Codename Empath

Language, Society, and Change

In the future, there will be a library, an archive of all human mathematics, history, science, technology, and art. And there will be a society of people sworn to protect that data. There will be antibiotics, vaccines, every medical process known to humanity, each and every college course in every college. As calamity approaches inevitability, we reject a species-reset to the middle ages.

And what we have today is worth defending. But the knowledge will only be as safe as the society defending it. So that society of archivists will need to be as robust as ethically possible. An immortal society for the immortal written history of humankind.

Recorded history, as far as we know today, spans 5000 years. And the only constant since we humans began writing has been change. And that overwhelming torrent of change, that riptide always drags language with it. So one thing is virtually guaranteed: the immortal society won’t just speak today’s languages.

What happens when the immortal society tries to create a language for everyone, a truly empathetic language, something dynamic enough and robust enough to last thousands of years? A language to liberate us from the limitations of our viewpoints in the present? How can we truly transcend our own perspectives when we don’t even know what viewpoints are holding us back?