Tristanis a 21-year-old born in France and studying Film and Philosophy in the United States. He has published several undergraduate philosophy essays and one science-fiction short story. He hopes to continue graduate studies in Philosophy, and writes science-fiction stories for his own entertainment.
If aliens were to visit us, what do you think their first impression of humans would be?
I believe they would wonder why such an original and widespread species as could nevertheless be the subject, in every continent and in a majority of households, of the laziest and most pointless of animals: the cat.
If you could have dinner with any fictional character from any sci-fi book or movie, who would it be, what would you talk about, and where what restaurant would you choose?
I would choose Darth Vader. I have always wanted to find out how exactly he eats his food without taking off the helmet. I could also bring him at a beach restaurant, just for the sake of showing him all the sand around… If he still hasn’t cut me in half by then, I would ask him to confirm, once and for all, for the record, that Jar Jar is the real Sith Lord.
If you were secretly an alien visitor to the Earth, why are you here?
In all seriousness, I believe that when we try to interpret the beliefs of a creature, we must project our own logic and rationality onto it. Indeed, we must have a common ground with the creature in order to understand its beliefs and intentions; otherwise, we simply could not make sense of its behavior. Finding the creature mostly logical and rational (based on our own notions of logic and rationality) is a necessary condition to finding ourselves in broad agreement with them (because disagreement can only be meaningful against a background of common agreement). Therefore, any alien visitor would either be mostly similar to us in their beliefs (even though there might still be important disagreements on the forefront), or so remote and unusual that we wouldn’t even be tempted to ascribe them any beliefs in the first place.
If you had to live on a spaceship with one fictional character for the rest of your life, who would it be and why?
To keep it Sci-Fi, I would pick Hari Seldon from Foundation. I would finally have a math teacher with infinite amounts of patience. With enough luck, he would find out a way to calculate how our lives on the spaceship are going to unfold; and perhaps he might even give me a glimpse of the role I can play within the grand scheme of the ship’s History…
If you had to choose between fighting 100 duck-sized robots or one robot-sized duck, which would you pick and why?
Nice try, duck-aliens. I’m not falling for that one again.
