer with a spoken command. Such conveniences are not trivial — and for some, like the elderly or disabled, they can even be life-changing.

There is also a subtle psychological reward. Speech is a natural interface. As in the Middle Eastern folktale of the forty thieves, in which Ali Baba says “Open Sesame” to access a cave full of treasure, there is something magical about lighting a room with a spoken phrase. It provides a sense of control, as if the home exists to do our bidding.

According to one survey, more than eight in every 10 American homes now contain smart devices of some kind. While not all are the voice-activated type, a lot of people seem to understand the appeal.

I remember the headache of trying to set my old bedside alarm clock, holding one button down while repeatedly tapping another, watching the advance of the flashing numbers.

Now I tell it, “Wake me at six.” Technology handles the rest.

The Loss of Interaction

Convenience, however, comes at a cost. And I don’t mean the monetary price of smart gadgets and speakers, which can add up.

I have always loved music. I remember running a thumb across the rows of record albums in my parents’ den … admiring the cover art as I slid a vinyl record from its sleeve … placing it on the platter and lowering the stylus. As any turntable owner knows, this is a ritual. It has substance and ceremony.

Now I just name the artist and album, or tap my iPhone’s screen, and I hear it instantly. This is easy. But something wonderfully tactile is lost when such routines become simple.

The same can be said of using my voice to dim the lights or change the temperature. A switch or dial requires an interaction with the space: a movement, an expenditure of energy. A spoken command lets me remain lazily in place, creating a sterile disconnect between me and my environment.

Such losses are not insubstantial. We are physical creatures. We touch the world around us. Life at home for millennia has been shaped by work and effort: tending gardens, winding clocks, opening drapes.

A smart home trades hands-on interaction for hands-free communication. Whether this counts as “progress” will depend on how one prioritizes efficiency and experience.

Who’s Listening?

And then there are the controversies that hover over the entire category. If my house can hear my commands, then something is always listening.

Many people refuse to adopt voice-activated technology for this reason. I understand where they are coming from.

Microphones in the kitchen? Big Brother monitoring the bedroom? No thanks, the skeptics say. They distrust promises from Big Tech players like Amazon, Apple, and Meta about how data is analyzed, whether it is sold, or how securely it is handled.

The concerns are valid. In 2023, for example, the Federal Trade Commission charged Amazon with violating the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act. According to the complaint, Amazon kept voice recordings and geolocation data longer than advertised, prevented parents from deleting it, and used the data to train its own algorithms. Amazon forked over a $25 million fine, less than one-tenth of one percent of that year’s profits.

And there is another worrying risk. Domestic violence advocates warn that abusive partners can exploit this technology to monitor movements, eavesdrop on conversations, and exert control in other harmful ways.

A 2025 NIST study of consumer attitudes about smart tech found that voice assistants are significantly less trusted than thermostats and security devices. This isn’t surprising.

And yet, many users accept the trade-offs. Every day, we make small exchanges of privacy for convenience, comfort, or other benefits. We allow smart TVs to keep an eye on our viewing habits and recommend new shows. We let fitness apps track our location, heart rate, and sleep activity.

The smart home speaker is another version of this technological Faustian bargain, sitting on our countertop.

The Social Glue of Domestic Life

There is still another compromise some of us make when we upgrade to smarter homes. And this gets to the heart of how humans communicate.

The technology performs tasks, but it also erases conversations.

“Did you remember to lock the door?”

“Would you mind lowering the heat?”

“Honey, can you please dim the lights?”

These are small, mundane sentences. Yet, they matter. For those who live with others, they are woven into the fabric of domestic life. Some innovations create shortcuts that decouple us from old-fashioned communication. With ourselves, with our environment, and with each other.

Easier is not always better. Those shelves of records in the house where I grew up invited contemplation. The walk across the room to flip a switch helps me move my sedentary muscles. These physical interactions can be a nuisance. They also add warmth and texture to household life, and I value that.

