For a more personal experience, there’s Sent Forever—a website that insists there’s no event too insignificant to announce to the universe. Are you getting married? Is it your birthday? Did you remember to put out the garbage? Tell eternity about it! For just $20, Sent Forever will ensure “your message [will] travel through space forever.” Why limit your influence to your immediate family when you could be boring an entire star cluster? (Interestingly, the Sent Forever home page features photos of a bride and groom, a little baby and an elderly couple. These are there either to depict critical elements of the human experience or as a secret message to invading aliens describing the order in which we should be eaten.)
For those who want to lend a more personal touch, there is Endless Echoes—an internet company that transmits voice messages into the depths of space. For $25, you get a one-minute message along with a Certificate of Broadcast, a Distance Chart and a picture of the website’s owner rolling around on a bed covered with the money of idiots like you. What’s unique about Endless Echoes is that it also claims to be able to deliver messages beyond the grave. In fact, the website features a picture of a sad little boy and the words “When you never had a chance to say ‘goodbye.’” Classy. That’s super-classy. When the nebula monkeys arrive to lay waste to planet Earth, here’s hoping they save the biggest, curviest banana probe for the people at Endless Echoes.
Is a one-minute voice message to your deceased goldfish just not going to cut it? There will always be hucksters like Blog in Space, which was the first entity to allow everyday bloggers to inflict their tortured, self-obsessed musings on defenceless asteroids. Thanks to Blog in Space’s access to a “powerful deep space transmission dish,” it is now entirely possible that an alien civilization’s first inkling of Earth’s existence will come in the form of a suburban mother’s six-thousand-word rhapsody about the texture of her baby’s poop. Alarmingly, Blog in Space offered no method of monitoring the content of such messages, placing human existence in the position of being threatened not only by nuclear war and global warming but also by the intergalactic equivalent of drunk dialling. I’ve got a few things to get off my—hic!—chest about youse space lizards …
Here comes the invasion. Time to take off our pants and wave, men.
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Looking for a fun getaway with the man or woman you love? Consider a trip to Mars! It’s a journey you’ll cherish until the day you die—which, for the record, will be when you both incinerate on re-entry.
But let’s not dwell on the many completely fatal potential downsides of this romantic jaunt. The privately funded Inspiration Mars Foundation is determined to send a married couple on a non-stop, “state-of-the-art” trip around the red planet for some reason. And why shouldn’t it be you? Being shot toward a distant sphere would give you and your spouse the “us time” you’ve both been craving—the chance to leave behind the stresses of daily life and do something fun together, like stare for months into unending black, grow progressively more insane and sit helplessly as your bones and muscles deteriorate from the ravages of microgravity. Sounds better than Disney already!
Not sold yet? Consider some of the other benefits of being sealed inside a thin metal canister and lashed to 700,000 kilograms of liquid hydrogen and oxygen:
Intimacy. In this hectic age, there really aren’t that many opportunities to spend every single second of 501 consecutive days within arm’s reach of your loved one. Think about it. No phone calls. No social obligations. No way to leave the room when he starts clipping his toenails or making weird noises in his space sleep.
Sure, most marriages can barely survive the car ride to the cottage—but you guys are really in love and will totally cherish each and every one of the 721,440 minutes you’ll have together. Alone. So very alone. And if there’s an occasional lull in the conversation, well, here are a few helpful “talking points” for a couple who’ve been in space together for several months:
How are you today?
Your hair looks good when one takes into consideration you have not showered for 238 days.
Um, say, just curious: Did you try to murder me in my sleep again last night?
Cuisine. Get out of the dull routine of Sunday pot roast—and into the exciting habit of eating food that’s been rehydrated using water reclaimed from your own urine! Sure, it sounds gross now, but it’s just a matter of time before a hipster restaurant in Brooklyn finds a way to charge $350 a couple for the experience. So you’ll be ahead of the curve on that, which is nice.
Entertainment. Maybe you’re worried that spending seventeen months inside a capsule the size of a parking spot will get a little boring? Nonsense. There’ll be so much to do in your outer-space love nest. You can become charter members of the thirty-million-miles-high club! And after that, you can spend the next five hundred days trying to ignore the ever-present spectre of an imminent death. Nothing helps the time pass quite like mortal terror.
