Monday, 16 April 2018

Dear Aliens, nothing to see here...

As NASA points a new orbiting probe at individual exoplanets, could we please beam this message towards them at the same time?

Dear Aliens,

This message comes to you from a rather inconsequential end of the galaxy, a planet we call Earth (another word for ‘dirt’). But to be perfectly honest, ‘Scorched Earth’ is probably a better description.

So just in case you’d like to come and visit, we feel it’s only right to warn you that it would be a complete waste of your time and effort.

Firstly, we have very little in the way of natural resources: water, metal, that sort of thing. And what metal we did have we turned into satellites – which then got destroyed in one of our rather frequent wars. The result being that our planet is now surrounded with a thick layer of high-velocity orbiting shrapnel which makes it extremely hazardous to approach us too closely – our apologies.

We also sadly have very scarce cultural resources, except for reality shows like The Walking Dead, which you may have seen. Although, to be strictly accurate, many of the zombies perished at the same time as our atmosphere became severely contaminated with nuclear radiation due to one of the frequent outbreaks of hostilities we mentioned earlier.

And as for meeting our leaders, we can’t tell you just how disappointing that would be.

So while we’d love to have you over, we would really advise against it.

But if it’s not too much trouble there is something you could possibly help us with… we’ve been trying to develop nuclear fusion energy for rather a long time now and haven’t made the slightest hint of progress… so if you’re as advanced as we expect you to be, we’d be most grateful if you could send us a few pointers?

Thanking you in advance,
Earth

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