I appreciate the technology. But I also like a compromise. In my house, we draw the curtains and bolt the doors by hand.

Humans speak inside homes. To ourselves, to our roommates, to our loved ones, to our pets. And now, to the residence itself.

Does this make us more efficient? More passive? More spied upon? This will remain a topic of active debate.

At last, the hieroglyphic text of Ancient Egypt, known to its creators as medu netjer, the “words of the gods,” could be deciphered. Until that moment, the arcane script had been illegible even to the world’s leading academics.

This mystery was solved. And yet, all around us, there remain ancient messages that no living person can interpret.

Not necessarily because they are codes or deliberately cryptic. Rather, because the ones who made them have vanished, along with any clues about how to make them readable. These are artifacts of a lost world.

We tend to think of writing as durable, something that persists, outlasting centuries, waiting patiently for future readers to discover it … just as we found the words on Ancient Egyptian obelisks and tombs, just as we unearthed the weathered stele, now known as the Rosetta Stone, that would enable us to translate them.

But some of the most exquisitely preserved artifacts remain, for the moment, utterly silent.

Quiet Symbols of the Rapa Nui

Easter Island, in the southeastern Pacific, is known for its nearly 1,000 moai statues. These monuments, created by the early Rapa Nui people, were erected to honor and embody deceased chiefs and other prominent ancestors. But another, more recent legacy of the Rapa Nui is a series of irregular wood tablets inscribed with rows of glyphs. Known as rongorongo, the symbols depict human figures, animals, and plants, as well as abstract geometric shapes.

Based on the consistent orientation of the symbols across tablets, the lines appear to be written in an unusual “reverse boustrophedon” style, which requires the object to be physically rotated as it is read. It is unknown whether rongorongo was inspired by the writings of Europeans, who arrived in 1722, or whether it came before. At least one example has been carbon-dated to the 15th century, though that pinpoints the age of the wood, not the glyphs. If rongorongo does predate outside contact, then it may represent another example of a civilization independently inventing writing.

Though the symbols are deliberately arranged, no one knows what they say. European contact introduced tuberculosis and smallpox. The brutal Peruvian slave raids and annexation by Chile in the 19th century further devastated Easter Island’s people and contributed to the erosion of oral traditions. It is believed that some Christian missionaries destroyed rongorongo tablets, viewing them as pagan objects, though other missionaries may have helped preserve the genuine examples that remain.

The Rapa Nui have survived and today have better protections from such injustices. But the meaning of rongorongo has disappeared. And this represents a loss not only of words, but of thought and culture. Perhaps these texts described genealogical records, sacred rituals, or traditional stories. We cannot know.

The Only Surviving Specimen

Phaistos was a Bronze Age city on the Greek island of Crete, first inhabited around 3600 BC. Little is known about the structure and governance of Minoan civilization, but at its peak, this ancient city was one of its thriving centers, home to palaces and bustling workshops.

In 1908, an Italian archaeologist named Luigi Pernier was exploring the ruins of a palace in Phaistos. He found a small clay disc, just over six inches in diameter, covered with symbols that had been pressed into the object’s surface before firing. Based on the context of its discovery, in an underground temple depository, the disc is believed to date from between 1850 and 1600 BC.

There are 45 unique characters, each made with a carved stamp. This, one could argue, makes the artifact an early example of movable-type printing. The symbols spiral outward from the center of each side of the disc in a whorled pattern. One is shaped like a person running. Others resemble fish, or human heads in profile, or flowers, while some shapes are inscrutable.

The system of symbols on the Phaistos Disc is unique. No other examples have been found. No fragments, no workshop prototypes. Just this small, one-of-a-kind object, with its puzzling sequence of images.

Is it a prayer? A curse? Or even a board game? It has been extensively studied and debated, but no known Rosetta Stone equivalent can unscramble the Phaistos Disc. It sits in an archaeological museum in Crete, a curious relic of a culture long since vanished.

Humanity’s Earliest Writing?