Safety. One of the biggest concerns is the cancer threat posed by radiation. Not to worry—Inspiration Mars is on top of it. Remember how they said they’re all about “state of the art”? Well, relax with the confidence that you will be protected from cosmic rays by the very latest in bags of your own feces.
Confused? Here’s how it works:
Poop into a bag. Some suggest this is a more challenging task than it appears to be, but for the sake of argument let’s say all (or most) of it hits the mark. Good for you!
Take the bag of feces and hang it on the wall of your spacecraft—your tiny, tiny spacecraft that, after a few months, will be decorated almost entirely with wall poo, making it either a health violation or a modern art exhibit.
Marvel as the “organic matter” absorbs the bulk of the radiation.
Realize that being an astronaut isn’t quite as glamorous as it was back in the 1960s.
“It’s a little queasy sounding,” the mission’s chief technology officer admits, “but it makes great radiation shielding.”
Two things about that:
First, it’s actually a lot queasy sounding. And second, the technology officer says they have engaged the “best minds” from industry and academia to brainstorm their flight systems. And the pinnacle of what the “best minds” can come up with is: poop shield.
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I don’t think there’s any reason at all to worry that maybe this whole mission hasn’t been sufficiently thought through. But if that’s the way you feel: relax—there are still discoveries to be made here on Earth.
Just a few years back, from the deepest jungles of Brazil, came remarkable news of a small indigenous tribe that has had no contact with any other human being on this planet—not even George Clooney, who seems to know everyone.
Photographs taken from the air, and later broadcast by cable news channels, show several members of this primitive society shaking their fists and covered from head to toe in red paint. According to researchers, this probably means they really, really support their troops—either that or they just tried to break into Macaulay Culkin’s hut.
The startling discovery of an isolated, uncontacted society is like an M. Night Shyamalan movie come to life, except not disappointing and stupid. It also challenges our conventional wisdom. For instance, if Walt Disney was completely wrong about this being a small world, what else is a lie? Are the ocean’s pirates not actually crudely rendered animatronic scoundrels? Are there no roller coasters embedded deep in the mountains of space? Can mouse, dog and duck not truly live in harmony?
Some scientists insist it is paramount that we preserve this Brazilian tribe’s autonomy by shielding them from contact with the rest of society and allowing them to carry on their ancient traditions. These are known as “pansy scientists.”
I say it is our solemn duty to inform these people about the many vast
wonders of the wider world that the rest of us are currently imperilling, sullying or destroying. I say we cannot rest if there exists one society, one tribe, one person on Earth who has not yet been exposed to twerking. I say that even as we turn our eyes to Mars, even as we scour the outer reaches of the galaxy for signs of life, we must come to grips with the unsettling fact that we are not yet done screwing up people on this planet.
I will therefore be mounting an expedition into the deepest Amazon. After cutting through foliage, after fending off wild beasts, after running the world’s longest extension cord to keep my Dr. Pepper chilled, we will achieve a deeply historic “first contact” with this idyllic society. We will embrace our fellow humans. We will learn from their simple utopian paradise and subsequently destroy it by getting them bickering over who has dibs on the Xbox One.
As I travel through the deadly Amazon, I will be accompanied—and, at the first sign of a snake or cobweb, piggybacked—by my elite “first contact” team, which shall comprise:
One doctor, one anthropologist, three entertainment lawyers to negotiate movie rights
One Rush Limbaugh (for bait)
170 camera operators dressed as bushes
One trunk full of post-Genesis Phil Collins records (in case we see a volcano)
One trampoline
Three Coors Light Maxim golf caddies (no point hauling the trampoline if it’s not going to be put to good use)
One photograph of Scott Baio, in case the tribe needs a god to worship
The actual Scott Baio, in case the tribe’s god needs a human sacrifice
Sure, on one hand, my expedition is a blight on civilized thought and a thin pretext for rounding up the last untainted control group on the face of the earth for my client, the pharmaceutical industry. But on the other hand … awkward silence.
