I think that the greatest event for mankind to ever experience would be extraterrestrial life—to meet life from elsewhere. I think that would question everything that we hold to be true about ourselves and our particular place in the universe. In that respect, I think this is a unique scenario by which to explore something about human understanding and human self-perception and also, of course, ideally create a kind of a mirror. That’s what I’ve been trying to do with The Visit.

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I’m interested in using this outside perspective of a creature coming from elsewhere, outside of human understanding, outside of human self-evidence about everything in this world that we inhabit. I assume that a kind of a task force would be formed in such an event—what sort of things would they be asking about? What would they be explaining about human beings? What’s important to understand about human beings? These are the things that I’m interested in. You can also say that I’m trying to create a kind of philosophical launch within the audience, in terms of these questions.

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And the question is—this is something that I was very interested in exploring with the experts—to which extent are we able to perceive something that is not like ourselves? How can we see something that is fundamentally different? And this is also of course what is being discussed in terms of lifeforms and so on. But how do we actually detect life that’s not like life on earth? With it comes other minds, other feelings, other emotions, other types of memory, other perceptual faculties, it’s just exponentially more difficult. But, of course, there is also something infinitely wondrous about this. What if somebody comes here and has a completely different experience of reality and we could learn something from that and could of course expand our own world?

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I think this is connected to something deeply human and perhaps the whole thing why we do look to the stars and ponder if there is life out there. Because there is a very interesting longing toward space and what’s out there. I think it has to do with this hope or idea or longing towards being seen by something other. By being seen, also by something superior, you actually gain existence, because you’re recognized as something.I think if somebody came here and left again without a word, more or less, without any [idea of] why they [came] and so on, I think, yes, that would plunge us into a collective depression, because we would get the idea that we were nothing. We weren’t worth wasting more time on. It was just like they just stopped by on the road and there was nothing to see and then they just drove on in a way. That would give us a kind of inferiority complex, which we might already have.

Let the record state that my mission statement has long included  “positioning myself on the Rolodex of Humanity, to be called upon in the event of First Contact” 🙂

Dark Mystic Astrobiology Team, ASSEMBLE!