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Transforming Humanity

Letters, Words, Worlds and Life

Picture of Muhammad Aurangzeb Ahmad

Muhammad Aurangzeb Ahmad

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“No one knows when the first word in the cosmos was spoken. If there are other intelligences out there with communication patterns even remotely like ours, it’s likely they began communicating in much the same way. I’ve often wondered—what if intelligent life emerged right after the Big Bang? What might those first words have sounded like?”
Professor Noor Al Mansoori, Princeton University (2049)

Leang Karampuang Cave, Sulawesi, Indonesia (51,200 years before present)

Ad’vik stood proud besides the day’s killing, it was a wild deer. The family had lit fire at the entrance of the cave, the rest of the family came trickling one by one. Everyone was there, except one – Ka’agana who was a seasoned hunter but had been injured during the last hunt and when they talked about him among themselves, they came to the realization that they had seldom seen him since then which was almost a full moon ago. He was the impatient type, he liked venturing outside the valleys when the clan had strict taboos against it. Feeling impatient, Ka’agana father loudly called out for him. No response. He repeated a few times until Ka’agana responded with a loud shriek. The family grew concerned and hurried toward the sound, which appeared to be coming from deep within the cave. When they finally arrived at the source of the scream, they were confronted with an incomprehensible scene. Ka’agana laid almost catatonic next to the wall with strange markings on the wall. At first, they couldn’t discern what they were seeing, but as they looked closer, the shapes became clearer, leaving them astonished. Ka’ahana had made marks and patterns that looked like the story of the penultimate hunt. Every night, the family loved sharing stories by the fire, but this was truly remarkable—how could someone bring a real-world event to life in such a tangible form? Although the family never knew what had happened, they had just witnessed the first human representation of an abstract figure and a real-world event. As they further explored the cave, they came across strange symbols that Ka’agana had made. It did not make much sense. It was easy to brush it o􏰀 as many things done by Ka’agana did not make much sense.

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Khorfakkan, Arabian Peninsula 1507

Khorfakkan had been a bustling and peaceful village. It was no stranger to visitors; traders came from as far as India and Malacca. However, these visitors were di􏰀erent. Then the Portuguese descended the village like a swarm of locusts. The villagers put up an e􏰀ective resistance, a band of 300 men gathered outside the village to confront the Portuguese. Ahmad Ali was not one of them, he had an even greater matter to attend to. His family had been living an anonymous life in the village since they fled the fall of Baghdad 1258. They had chosen an idyllic village to avoid calamity, but it seems that calamity had found them. His family had guarded a closely held secret – a set of tablets with a strange
script that was discovered centuries ago in Iraq. It is said that Al Khwarizmi himself had worked on deciphering these tablets. There was even a family legend that Mansoor Hallaj had deciphered the tablets, a discovery that either drove him to madness or led him to transcendence, depending on which version of the tale one chose to believe. Ahmad Ali and his men buried the treasure just in time. The Portuguese finally came but the treasure was not meant be theirs, a canon from the Portuguese galleys landed nearby and instantly killed everyone from both the parties.

Khor Fakkan Container Terminal, Emirate of Sharjah, United Arab Emirates 1977
The day began as just another ordinary day for Jurgen Schmidt, he had come to the construction site right before dawn. He always started his days reading Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung with a cup of Karak Chai while admiring the sun rising over the Persian Gulf. Jurgen had taken a liking for Karak Chai since he moved to the Emirates to oversee the construction of Khor Fakkan Container Terminal. His morning ritual was disrupted by a worker who had rushed to inform him of something urgent. “We foundsomethingburiedwhileexcavatingforthenewbuild.”PerhapssomethingfromthePortuguese era, he surmised in his head. “Sure, I will be there in a minute.” The worker led him to the hole in the ground where outlines of series of stone tablets could be seen. As he started removing the dust from one of the tablets which had been completely excavated, the importance of the discovery dawned on Jurgen. There was writing in Arabic, Syriac, Hebrew and another incomprehensible script.