Thousands of years earlier, in Neolithic settlements across southeastern Europe, prehistoric people created ornate figurines and pottery.

Skilled hunter-gatherers and sophisticated farmers, the Vinča people inscribed pots and tablets with pictograms and abstract shapes, including lines, chevrons, and crosses.

Because most of these artifacts were made between 4500 and 4000 BC, they predate the development of Sumerian cuneiform and other pictograph-based early writing systems by roughly a millennium.

While these symbols likely aren’t “writing” as we know it, their purpose has vexed scholars for decades. They may be markings to represent ownership, or they could be religious in nature, or purely decorative.

When does a symbol become language? What if it is not meant to be read, or translated, or understood? Maybe it is intended merely to represent something to its maker or the culture that created it. Or perhaps it exists only to please the eye. Sometimes a pretty shape is just a shape.

Whatever the answer, the Vinča symbols are another cryptic example of that which we can’t decipher. Their true meaning, if they have one, belongs to our distant ancestors.

And there are other mysteries. The Indus script of the Indus Valley Civilization. The Cascajal Block, found in Mexico’s Olmec heartland. The Voynich manuscript, a 15th-century codex that may have Italian origins. The list goes on.

The Importance of Continuity

A picture, as they say, is worth a thousand words. Paintings in a limestone cave on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi, dating to nearly 44,000 years ago, depict figures hunting wild pigs. These are among the oldest-known examples of figurative art.

While we cannot know the details of the artists’ lives, the Sulawesi paintings tell a story. They communicate something we can clearly understand, tens of thousands of years later: these people valued cooperative hunting.

Writing and symbols are different. They are encoded information. To comprehend them typically depends on a continuity of the conditions under which that information can later be decoded.

When language and culture disappear, so can the reference points that make such understanding possible. Meaning is not stored in writing alone. It lives in the relationship between the symbols and the humans who made them. I find this striking and oddly beautiful.

Some old words no longer speak to us. Yet we keep intently listening.

All told, about 250,000 people took part, swapping stories, playing board games, chatting with strangers. Celebrities like David Beckham waited for hours, blending in with the crowd. Camping gear and folding chairs appeared, despite rules prohibiting them. Volunteers distributed water and snacks. Lasting friendships and even romances formed.

Commentators noted that The Queue was significant not only for the admiration afforded to the deceased monarch by her subjects, but because it reinforced the popular stereotype that British people enjoy waiting in lines.

Throughout much of the world, if several people want the same service, an orderly column will form. One person, the first on the scene, steps forward. The second one stands behind them, prepared to wait their turn. Then a third steps up, and so on.

Few instructions are needed. Everyone understands what to do. You might hear, “Pardon me, are you in line?” or “Does the queue start here?” but otherwise, conversation is unnecessary.

The queue, or line, is a simple system we have devised for coordinating strangers as they wait for something. It requires no shared language or even a discussion. All that is needed is a mutual understanding of the rules, which vary across cultures but are remarkably consistent. Priority is assigned not by status or urgency, but by the order in which people arrive.

It’s fair, it’s straightforward, and it works. Both the behavioral psychology and mathematics of queuing have been extensively studied. And yet, this seemingly obvious arrangement, which today we take for granted, did not exist for much of human history. The queue, from the French word for “tail,” is a relatively recent social convention.

The Time Before Tails

While we can’t know with certainty what ancient and medieval marketplaces were like, people likely clustered in noisy groups. When a merchant opened a stall or food was distributed, customers jostled for position. Sometimes the loudest or closest were prioritized. Status and reputation would have played a role; it’s hard to imagine wealthy nobles waiting patiently as commoners were served.

The Structures of Everyday Life, by the French historian Fernand Braudel (part of his Civilization and Capitalism, 15th – 18th Century series), makes no mention of queues — despite its detailed engravings and descriptions of butcher stalls and town markets.

