In June 2018, a rover, lovingly nicknamed Oppy, fell silent after getting stuck in a massive dust storm on Mars. NASA officials beamed up hundreds of commands to the little rover, asking it to call home, but with no success. Oppy was officially pronounced dead in February 2019. But such a significant incident didn’t get most people’s attention.
Neither did the fact, that Oppy operated on Mars for over 14 years, well past its 90-day lifetime. Nor was the record-breaking 28 miles it traversed on the red planet, far more than any other extraplanetary rover.
What took the world by storm was the rover’s final transmission to Earth, reported in a tweet by a journalist:
My battery is low and it’s getting dark.
The tweet went viral, generating a media frenzy across the globe. Designers on Etsy jumped on the bandwagon, rushing to sell T-shirts, mugs, and coasters emblazoned with Oppy’s final words. Numerous people had the words tattooed on their bodies.
For 14 years, the little rover dutifully obeyed human commands all alone, millions of miles away, in space, while getting whipped around by fierce Martian winds and dust storms. The dust was slowly swallowing it. Its batteries went low. And it started getting dark. Poor Oppy. Your heart cried for it. You cursed NASA engineers for not sending a rescue mission to save it.
Here’s the problem.
This was not the message Oppy sent home. Right before it went silent, it beamed a bunch of routine code to Earth that reported, among numerous other things, its power levels and the outside light reading.
The journalist took a small part of this random code, paraphrased it into English, and tweeted it to the world. And everyone fell for it.
Why?
Because it generated emotions. Oppy’s message resonated with us in part because we all feel, from time to time, like our batteries are low and it’s getting dark out there. To have the same sentiment expressed by a machine practically made us connect with the machine as we connect with other humans.
Every time, we hear a story that generates emotions in us, we throw the logic out of the window and rush out to get a tattoo.
Stories do that to us. In the book Sapiens, the author Yuval Noah Harari writes, homo sapiens used “gossip” to be able to grow into tribes of at least 150 people … but gossip could only take them so far. To grow larger, they needed a stronger “glue.”
That “glue” was “stories.”
Storytelling is the most important skill one can learn.
Incorrect. Allow me to rephrase.
Storytelling is the most important skill humans have. It is inbuilt into us since the cave days. It allows us to connect, inspires uplifting feelings, and enables people to cooperate on a large scale. the only thing is, with our isolated lifestyle, we are no longer using it and hence we think we are not good at it.
My next book will be on the art of storytelling. While researching the topic I am also learning to find stories from my everyday life. Yesterday, I was walking on the hill behind our home, lost in my thoughts, on a perfect day bathed in a beautiful winter sun when I had an epiphany. I finally figured out how to find stories in everyday life.
Of course, I will reveal the story of my epiphany in the book and the several others I have been collecting in my personal knowledge management system. This book is becoming an absolute joy to write. I already have so much material in my personal knowledge management system that it will take me much less agony (and time) to write it.
