Four essay 2 page for each

Arrival Vocabulary:

1. Time: the indefinite continued progress of existence and events that occur in apparently irreversible succession from the past through the present to the future.

2. Future: the time or a period of time following the moment of speaking or writing.

3. Past: he time or a period of time before the moment of speaking or writing.

4. Present: existing or occurring now.

5. Orthography: a set of conventions for writing a language.

6. Dream: A series of images, ideas, emotions, and sensations occurring involuntarily in the mind during certain stages of sleep.

7. Metaphor: a figure of speech in which a term or phrase is applied to something to which it is not literally applicable in order to suggest a resemblance

8. Immutable: unchanging over time or unable to be changed.

9. Indeterminate: not able to be stated or described in an exact way

10. Ambivalence: a state of having simultaneous conflicting reactions, beliefs, or feelings towards some object.

11. Quantum Mechanics: the branch of mechanics that deals with the mathematical description of the motion and interaction of subatomic particles, incorporating the concepts of quantization of energy, wave-particle duality, the uncertainty principle, and the correspondence principle.

12. Decoherence: the process by which a quantum system interacts with its environment in such a way that no interference between states of the system can be observed.

13. Superposition: the net response at a given place and time caused by two or more stimuli is the sum of the responses that would have been caused by each stimulus individually.

14. Synergy: the interaction or cooperation of two or more organizations, substances, or other agents to produce a combined effect greater than the sum of their separate effects.

15. Uncertainty Principle: a statement in quantum mechanics formulated by Werner Heisenberg, that it is impossible to measure two properties of a quantum object, such as it’s position and momentum simultaneously with infinite precision.

16. Eigenstates: Because of the uncertainty principle, statements about both the position and momentum of particles can only assign a probability that the position or momentum will have some numerical value.

17. Entangled: To cause (the quantum states of two or more objects) to become correlated in such a way that they remain correlated, even though the objects are separated spatially.

Essay Prompts Arrival:

1) With all the Internet technology saturating Earth, why don’t the Heptapods buy smart phones and use Google decryption software to communicate with us? A lot of human culture has concepts like past, present, and future, they could pick up on our relationship with time with not so great effort on their part.

2) Why do they look like squids? No offense, but are we to imagine them living underwater? Do they want to come and inhabit our oceans? Does that explain why they want our help?

3) Why do they send two emissaries rather than a team? Do Abbot and Costello have genders that match their names? What if they’re both female?

4) What exactly is going to happen in three thousand years? Why are they confident that we could help them? Do we have the option of declining their invitation to help? What happens if we say “No?”

5) How do flash forwards function in the film? Why don’t we ever see Louise’s mother helping her take care of Hannah?

6) In the first timeline visualized in the flash forward, Ian abandons his family after being told about Hannah’s cancer, why would he do such a terrible thing? Is it better that Louise keeps that information from him the second time around? Doesn’t he have the right to know and make an informed consent?

7) If you were put in charge of the first contact committee, what type of team would you assemble? Would you include yourself? What about me?

8) Where do the Heptapods come from? The initial assumption is that they come from our universe, but that’s not entirely clear; what if they come from another Universe with different physical laws? How might the concept of a multi-verse help explain their unique relationship to time?

9) What do you think might actually happen if a first contact scenario such as that outlined in the film happened tomorrow? What would be the response of the Trump administration?

10) In all the excitement and confusion about first contact with an alien species, who cares if Louise has a baby? Not to be too cruel about it, but that story seems wedged into a significantly larger issue like a distraction.