Original printed byline: Hawkeye Z. Hoerr
Historical April–May 2014 article. Dates, prices, services and contacts describe the source period; current availability has not been established.
Well, there’s no doubt that we are not alone. No, I’m not referring to those people who live in the county, the denizens who reside west of the 1876 artificial political divide. Despite their zip codes and car choices, they already count. They’re here. Further, I’m not even referring to people in different countries who speak languages that are foreign to those of us who are English uni-languists. I’m not even talking about folks who eat remarkably strange foods – insects, tofu, and rabbit. (It’s pretty bad when I don’t even list sushi among strange foods!) And you guessed it, our lack of aloneness doesn’t speak to people who live in very strange environments – on ice, under the canopy of a rain-forest, or in 63124. Rather, and, yes, Captain Kirk, you knew where I was heading, I’m referring to life forms which inhabit other planets. Yep, no doubt about it, Spock, we are not alone. Granted, it was easy to think that there weren’t any other life forms when all we had to consider was our tiny solar system. Whether we have eight or nine planets as neighbors (oh, Pluto, where have you gone?) along with myriad asteroids and comets, we didn’t see much out there. Powerful telescopes have failed to identify a Ted Drewes, a red-light camera, or a Great Wall on any other heavily body. Sure, we have some evidence that there’s someone out there, likely someone out there who is peeking at us.
The debris from the spaceship crash in Roswell, NM has never been made public but I have it on very good authority that the downed craft contained elongated skeletons of two things (a technical term), a half-smoked Cuban cigar, some uneaten Hostess Twinkies, and a Playboy Magazine featuring E.T. No wonder they were lost. Other evidence that we are being peeked upon is also strong. Consider Peking Duck. And now we have incontrovertible evidence that our universe is popping. Just recently NASA announced that the Kepler telescope had discovered 719 new planets. No, I am not making this up. Altogether, we now know that there are almost 1,800 other planets revolving around other suns which have been identified. Like our Earth, all of these planets are part of multi-planet systems, two or more planets orbiting a single star.
They also all orbit in the same approximate flat plan as occurs in our solar system.
This ain’t no coincidence.
There are lots of technical explanations for how we know that a planet is a planet and not a non-planet, but the one which resonates most with me is whether or not there is evidence of Groupon use on the planet.
If there aren’t any Groupons being used there, I question whether life exists there, or at least life with which I would want to have dinner. For that matter, Groupon use comforts me that the life existing there wouldn’t want to have ME for dinner.
In previous columns, dear reader, I’ve written about the under-the-rug connections that I have with a nearby university. You may recall that this was how I learned about the dog collar which enabled me to read my pooch’s thoughts. ‘Arf! It’s time to go out,’ says Onyx. Well, and please keep this confidential, an astronomer friend from that nearby university – I’ll refer to her as Dr. Quark – has given me the inside skinny (another technical term) on what we’ve learned about these 1,800 planets. You see, there are telescopes that are so secret that even Edward Snowden doesn’t know about them! That’s, like, way deep. OK, so let’s be Earth-centric here and see if we can identify a planet with folks like us. I’m not interested in life forms which are way behind us, those who are still living in trees and picking insects from one another’s fur, and I don’t care about the life forms that are way ahead of us, those who all look like an iPhone. I’m not looking for planets with Republicans.
I want to find doppelganger planets, filled with new friends with whom we can party According to Dr. Quark, only 613 of the 1,800 planets have evidence of Groupon use. Ratcheting up the criteria for a friendly and compatible life form a bit more, of those 613, only a third keep another species as a pet, arf again, and only a third of that number have mechanisms for buying Girl Scout cookies. Thus we know that there are 68 planets with life forms that use Groupons, don’t vote Republican, and sell Girl Scout cookies.
This sounds like nirvana to me!
The bad news is that none of these 68 planets are close to us.
Most are farther, even, than Kansas. So what to do? Well, here’s another secret. Scientists, yes, scientists at that same nearby university, are also working on condensing carbon life-forms. That could be us! Elephants have already been shrunk to be no larger than the period at the end of this sentence. Watched under a microscope, the elephants act as normal as possible, unaware, it seems, of how their environment has grown bigger. And this is just the first step. Within two years, I’m told, elephants will be microscopic; they’ll still be elephants, still act the same, but be too small to be seen by the naked eye. Think of the possibilities that this will open. Rather than taking a medicine to unclog your intestines, you can take a pill with a pack of elephants and let them roam through your colon. Is this exciting or what? And as other life forms get tinier and tinier, yep, we will also become microscopic in size. Once that happens, we’ll be loaded into a tiny, light-weight rocket, the equivalent of a modern-day Noah’s Ark, and millions of us will travel at near light-warp speed to one of these 68 planets. KA-ZOOM! Think of the fun reception we’ll get.
Now it’s possible that our telescopes are much stronger than theirs, so they may or may not know of us. Consequently, we need to give some thought to that first encounter and how to let them know of our peaceful intentions so they will see us as friends, not as possible adversaries. Let’s learn from Christopher Columbus. It’s critically important that these lifeforms see us neither as a threat nor as a possible snack. What to do? It’s simple: We all exit our ballpoint pen size spaceship while wearing love beads, holding hands, and singing ‘I Got You, Babe.’ That will raise their eyebrows and knock their socks off! Or maybe it will raise their socks and knock off their eyebrows? Either way, I have no doubt that we’ll be embraced. Within hours we’ll all feel like Charlie Lindbergh as we are welcomed by a tickertape parade made from expired Groupons. Start meditating on shrinking.
I can’t wait!
Originally published in The Times of Skinker-DeBaliviere, April–May 2014.
Read this article in the original newspaper issue.
Original source: SD_Times2014_04.pdf, printed page(s) 8; PDF page(s) 8.
