Reading and letters, easily.

Why? A few things.

One, the gigantic variety of letter shapes that are totally intelligible if you know them. Look at Omniglot [https://www.omniglot.com/writing/index.htm] for a moment. (Another giant collection can be found at Wikipedia's list of writing system and Google's collection of Noto fonts at https://fonts.google.com/noto/fonts] You telling me "ⵜⵉⴼⵉⵏⴰⵖ", " ތާނަ", "მხედრული", "မြန်မာ ", "සිංහල", "தமிழ்", "മനഷയ", "ಎಲಮನ", "ⰂⰲⰠⱐ" "འགབམ", "ᬅᬓ᭄ᬱ", and more are all intelligible things to people who can read it?

Two, and more importantly, humans are exquisitely suited to read. Here's an experiment that you can do on yourself. Give someone some colored pencils and ask them to write color words (eg orange, black, yellow). The catch is, they can't match up - orange can't be written with the orange pencil, for instance. Now have them hand it to you. Try to say the names of the colors. It's hard, right? Because your brain *reads faster than it processes colors*. This is called the Stroop test. [Google Scholar link: https://scholar.google.com/scholar?cluster=15913436778695240337&hl=en&as_sdt=0,39. Yeah, it's been cited by 26,610+ people - more if you count 'downstream' citations, ie papers citing papers that cite Stroop, one assumes]. You can't turn off your reading while still being able to see. You can't stop reading. Humans are perfectly made for reading. We have fine-grained control of our hands, allowing us to produce letterforms. Our visual resolution is good. And we can craft a writing system that plays to our needs. If we focused on scents, maybe we'd communicate via scratch-and-sniff.

But what makes reading EVEN COOLER is that WE NEED TO BE TAUGHT. This thing that, once learned, we CANNOT TURN OFF without closing our eyes, that we process FASTER THAN COLORS, is not inherently wired in our brains. People don't need to know how to read. Most of our species' time was spent with no reading. This thing we are astoundingly good at, that you would thing we would be evolutionarily hardwired to do, like breathing, given how good we are -- WE SPENT MOST OF OUR TIME NOT KNOWING HOW TO DO. We're NOT hardwired to read and write. This was, seemingly, an *ACCIDENTAL BYPRODUCT*.

ALSO, writing seems like a genuinely new innovation by humans. Language is pretty precedented in animals. Humans might be extreme, but the building blocks are there. But we seem to have created writing. We didn't expand on something other animals did. We MADE writing.

And, you know, reading lets us read stuff from languages no one has spoken in thousands of years. And lets mass collaboration occur. And...But the idea that this thing, that we weren't made to do, didn't do for most of our life, need to be taught, we're so good at that we process it faster than colors, which we don't need to be taught, and cannot turn it off without closing our eyes is *CRAZY*. We seem perfectly suited for writing and reading. (Makes you wonder what other things we would be so seemingly perfectly suited for we haven't discovered or created yet. There's so much space for innovation, there are probably things as perfectly suited for us as reading no one's figured out yet.)

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Evagating Beewolf (she/they)

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I have a photo of the Andromeda galaxy. In it, two other galaxies are prominent. Billions of stars, billions of planets, possibly trillions or quadrillions of life forms. Maybe some of them have an equivalent of the internet, even of BP - but first, they'll have to master fire, then electricity, and that may have to happen by accident. Even at warp 9.9, we'll never get to meet them.

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Apatheist Account2

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