It is one of the oldest stories in the world. Humans, who once all spoke the same language and could all understand each other, decided to build a tower so high that it would reach Heaven. God saw what they were doing and did not like it. God concluded that so long as everyone could understand the speech of everyone else, there would be trouble. So God made it so that all races and nations spoke different languages. As soon as people were unable to understand each other, work on the Tower of Babel could not continue.

What started me on this train of thought was a meeting I attended last week at the Johnson Space Center, where workers have a special interest in devices able to ascend to and operate in an environment close to the old location of Heaven. I had been asked to give a talk on the long-term difficulties and prospects for space exploration and development. This is, of course, a good deal easier than the real near-term problems, which are beset with cost overruns and personnel ceilings. I was permitted an Olympian viewpoint, where events a hundred years from now are more relevant than next year's budget cut.

My talk was on the first morning. It went fine, and I had lots of questions. They seemed to show that people understood what I was getting at.

My doubts began during the afternoon specialist sessions, which focused on human factors affecting the design and operation of the International Space Station. Some of those sessions, for me, were not fine at all. After one of the papers, the general organizer of the meeting asked what I had thought of it. He is a personal friend, so I could be honest. I said, "Brian, I understood every word of that presentation." This was a true statement. I went on, "But I have not the slightest idea what he was talking about."

He frowned. "What was the problem?"

"The things that weren't words. On just about every visual aid and in every sentence, the speaker referred to a `PFS.' I never heard of a PFS, and I still don't know what it is. What is it?"

This was where I really began to worry. Brian said, "Well, it could stand for a bunch of different things. I was outside during that particular paper, arranging transportation for the tour of the center. I would have to see the context of the talk before I could tell you what PFS stands for."

"But then you could?"

"Then maybe I could."

Or maybe, by implication, he couldn't.

I thought back to the morning session. Had people actually understood my speech, or had they merely been nodding out of politeness? The speaker just before me was Shannon Lucid, who spent six months in orbit aboard the Mir space station. She gave a highly entertaining talk, but she mentioned among other things that some of the buttons and switches, which if activated on Mir would perform totally different and unrelated functions, were labeled using identical code letters. Press the XYZ button (I'm making up the codes) and you opened the hatch to space. Press the other button labeled XYZ, and the fire alarm bell rang.

The Tower of Babel. We have been hard at work building it for the past few hundred years. I am not thinking of the fact that humans speak many different languages, Russian and English and Chinese and French and Spanish and Japanese. Nor am I referring to the fact that a few hundred years ago every European with a pretension to an education could read Latin. What worry me are the new languages, unique to an area of work - any area, engineering and astronomy and medicine and law and navigation.

If this were a problem that applied only in space, we could live with it. But the specialization of language occurs everywhere. A friend of mine went to see his doctor, complaining of back stiffness and back pains. The physician, after the usual raft of tests, said. "You have ankylosing spondylitis."

My friend said, "I see. Is that bad or good?"

Actually, it's somewhere in between. It's a form of arthritis that affects the mobility of the vertebrae. It may over the years burn itself out, or it may cause him to stoop excessively. Provided you happen to speak medicine, the meaning is perfectly clear. But if your chosen language happens to be mathematics, or architecture, or sanitary engineering (my friend's was computer software), then speeches in medicine give you trouble.

Specialist languages become more and more common, and they are diverging. Doctors, lawyers, teachers, physicists, plumbers, electricians, chemists, microbiologists, botanists, and for all I know, deep-sea divers, are all helping to build the Tower of Babel. Everyone has a special trade lingo, a large segment of which is convenient abbreviations, not intelligible by putting together their separate syllables because they have no syllables. Part of language divergence may be no more than job protection, the modern equivalent of the old-time guilds. "You need a J-2 swivel hinge with a screw-neck bias to seal that leak." Speak my secret language, or I will know for certain that you are an outsider (and I can charge you accordingly).

Is there an answer, as we more and more occupy our sealed compartments, employ our cryptic acronyms, and assign our own specialized meanings to common words?

I would like to think that there is. Our salvation will come via an improbable source: the Internet. As more and more of us go to the worldwide web for information, the need to distinguish the use of a single word with different meanings, or to identify different words with the same meaning, increases. How can a search engine operate effectively unless all possible equivalents of a word are included? How can a search engine operate until different meanings of the same word are recognized? Computers are ideal instruments to create vast tables of equivalencies of words in any language, then recognize by context which possible meaning of a word is the appropriate one. I claim that this is bound to happen, because there is a strong commercial interest to push it along.

What does "occult" mean to you? Today, the meaning depends whether you are an astronomer, a physician, or a necromancer. Fifty years from now computers will resolve this sort of ambiguity. And none of us will be confused by anything ever again. Right?

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