600 People

Why do we fixate on finding intelligent life out in space, when there’s such an abundance of it here at home? Alex Kelly’s lecture—performance lecture is probably pushing it—marvels at the sheer scale of human discovery and ingenuity. From human-sized spiders to DNA that turns itself inside out, it’s pretty much an hour of ‘O, Wonder.’

Starting with Voyager, the seventies spacecraft carrying a record of human knowledge and culture out into the universe, Kelly’s fascinations proliferate. Animal intelligence, oxygen crises and epigenetics all crop up in a piece that can’t quite fathom how all this goes back, through the genetic line, to just 600 people all those years ago.

Beneath, then, is a question of expansionism – and exponential expansionism at that. The more we know, the more we discover. Yet as Kelly zooms out, in time and in space, it all starts to seem infinitesimal; futile even. If you think humanity has surpassed itself already, just wait until we render ourselves redundant. 

It’s a question of perspective and 600 People prods at the way we—as a species and as individuals—put ourselves at the centre of the universe. By alien life, we mean life as we know it. By intelligence, we mean intelligence like our own.

Kelly’s a likeable, low-key guide—Brian Cox with a Brummie accent—and Nathaniel Warnes’ line-drawn diagrams pull the jumbled info together, but even so, the theatre drops out. The lecture bursts its banks, but it never becomes anything bigger. Still, call off the search. Intelligent life located.