Among the earliest accounts of people standing in line can be found in the 1837 book The French Revolution: A History by the Scottish essayist and historian Thomas Carlyle. He makes it clear that queuing up in order of arrival was an uncommon sight, writing, “If we look now at Paris, one thing is too evident: that the Baker’s shops have got their Queues, or Tails; their long strings of purchasers, arranged in tail, so that the first come be the first served — were the shop once open! This waiting in tail, not seen since the early days of July, again makes its appearance in August. In time, we shall see it perfected by practice to the rank almost of an art; and the art, or quasi-art, of standing in tail become one of the characteristics of the Parisian People, distinguishing them from all other Peoples whatsoever.”

The Rise of the Queue

The Industrial Revolution and growth of urban societies brought together large volumes of people who didn’t know one another — post office customers, rail passengers, factory workers collecting wages. New bureaucracies emerged and expanded. A clerk couldn’t possibly keep track of who had arrived first in a crowd. A new system was needed.

The “tails” that had appeared at 18th century Parisian bakeries were the ideal solution. No central authority or complicated process was needed. Crowds organized themselves. Each newcomer simply joined the end. Victorian-era Britain developed a particular reputation for the politeness and discipline of its queues; waiting one’s turn was seen as a sign of strong morals and a willingness to cooperate.

The Social Contract of Waiting

I have spent my fair share of time in lines. Some move quickly, while others drag on for hours. Each is an experiment in miniature, an opportunity to observe human behavior. Occasionally, tempers will flare, especially when people get impatient or if someone acts like the rules don’t apply to them.

But I don’t mind the occasional wait. I am a patient person, and it forces a pause in a hectic day. Studies suggest that waiting is good for our brains, boosting mindfulness and self-control.

Because the queue relies on trust and cooperation, it can be fragile. Anyone who has ever stood in one understands the tension that simmers beneath its surface. The crowd is typically polite … until someone tries to cut in, or join a friend who has been holding their spot. It is rare that the group will summon a nearby shopkeeper or other authority to preside over a disagreement. For the most part, the line governs itself.

Over time, institutions have created infrastructure to support this organized assembly. Banks, airports, and theme parks guide customers through serpentine waiting areas, divided by barriers or velvet ropes. Delicatessens distribute numbers that preserve the order of a queue without the need for lines that might otherwise snake out the door. Online ticket vendors put buyers in virtual queues, giving those who log on first priority access to desirable concert seats.

Most of this happens wordlessly. People quietly advance in unison. They adjust their distance from one another, sighing at any new delay or interruption. Glances are exchanged, perhaps with a brief joke or sympathetic comment. “Sheesh,” someone might quip. “You would think they’d open another cash register!” At other times, no one utters a syllable.

All these systems perform the same basic function. They make the sequence clear and visible, so that strangers can coordinate without negotiation or conflict. It’s human communication … with a beautiful minimum of communication.

Every day, in grocery stores, airports, and coffee shops around the globe, this same choreographed ritual plays out again and again.

Countless people, signaling community and cooperation simply by standing and waiting their turn.

Not the marble floors. Not the modern architecture, the soaring ceilings, or the rows of gleaming bottles behind the lobby bar. What caught my attention was an unmistakable fragrance: clean, citrusy, pleasant. It was subdued, yet clearly intentional. This wasn’t the cologne of a passing tourist. This was … something in the air.

Later, as I browsed the gift shops in nearby resorts along the Strip, I discovered that many were selling candles and air fresheners based on each property’s signature scent. If you enjoyed the atmosphere of your favorite five-star hotel’s lobby, you could bottle it and take it home as a souvenir.

This was more than a clever marketing gimmick. This was a message. Long before a visitor laid eyes on the slot machines or the well-appointed guest suites, the hotel’s management was already communicating something. It was invisible, subliminal, yet noticeable in every breath.

An Unseen Language

Casino designers are masters of the controlled environment. The lighting, sounds, temperature, and layout have all been cunningly engineered. If you have ever gotten lost in a maze of roulette tables, or wondered why the signs for the exits aren’t more clearly marked, know that this is not by accident. Comfortable seating, endless cocktails, and an absence of windows keep players, and their wallets, glued to the floor.

