Artist's conception of an alien giving us the finger as he flies by Numerous stories appeared last week about Harvard scientists conjecturing that the interstellar item Oumuamua, which is Hawaiian for “mysterious, cigar-shaped object,” which cruised past Earth from the depths of space a while back, was indeed an alien probe sent by an interstellar civilization to take a gander at our solar system.
The evidence for this is that Oumuamua sped up as it was leaving the solar system. It vamoosed like a biker who accidentally wanders into a gay bar. Already traveling at a brisk 196,000 miles an hour, it apparently took one look at our planet and hit the gas. These Harvard guys could think of no other way of accounting for this phenomenon other than ET putting the pedal to the metal.
They’ve got some convincing points. For one thing, going 196,000 miles an hour seems like tootling right along. Certainly, if you slam on the brakes at 196,000 miles an hour, every alien on board is going through the windshield, but to really get anywhere in interstellar space you have to go much, much faster. At 196,000 miles an hour it would take you thousands of years to get to the next star over. If you speed up to 196,000 miles a minute, it still takes 60 or 70 years, so you still need plenty of toys and videos for the kids in the back, or else they’ll be playing slug-bug for light years at a time.
And after going to all that trouble, the aliens bugged out after taking one look at us. Maybe they noticed we were cooking our perfectly nice planet in a crock-pot of carbon dioxide. Maybe they decided to get gone when they figured out that most of us would happily nuke them, just to see if they were impervious to hydrogen bombs, like they always are in the movies. Maybe they logged on to the Internet and noticed it was nothing but images of Trump and porn.
Maybe they made a comment on Facebook and were viciously attacked by a bunch of low-IQ strangers working for a troll farm in Belarus.
Anyway, they’re gone. And it’s no use to go running after them, begging them to listen to PBS, tour our museums and check out the cool shit we left on the moon. Vainly, we’ll strain to enumerate the accomplishments of mankind. They’ll just listen to us patiently and say when we’re done, “Yeah, but what about all those dick pics?” Then they’ll proceed with the process of digging out.
There’s nothing to do but spruce up the place a bit before the next batch of aliens comes to call. It could be a while, so everybody doesn’t have to buy a Prius tomorrow, but we could get started in little ways, like sucking some of the plastic out of the oceans and tossing fewer bombs and missiles at each other. If we behave better, maybe next time the aliens will stop and give us a stash of live-forever pills, or at least reveal all the secrets of the universe that they know and we don’t.
Or they could just blow on by again, following the Oumuamuans to wherever they’re going, maybe to a planet where the highest form of life is still a bunch of smart apes living in the jungle.
And hope they turn out better than we did.
The evidence for this is that Oumuamua sped up as it was leaving the solar system. It vamoosed like a biker who accidentally wanders into a gay bar. Already traveling at a brisk 196,000 miles an hour, it apparently took one look at our planet and hit the gas. These Harvard guys could think of no other way of accounting for this phenomenon other than ET putting the pedal to the metal.
They’ve got some convincing points. For one thing, going 196,000 miles an hour seems like tootling right along. Certainly, if you slam on the brakes at 196,000 miles an hour, every alien on board is going through the windshield, but to really get anywhere in interstellar space you have to go much, much faster. At 196,000 miles an hour it would take you thousands of years to get to the next star over. If you speed up to 196,000 miles a minute, it still takes 60 or 70 years, so you still need plenty of toys and videos for the kids in the back, or else they’ll be playing slug-bug for light years at a time.
And after going to all that trouble, the aliens bugged out after taking one look at us. Maybe they noticed we were cooking our perfectly nice planet in a crock-pot of carbon dioxide. Maybe they decided to get gone when they figured out that most of us would happily nuke them, just to see if they were impervious to hydrogen bombs, like they always are in the movies. Maybe they logged on to the Internet and noticed it was nothing but images of Trump and porn.
Maybe they made a comment on Facebook and were viciously attacked by a bunch of low-IQ strangers working for a troll farm in Belarus.
Anyway, they’re gone. And it’s no use to go running after them, begging them to listen to PBS, tour our museums and check out the cool shit we left on the moon. Vainly, we’ll strain to enumerate the accomplishments of mankind. They’ll just listen to us patiently and say when we’re done, “Yeah, but what about all those dick pics?” Then they’ll proceed with the process of digging out.
There’s nothing to do but spruce up the place a bit before the next batch of aliens comes to call. It could be a while, so everybody doesn’t have to buy a Prius tomorrow, but we could get started in little ways, like sucking some of the plastic out of the oceans and tossing fewer bombs and missiles at each other. If we behave better, maybe next time the aliens will stop and give us a stash of live-forever pills, or at least reveal all the secrets of the universe that they know and we don’t.
Or they could just blow on by again, following the Oumuamuans to wherever they’re going, maybe to a planet where the highest form of life is still a bunch of smart apes living in the jungle.
And hope they turn out better than we did.
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