In our previous episode, we talked about living under the ancient curse of the Tower of Babel.

So the curse of Babel is the existential condition in which we live every day.

We use language to communicate, but we cannot rely on it to make ourselves understood.

We can't always rely on it because...

Well, we have 7,000 languages.

7,000 languages.

We learned about the many costs associated with this linguistic diversity, financial costs, psychic costs, even war.

So how many people died in the war, which in fact easily could have been avoided?

And we learned that linguistic diversity has plenty of benefits, too.

There certainly claims about types of thinking that become very hard without language, or become unlikely without language.

Those are some of the things we know about language here on Earth 1.0, but today's episode is part of our Earth 2.0 series,

in which we imagine we could reboot the planet and do some optimizing, or at least some tidying up.

So if we were starting over...

If we were to start from the beginning...

If we were to start from the beginning...

All the countries in the US communicate...

What would be the best way for everyone on Earth...

to be able to communicate with one another?

From WNYC Studios, this is Frekenomics Radio, the podcast that explores the hidden side of everything.

The second program is called...

The first program is called...

In the future, human to human communication may be so different that it will render our mission today moot.

...