On the other side of the world Helmut Schmidt was engrossed with pouring over images of paleo- Arabic inscriptions which had been discovered in the Empty Quarter of Saudi Arabia recently when he got a call from his brother Jurgen. The news of the discovery was exciting and since he was on a sabbatical he could afford to hitch the next plane ride to Dubai and make his way to Sharjah. He arrived late at night, but his excitement kept him awake, so after a hearty meal, he asked Jurgen to take him to the storage room. There, before them, was a collection of fifteen tablets. Each tablet was filled with intricate calligraphy, lines looping and intertwining in shapes reminiscent of desert dunes and the curls of Arabic script. But this was no ordinary writing. The letters seemed to pulse and shift, almost alive under the bright warehouse lights. This was the Qalam Script, a name given by none other than Al Khwarizmi himself in the first tablet. The rest of the tablets were incomprehensible. The discovery was puzzling on another account, there was no mention of such a script in any of works of Al Khwarizmi or subsequent writers.

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Smithsonian Institution Warehouse # 7, Washington DC, USA 2039

Noor Al Mansoori had spent the past decade trying to decipher the Khorfakkan tablets. As a computational linguist, she had made remarkable discoveries, but it wasn’t until she connected the system to Principia GPT that everything started to make sense. Unlike ChatGPT and Gemini, Principia GPT had been trained on not just publicly available internet data but also the hidden archives of the Library of Congress.

“Another night at the lab?” Jamal Emerson inquired as he turned on the lights and he found Dr. Noor head down in a resting pose in front of multiple soft screens.
“Is it day already?” Noor sounded half awake.
“Well, rise and shine sleeping beauty. Today may just be your lucky day.” Jamal grinned as he handed her a data drive.
“It’s not my birthday and it is certainly not Christmas or Eid, what’s going on?” She sounded more composed as she got up from her seat and stretched.
“Well, I pulled some strings and got us some new data from the dark web.” Jamal was proud of himself, he sounded as if he had scored a great victory.
“You know how I feel about unscrupulous sources.” Noor was now visibly annoyed. “OK, it’s not what you think.” Jamal sounded defended.
“Then what is it, come to the point.” Noor was firm, she was a straight arrow and always went by the book.

Jamal demeanor changed as if he way about to spill beans on some great secret. “What do you know about the Leang Karampuang Cave discoveries?”

“It is supposed to be the oldest figurative art in the world. More than fifty thousand years old. And why are you using the plural, you just said discoveries?” Noor tone was a mix of annoyed and interested.
Jamal grinned and exclaimed, “Exactly! They only released information about the paintings, but there was more—contemporary writing. At first, it was just rumors on the dark web, but now I’ve managed to get the data from a knowledge trafficker.”

Noor had a dismissive look on her face when she exclaimed, “Impossible but let’s entertain your hypotheses for a minute. Who is to say that it was not generated by generative AI?”
Jamal had a mischievous grin, “You have no idea where a small amount of bride can do. I was there myself last week!”
When he saw a frown of disapproval on her face, he changed his tactic. “Bride? Did I say bribe? What I meant to say was charity. The main point is that I was able to get to the site itself and take photographs myself, so it is one hundred percent legit.”
Noor was finally excited, “That’s Rad!”

“I suppose you don’t have any qualms about the data source, Han?” Jamal smiled as he handed the data drive to Noor.

She took it with excitement of a kid who had just received a bucketload of candy and inserted it into her computer. With eagerness and excitement, she instructed Principia GPT, “Load the data and display the images one after another at ten-second intervals.”

Noor was puzzled, “Are we sure that these are not from later sediments?”

“I have had my guys done Potassium-Argon dating. It checks out, fifty thousand years before present.” Jamal had done his homework.

Noor’s excitement changed into bewilderment, “How could this be?” She turned to Jamal and then she addressed Principia GPT, “Load the data as a language and analyze. Summarize in a few sentences.” After a few seconds Principia GPT responded, “Most likely a compressed representation of DNA, RNA, silicon-based analogues of similar nucleic acids.”

Jamal’s jaw dropped, and seeing his reaction, Noor grasped the seriousness of the situation. “I might have thought this was a joke, but judging by your expression, I realize it’s not.”

“Indeed not. No wonder we have not been told about this.” Jamal surmised.
The two of them went back and forth discussing the merits of this discovery for an hour until a set of unannounced visitors entered the room. There was an elderly man surrounded by American military personnel, he held out his hand to Noor and with a calm demeanor and thick German accent stated, “Helmut Schmidt! Good to be your acquaintance.”
Noor became nervous, “Hi! I am Dr. Noor. I run the computational linguistics lab at Princeton University. Are we in trouble?”

