Blog

Amongst all the things that were written in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and have proven to be a scarily accurate prediction of our technological world, the Babel Fish was one that didn’t take me by surprise but was one that I hadn’t thought related to our present world straight away. Now, upon re-reading what a Babel Fish was, and reading about Moore’s Law (and what transistors are…), I can say with confidence that we are living in a time where we have a modern execution of a Babel fish from the mind of Douglas Adams—and is something that is affected by Moore’s Law.

The Babel Fish, according to the H2G2 entry (the in-lore guide) in chapter 6, is a small, yellow fish that processes different languages that are spoken, and allows you to understand what is being said because it translates the language for you in real-time (of course, this is once you have let it wiggle inside your ear…). The in-lore explanation is that it nourishes itself with the brainwaves of others around you, and then excretes a “telepathic matrix” into the user’s mind so that it can decode the languages spoken to you and help you understand what is being said. Thankfully, we don’t have anything that requires wiggling inside your ear to decode and understand other languages. Of course, it’s not as easy as having instantaneous reception, but we do have different apps and websites that allow us to learn a new language without having to take a class in a classroom to do so. We also have translating apps as well to instantly translate something from one language to another; however, from personal experience, those translator apps do not do a very good job at translating it properly, which can create conflict and misunderstandings between people who speak different languages; this also takes away being able to retain the information that comes with leaning a new language by being taught the actual words and sentence structures their meanings in each language. But these are things that we have nowadays that are equivalent to a Bable Fish found in H2G2. As content creators and students learning about multiple ways to communicate through media (hence the name multimedia communications), it’s our job to relay information to others in any form that we can. Of course, it is difficult to write things in other languages, especially if we only speak one language and can’t afford a translator to translate out media for us; but those types of things are wonderful to have, especially if we want to expand who our audience is and what language they are able to understand and speak.

Moore’s Law, which was a theory written by Intel’s co-founder Gordon Moore, is the idea that the structure of a chip will get smaller and smaller every two years while transistors (which are semiconductors that are the basic building blocks for electronics) double in size within that same time. This means that they can minimize the cost of making chips, because they are making them smaller, while being able to input more transistors within them to make electronics function more efficiently. Being able to make technology more efficient and making them cost less means that they can produce more of them, which means that more people are able to use them. There has been talk about the “end” of Moore’s Law, saying that, at some point, we will no longer be able to make applications smaller since there will eventually be nothing to build upon that. So far, as of right now, we have many devices that are small and portable, and easy to take around with us if we need to work on something in a different location (aka, smart phones, and laptops). While I do not think that there is a better way to make these types of things smaller and execute well (look at the previous invention Google Glass, and now Apple Vision), I think that there will potentially be new and better ways to make things more portable and efficient to our needs.