Symbols are the building blocks of thoughts and understanding. Symbols can be written script, images, sounds, even smells, taste, things which trigger our senses and give us information. A collection of symbols is language. Languages like English, Telugu, Japanese, Chinese, etc, and also languages like Math, music, physics, etc. Every language has their own collection of symbols that is used to model the world and communicate information. Some symbols are more accurate than others for modeling and communication.

Let's take English as an example. The base symbols are the alphabet, then build higher order symbols called words. The words can refer to things in the world like objects, animals, etc and concepts, phenomena, etc like birth, death, love, fear, consciousness, intelligence, time, constellations, eclipses, etc, and stories, laws, symmetry, proof, etc. to communicate increasingly complex and dense pieces of information. Symbols are also images, there are flags, logos, street signs, etc which are all symbols that communicate information that's universally understood. Symbols can also be sounds like a school bell, fire alarms, etc. Symbols can be smells like the smell of cooking or the smell of waste. There are symbols that trigger your other senses and generate feelings, like fear, happiness, sadness, etc. Some symbols are personal and have meaning and emotions that are specific to an individual or a community and some are universal and can be understood the same by all.

When communities were small, it was easier to communicate with each other with a shared set of symbols which were understood the same by all and passed on over generations. Now with the internet and global commerce, we are communicating with people all around the world. While English has become the de-facto language of global communication, it is not yet universally understood. This causes misunderstandings, misinterpretations and conflict because the symbols between various communities and cultures do not translate across with full fidelity. It is hard to explain the meaning and emotion behind the various symbols from one language to another, since we don't always share the same history, we grew up in different circumstances and give different meanings to symbols like good, bad, morality, justice, etc. We need a set of symbols anchored on a shared understanding of the history of the world. We are getting there with Math, Physics, Computing, etc for the symbols and also working on getting past the scarcity driven history of the world, so we can start to educate and build a future generation that has a strong foundation of symbols to build an exciting future for themselves.