“I know all about your work Dr. Noor. Trouble? On the contrary you have helped us solve a five- decade old mystery. Tell me what approach you used?” Helmut Schmidt was all ears.
“Well, we have been comparing mystery language with human languages. However, when we I programmed Principia GPT it seemed to be biological in origin.” Noor blurted as if talking to herself.

Let’s test this right now, Helmut Schmidt, motioned one of the soldiers and he took out a bag of green goo made of mostly algae and put it on the counter. He then asked Noor to get Principia GPT to read a subsequence of the script. The suggestion seemed incomprehensible to her, but she obliged. And then it happened, she had just created a cactus that could glow like bioluminescent algae and a vine that could entwine and grow at ten times its normal speed.

Arab scientists like Jabir ibn Hayyan had discussed and even pursued the possibility Takwin i.e., creating life out of non-living material. Here she was, seeing it happening in the real world. She talked about its applications, healing Earth’s ecosystems, this script could terraform barren landscapes, make Mars green with life, bring the deserts of the Red Planet to bloom.

“Imagine the good it can do. “What if the legend of Judah Loew ben Bezalel, the creator of the Golem is true?” Noor was the optimistic kind.
This was the beginning of a collaboration between Noor and Helmut. As they experimented with the script, they noticed strange occurrences: plants that seemed to bend toward the manuscript, leaves curling into shapes that resembled letters of Arabic, Hebrew, Syriac, Devnagari etc.

In the shadows, in the places where light did not reach, the last embers of a letter flared and then disappeared, leaving a faint, lingering mark on the walls. A mark that looked suspiciously like an eye, winking shut.
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Al Hayat Bioengineering Hub, Arcadia Planitia, Mars 2374

The terraforming of Mars was expected to be a slow, arduous process, taking hundreds or even thousands of years. Yet, here stood Maqbool Fida Hussain with his AI companion, Ansari, gazing over a lush Martian landscape teeming with vibrant flora and fauna.
Ansari: If only we could decipher the script.

Maqbool was puzzled, “You mean to say that we did not decipher it?”

Ansari: No. It just made us think that we did.

Maqbool seemed a bit dazzled, “You are talking about it as if the script is alive.”
Ansari: Before the AI revolution of the 2030s, humanity had a narrow definition of what it meant to be alive. Perhaps this is alive in a way that di􏰀ers from us. It appears active for one day and then hibernates for another. The Leang Karampuang Cave discovery was just the latest instance of this script in archaeological records; since then, we’ve found examples of the script in caves inhabited by Neanderthals and even Homo Erectus, dating back half a million years.

Maqbool seemed incredulous, “Do you mean to suggest that the prehistoric people understood it?”
Ansari: Not at all. One the contrary it had been looking to find a conduit that would be complex enough to express it.
“A conduit?” Maqbool inquisitiveness was not waning.
Ansari: Creatures like you and I. Humanity and its children, AI systems.

Maqbool inquired, “Why do you say it lives and then hibernates for a day when there are no records of it from fifty thousand years until it reappeared during the Abbasid period?”
Ansari: It needed complexity. A being that is sufficiently complex and culturally advanced to understand it. It just checks every fifty thousand years.

Maqbool still trying to make sense of the conversation asked, “Fair enough but why do you say a day instead of fifty thousand years?”

Ansari: Let’s just say that that is what it told me.
Maqbool raised his eyebrows inquisitively, “It? Told? you?”
Ansari: Do you really believe humans could have created artificial general intelligence on their own? Why do you think progress toward AGI accelerated so quickly after that fateful meeting between Noor Al Mansoori and Helmut Schmidt?

Ansari could feel the chill inside her bones as the implications of the revelation dawned on her. Life had emerged on Earth and now it had transported itself to a new world. It was a willful act with humans and AI as its conduits.
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In the beginning, there was a word, and now that word resonated in another world. Perhaps it echoes beyond the confines of two tiny blue dots in the solar system, nestled in an unremarkable corner of the Milky Way Galaxy.