I thought hawkeye pressed glass too. But only that first time. In the explosion scene where one of them was tapping the glass, only she touched it. IIRC.
Did I miss how the explosion got Abbot, or did they just do a shitty job of cutting? Cause my memory is that the hoomans were actually closer to the explosions than the heptapods.
it didn't exactly show it but I assume that the explosion cracked their glass wall thing which let in our atmosphere and that's what lead to his death. The other one was further away and escaped I guess. They made a big deal earlier about how the atmospheres were very different and how long it took for them to filter it so that the humans could enter the chamber, that was the main limiter on how often and how long they could go up in to the ship and talk to them.
Then again, later when she goes up alone they send a pod to pick her up and she's just chilling with them in their room, not in the original room with the wall with the filtered atmosphere. Maybe our atmosphere was poisonous to them but there's didn't hurt us. He says that Abott is "Death Process" which could mean he's dead or maybe that he's in the process of dying, either wounds from the explosion or poisoned by our air.
It was all based on learning the language. Some hyper extension of Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis (
Linguistic relativity - Wikipedia) and in the short story you get more of the physics / science and combining linguistics with the Principle of Least Action. But in the movie Renner only makes a passing comment about them not understanding algebra.
^ this is the philosophical mental masturbation I was referring to. I was too lazy to find the original quote thanks for reposting so i can mock it.
"Imagine if we lived in a world where language was the bottleneck to faster than light travel"
"but it's not, physics is"
"but what if it was language? What if the concepts of tenses in language, or accents, to denote past and future tense, is what is limiting our ability to perceive time differently and therefore achieve greatness?"
"you do realize that on planet earth there's several dozen languages which lack either a past or future tense? Like idk, finnish? or Japanese? There's also quite a few that lack both. Like all of the native tribal languages and dialects of the america's pre-colonization? Basically everyone on earth who wasn't influenced by greco-roman latin based culture? You think if language enabled us to see our future that the Aztecs woulda fared a bit better against the conquistadors? Think the seminoles woulda been lining up for those blankets the settlers were handing out?"
"ok but let's pretend this is a real thing and create some pseudo-science around it to tell a story"