In recent decades, signature smells have joined the list of carefully curated environmental cues. Modern resort hotels use HVAC-connected scent-diffusion systems to circulate proprietary fragrances through their lobbies and other public areas.

This does more than simply make the air agreeable. It is designed to evoke specific vibes: wealth, opulence, modernity, escape. Guests who walk through the doors receive these signals immediately and subconsciously. Research suggests that our mood improves about 40 percent after exposure to a pleasant smell. For those making a first-time visit, it can feel like stepping into a luxurious oasis. And for returning guests, it’s a bit like coming home again.

Unlike décor, scent operates somewhere below the level of deliberate attention. It slips past the analytical areas of the brain like a heat-seeking missile, taking a direct route to the amygdala, which processes emotion, and the hippocampus, which governs memory formation.

This is why a faint aroma can seem to thrust you back in time, temporarily transporting you to your first baseball game or Sunday dinner at your grandparents’ house. In 1935, psychologist Donald A. Laird published a groundbreaking study on this phenomenon; one survey participant, whose father had worked in a sawmill, noted that a whiff of sawdust produced “a series of vivid pictures so graphic that for the moment I live the scenes again.”

This is also why those souvenir candles are such hot sellers, and why these trademark scents have become key components of each property’s brand library. Because smell is so closely linked to emotion and memory, these pleasant messages can linger. It’s a way of recreating the experience. Simply activate the scent to take an instant olfactory shortcut to that elegant lobby or bustling casino floor, whenever you wish.

Smell as Information

Since long before the dawn of modern humans, smells have been carriers of vital information. Smoke on the breeze signals danger. A sour odor warns us away from spoiled food. Even today, smells carry messages — the hospitality and warmth of an open bakery; the expensive, leathery perfume of a new car’s upholstery. Some of these signals we notice, while others we interpret subconsciously.

And of course, humankind has for millennia deliberately crafted and used smells for various purposes. Thousands of years ago, ancient Egyptians and Mesopotamians dabbed their hair and bodies with aromatic oils. They burned fragrant resins and grasses to appease the gods. In medieval times, people carried perfumed objects, burned incense, and stuffed sweet-smelling herbs in their clothing to ward off miasma, believing that plagues and other deadly diseases were caused by unpleasant vapors.

Today, fragrance remains one of the fastest-growing segments of the fashion and beauty industries, with the market expected to approach $100 billion in the coming decade. We choose perfumes and colognes as carefully as garments or any accessory, and each unique scent signals something about its wearer’s intentions. Smoky, musky aromas may communicate mystery or sexiness; bright, citrusy fragrances can signal vigor and energy.

Hotel marketers have learned that this same olfactory identity can apply to settings and spaces. The aroma becomes as familiar as the logo, a sort of atmospheric branding, carried not by signage but by custom-made molecules that work directly on the emotional centers of our brains.

We tend to think of messages as words, images, and sounds. But some of the most powerful signals are delivered silently and invisibly. We process smells as we read facial expressions — instantly, intuitively, often without being fully aware of them. The Las Vegas lobby scents activate triggers that are ancient, primeval, biological. They tap into what makes us both human and animal.

The fragrance drifting through the air isn’t merely a decoration. It is communication. A greeting. A whispered promise of the excitement and experiences that await beyond the check-in desk.

Just follow your nose.

This week, NASA’s Artemis II mission lifted off, carrying astronauts beyond low-Earth orbit for the first time since 1972. Three Americans and one Canadian, the first crew on the Orion spacecraft (which they have christened Integrity), are on a free-return trajectory around the Moon. They will circle the satellite at a distance of about 4,700 miles from its surface before reentering our atmosphere at 25,000 miles per hour.

This is a test flight to support later Artemis missions, with a plan to return humans to the lunar surface by 2028. That eventual mission will be the first time astronauts have set foot on the Moon since the Apollo missions ended.

