The Truth Is Out There

It is late at night, very, very late. Everyone in your dorm is asleep but you, because you’re studying for
tomorrow’s poli sci essay exam on current events. You sit at your desk, textbook in hand, surrounded by
Xeroxes, your notes from class, and copies of Time, Newsweek, The Nation, and The National Review.

Suddenly, you notice that all this paper is no longer sitting on your desk but floating in the air. Shocked,
you realize that you too are airborne, caught in what you’ll later learn is called a “tractor beam,” which
pulls you and your texts out of your window and miles above the earth, toward a gleaming metallic disk.
You are brought aboard the disk and into the presence of your “hosts,” three ear-less, mouth-less aliens.
The room you’re in appears to be some sort of vehicle command center: you hear the hum of machinery;
you see enormous banks of what look like computers; robotic devices race through the air, along the
ground, and across the walls, busily executing their functions.

Your alien hosts appear to be friendly. They do not speak, but you can hear the thoughts they project into
your mind. Well, you don’t “hear” the thoughts, exactly, since there are no words involved. Rather, you
simply understand what they’re thinking in a pure, wordless way, as if they were projecting pure,
unmediated thought. And apparently they can “hear” your thoughts, too, because their pure thoughts
respond to your thoughts as though you were having a nonverbal conversation.

The aliens have brought you aboard their ship because they have a question for you, which you “hear” in
your mind. They have been studying earth technology for decades now. They have figured out how our
cars and planes work, our televisions and radios, our computers, our nuclear reactors; indeed, they
understand perfectly the design of all human technologies — except one: writing. They see that humans
spend a great deal of time scribbling on things, typing on keyboards, staring at bound sets of sheets of
paper. But they are completely perplexed. What is this technology?

You realize immediately why the technology of writing puzzles these technologically advanced alien
explorers. Because they communicate psychically, the aliens would have no need of writing; the books
and magazines and notes that sit on your lap must indeed be an utter mystery to them. But you’re
anxious to make the concept of this technology clear to them, if only to be released from the spacecraft
(after all, you’ve an exam to study for).

So: what do you tell them? (Spend the next 10 minutes composing your response)