One of the most potent themes in Stanisław Lem’s writing was the fallacy of first contact.

Lem argued that we are just not ready for an actual meeting with something truly alien. That the most open-minded of us are close-minded on a cosmic scale. That sci-fi made us think that aliens will look like human with prosthetics when good, and insect-like creatures when evil, but sci-fi needs to be self-constrained for all the same reasons; showing us something actually inhuman will immediately render it utterly incomprehensible.

He wrote about it in Eden, and Solaris, and The Invincible, and Fiasco. The last of these is a book I was once so angry at that I threw it at the wall.

It also happens to be my most favourite book, ever.

Anyway. This is a diagram for a single-button flashlight called Andúril 2 (larger version):

I saw it for the first time earlier this week. I was speechless. Maybe a little bit in awe. I know I’m supposed to hate this, but this feels so profoundly… alien, that I don’t know if anything I know applies here. I don’t want to judge it by the wrong set of rules. I want to study it more.

Oh, and because I was curious too – this is the flashlight: