Hello, World

Thousands of years ago, primitive man left colorful handprints on some cave walls in Lascaux, France. Hey, they seemed to say. I was here. The instinct to reach out and communicate with strangers unconnected by place and time reflects a human truth about the need for companionship in sentience. The first computer program any budding computer scientist learns to write greets mankind: hello, world. Advances in science and communications have caused the amount of such communication, and the richness of information that it conveys about the sender to increase dramatically.