Welcome to Volume III of How Humans Communicate. I am thrilled to resume this journey of discovery with you, as humankind embarks on a literal journey into the heavens.

The excitement of this mission has a different texture than Apollo 11.

In July of 1969, the world leaned into flickering televisions and watched grainy images. The Artemis II mission takes place in the digital age. Audio and video arrive with astonishing fidelity. NASA’s YouTube channel features 24/7 streaming coverage, with cameras inside Integrity and affixed to its solar arrays. Last night, I watched a live ABC News interview with the distant astronauts, who answered questions in good spirits as they floated a microphone back and forth.

“With this burn to the moon, we do not leave Earth,” mission specialist Christina Koch remarked. “We choose it.”

The technology has changed. The distance has not. Our ancient neighbor, 240,000 miles away, is the same dusty, cratered rock the Apollo astronauts visited. The risks are real. When the Artemis II crew slips behind the Moon’s far side, conversations must pause. Even in 2026, with communication tools that make 1969 seem like centuries ago, physics gets the final word.

What’s in a Name

In Greek mythology, Apollo and Artemis are twin deities. Apollo, associated with the Sun, prophecy, and healing, gave his name to the program that first brought humans to the Moon’s surface. The Apollo name symbolized both creativity and confident optimism in the darkness of the Cold War.

Artemis, goddess of the Moon, the hunt, and the wilderness, represents something else. She is Apollo’s sister, and the new lunar missions arrive at a more inclusive moment in history. On the Artemis II mission are both the first woman and the first person of color to leave low-Earth orbit. They will travel farther from home than any humans have before. This is an exploratory mission, part of a program that may include the building of a Moon base and an eventual plan to establish a human presence on Mars. What a wonder that would be.

If the Apollo missions represented optimism, then Artemis is all about expansion and endurance. We are not merely reaching the Moon. As the sister follows her twin’s path to the cosmos, we are learning how to build a relationship with the Moon and the wider regions beyond.

A Different Kind of Global Event

When Apollo 11 launched, much of the planet experienced the event in unison. There were fewer channels and media outlets, fewer constant distractions.

Artemis II unfolds against a fragmented landscape. Attention spans are shorter. Priorities have shifted. Some will follow the mission’s progress fervently. Others will encounter short clips and updates on their smartphones.

Many will ignore it altogether. Outer space? Who cares? We have enough to worry about down here — rising gas prices, controversial immigration policies, conflict in the Middle East, Ukraine, and elsewhere. These headlines are important, too, and few are immune from the distraction.

NASA also has a different relationship with publicity than it once did. Rocket launches were much-touted spectacles. But disasters like the loss of the Space Shuttle Challenger in 1986, widely televised in classrooms, spotlighted the risks of such sensationalism. Launching people into the merciless void of space is serious business. NASA’s missions are still highly publicized, but with a different level of gravity, as it were.

I am among those keeping an eye on Apollo’s sister in the sky. I watched the launch as it happened and am following the mission closely each day. Human ingenuity and curiosity should be celebrated. We are explorers. The brave astronauts aboard the Orion spacecraft are trusting their lives to their confined capsule and to the scientists who built it. They are making another “giant leap.” Without their important work, future missions, including ones that may carry humans to the surface of another planet for the first time, will not be possible.

Resuming the Conversation

For more than 50 years, the Moon has existed for humankind in a sort of completed tense. The lunar surface is something from our past, a box we already checked off, as historic as the explorations of Lewis and Clark.

Artemis II is resuming the conversation. Humans are reaching once more across the veil that is the boundary of low-Earth orbit. The Moon is new again. Someday, astronauts may inhabit it. From there, keeping in constant touch with Mission Control, they can help plan our sojourns to other outposts … far beyond our world.

This week’s events represent yet another extraordinary, defining chapter in the history of how humans communicate. Apollo’s sister has taken flight. And I’m excited for what’s next.