If you look at the world around you, you'll see that you can sort almost anything into lists. Your friends are a list (and there's even an order to the list, starting with your best friend). You can organize the world's religions into a list. Everything around you is a list — of stuff.

Here's a challenge. Imagine this scenario: Right now, at this very moment, neutron bombs go off all over the world and kill every living thing on earth, but they leave the infrastructure intact. So you're dead and so is everyone else, but all the stuff around you is exactly as you left it. Fast forward a thousand years, and aliens from another universe land on Earth knowing absolutely nothing about us. The very first site their scientists excavate is the room you're in right now.

Okay, so you've already started to look at things objectively. Now try looking at the things around you really objectively. How would aliens interpret things, commonplace to you, that they have never encountered?

List all the things in your room — lamps, a TV set, an air conditioner, a CD player, an iPod, a trash can, curtains, chairs, remote controls, a computer, a printer, tables, rugs, photos, paintings, magazines, books, pillows, clothes, DVDs, pens, pencils, etc. What would aliens think each thing was used for? Let your mind play with looking at commonplace things from an entirely different perspective. Also, ask yourself what the aliens look like. Do they look like us or are they six inches tall? How would they look at a chair that they couldn't even climb, let alone sit in? What if they assumed that we were the same size as them?

In a class at Emerson College, a student once came up with a great premise from this exercise: What if the aliens noticed a copy of TV Guide in everyone's home and misunderstood it to be the bible of our civilization? What if they used it to form their own religion based upon ours as they conceived it. An alien sermon went something like this: