>>5832280OTHRIGEN SCIENTIFIC
Dr ELIZABETH MARLOWE
-Dhul Qarnayn, Interstellar Investor Symposium
>>5833451>Deliver speech:>Xenoarchaeology And The Passion Economy: The Future Of Interstellar GrowthAfter your hidden corporate bathroom toilet nervous breakdown, you are not certain you know the meaning or purpose of anything anymore... yet it led to some unexpected good fortune. First of all, you humiliated the annoying reporter Madison Mirage - that was almost worth the price of a panic attack on its own! - but secondly, you learnt that there is something mysterious occurring in Lynx Sector that involves Vertigo Pact / Vandenberg Aerospace and the fearsome matriarch Josephine Vandenberg herself.
Yet it would be far too suspicious if you were to deviate from your ordinary routine... if you leapt straight in and tried to spy or eavesdrop further upon Josephine Vandenberg. Certainly, if you missed the delivery of your own keynote speech, questions would be raised and doubtlessly enough conference security teams would start searching for your whereabouts.
So you resolve to deliver this speech... but is it not utterly meaningless? What is the Passion Economy? What has it got to do with xenoarchaeology? Is your entire science a failure, because you have not even discovered any aliens? After decades of research and dedication, you have discovered and learnt nothing at all?
On the podium stage, you stand before thousands of expectant delegates and investors. With a slight wince of annoyance, you notice many of them are actually noisily eating, cramming their faces with mouthfuls of canapes and other gourmet hors d'oeuvre cuisine. Your stomach grumbles enviously. Yet this bodes well in your favour, they will be too distracted by a general sense of gastronomic contentedness to pay close attention or scrutiny to your words. So you begin:
-To know Passion is to know your own Self, your own Being. Yet to know your own Self, you must also know the Other; you must know what you are not. Xenoarchaeology is the study of the Other. It is the study of all that is possible beyond the memory and experience of Humanity.
In the deepest ocean hydrothermal vents we find the chrysomallon squamiferum, the volcano snail, with an exoskeletal shell of iron sulphides and armoured scales of mineral sclerites. Even in the most extreme environments, of acidity, salinity, radiation and heat, life can endure with Passion. By studying fossils of ancient geological eras, or the microscopic beginnings of life in the Eoarchaean Age - long before the collective memory of human history, before even atmospheric oxygen - we can expand the endurance of mankind beyond human imagination. We are expanding the conditions of Life, we are expanding Passion! Even in the deepest biome and the most remote and inhospitable biosphere, our science shows us that Life can endure with Passion...
