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The Homesickness Kits are being developed to mitigate the psychological and physiological discomfort of space travel with time-lapse scent-journeys for both the space tourist and astronaut. The Kits are designed to counter-act feelings of unease, panic, or claustrophobia with scent memory-triggers related to important plants on Earth. These palliatives can be custom-tailored to passengers on sub-orbital flights or come as standard offerings to all passengers, much like airsick bags are provided on all airlines. According to my research, on longer trips, this kind of environmental engineering may have implications for astronauts’ health, performance, and social relationships.

A science-documentary/marketing campaign including this video (excerpt only here) for the Kits was created for Free Enterprise: The Art of Citizen Space Exploration along with a futuristic Kubrickian perfume counter, perfume samples, and limited edition prints on perfume blotters. This perfume counter installation also travelled to the Lancaster Museum of Art and History in summer 2013.

Other perfume-related sculptures in the Free Enterprise installation were also related to heightening awareness about the specificity of Earth environments, encouraging an embodied perspective for space travel, and other works about interstellar messaging. These related projects suggest how radio astronomy can use organic molecule signatures to represent embodied experiences of terrestrial inhabitants and explore the connections between scent, art, and science with the history of humans using the sky for navigation, forecasting, and preservation of cultural memory.

The recent discoveries via radio astronomy of scented molecules that are part of amino acid production, and the discovery of nucleotide bases found off-planet in interstellar mediums as well as meteorites, give added weight to this study. These discoveries suggest that the ingredients for life are plentiful in the universe.

This line of inquiry brings up existential questions involved in the search for extra-terrestrial life: What is life? Are we alone as intelligent species in the universe? Will humanity be extinguished before we ever know or communicate with an extra-terrestrial life form? How will humans make a legacy project that will last long after we are gone? Or, more optimistically, will our radio signals precede us as an interstellar calling card? Who will decide these values? How might we distinguish ourselves? What is common and valued in humanity? What represents us, in our “better” and most passionate selves, as well as our evolution? What would we choose to communicate about our species to "others," and thus reflect back to ourselves, in the process, about our values?

My idea is that a signal in response to an ET signal could include signatures of molecules that have a specifically recognizable scent and are meaningful to humans and other creatures: blood, sweat, plants, the ocean, iron, etc. This type of signal would convey our understanding of chemistry and the composition of the universe, as well as sending an aspect of human culture. (The Star Map, shown in several locations from 2010-2011, visualizes these ideas.)

It is worth noting that searching for exo-planets by looking for shifts in the light spectrum emitted by stars is sometimes referred to as “sniffing.”