I clipped this from a longer interview we did with Thomas Jane on NIGHT SHIFT and felt it deserved its own post because he articulates something I've never heard said quite this way. His core argument: the very concept of a "Galactic Federation," with boards, membership tiers, "younger" vs "older" species, is a purely human construct lifted straight from our own political and social systems. If a civilization can transcend time and space, why would hierarchy, distance, or architecture mean anything to them at all? He also goes after the "Western imaginary" specifically, this is essentially the idea that we can't even picture alien life without defaulting to frameworks built from Earth's history. And he makes a genuinely interesting point about Hindu philosophy: that its sheer complexity and thousands of deities might actually be structurally closer to what an alien "architecture" looks like than our tidier Western models. He's not dismissing people like Paul Hellyer or Haim Eshed, he just thinks even those accounts are still being filtered through a human lens, which he calls our biggest self-limiting factor. Curious what you guys think. Is the Federation concept a useful shorthand or is it actively getting in the way of understanding what we are dealing with? Full interview here: https://youtu.be/bedafQM2wUo?si=sCluv1rhbKxLtn9X submitted by /u/hunterseeker1 [link] [comments]