Once contact is made, we’ll have a lot of catching up to do. I’ll discover all about the Brazilian tribe’s culture through its noble traditions of storytelling, cave drawings and erotic acts performed on bespectacled Caucasian strangers (these are guesses). And I’ll fill them in on all they need to know about the rest of Earth’s culture by showing them the new Planet of the Apes movie and a picture of Scarlett Johansson’s cleavage.
But there will be more to share. I shall teach them of literature and philosophy and how the study of both enhances the mind and, at a post-secondary level, the prospects of joblessness. I shall bestow as gifts the finest achievements of modern humanity—the combustion engine, the antibiotic, the Pringle. And I shall explain to them a range of baffling concepts in ascending order of complexity:
Fire
Wheel
Quantum physics
Why Donald Trump is famous
It is roughly at this juncture that I will introduce to them, especially those of them who are hot, the concept of the reality show.
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Dear Scientists:
Many of you have chosen to dedicate your lives to preventing disease, curing illness and advancing our understanding of humanity’s place in the cosmos. Why must you be so selfish?
The time has come for you to join together, buckle down and deliver on the innovation that humanity really wants—namely, the kind we see in science fiction movies.
Don’t get me wrong. It’s great and everything that some of you are toiling to rid our planet of the scourge of malaria. But it’s the twenty-first century and I still can’t order up a burrito from a replicator and eat it in my hover car.
Here are the things we’d like now, please:
Jetpacks. Men and women of science, I ask you: How hard can it be to harness the volatile power of a white-hot rocket, strap it to a person’s soft, fleshy back, overcome the inherent challenges posed by atmospheric and gravitational forces and launch the person toward the sky without the certainty of a horrible, fiery death?
You’ve been promising us jetpacks since I was a kid—I’m beginning to feel foolish walking around in this helmet. Bottom line is this: I’m in my mid-forties now. If we don’t get jetpacks soon, I’m never going to know the thrill of rocketing above the great cities of the world without my left blinker on.
Don’t try to dismiss this: we need jetpacks. It’s not just about the convenience of being able to get to the 7-Eleven and back in fewer than two seconds. It’s about boosting the world’s fragile economy with big-ticket sales, new jobs and loads of ancillary benefits. For instance, the spectacle of jetpack accidents could alone support the creation of at least three new television channels and a hundred burn wards.
Plus, nothing would rekindle our interest in celebrity mischief quite like the proliferation of jetpacks. These days, we can barely be bothered to read about the latest Hollywood DUI. But what about breaking news of a DJPUI? Is that something you’d be interested in? Give us jetpacks and it’s only a matter of time until an inebriated Mel Gibson crashes to the ground and blames Jews for all the gravity in the world. That’s an issue of People magazine that we’re all buying.
Superpowers. Surely we cannot be too far away from a time when science will be able to grant all seven billion of us a superpower of our choosing. (Hollywood has already provided us with seven billion superhero movies, so we know the numbers are manageable.)
In this utopian future, it will become a rite of passage: you come of age and head to the clinic to pick your ability. You want the power of invisibility? Sure, no problem. Super-speed? Here you go. You want to fly? Science can only do so much, Mr. Kilmer.
Robot butlers. Rich people do so much for us, yet science has failed to provide them with any viable alternative to hiring boring old humans to do their bidding. This is a tremendous hassle for the wealthy, because every single human who didn’t grow up as a child star or female tennis prodigy still needs to be dehumanized. This process takes a surprising amount of yelling and hurled mayonnaise. But you know what doesn’t need to be dehumanized? Dehumans.
It’s time for science to nudge things forward. Let’s get a robot butler on the market, pronto, even if it suffers from a few minor bugs—such as sometimes walking into a wall or occasionally removing its owner’s spleen with a melon baller.
Aliens. Science, you totally need to step up the search for other life forms—to expand our understanding of the universe’s majesty, yes, but mostly so we humans can roll with cool alien sidekicks. Dibs on a Wookiee.
Alternatively, we could go the other way with aliens. A couple of years back, economist Paul Krugman of the New York Times found a novel way to illustrate his view that more stimulus is required to jolt the US economy to life. “If we discovered that space aliens were planning to attack,” he said on CNN, “and we needed a massive buildup to counter the space alien threat … this slump would be over in eighteen months.”
You heard him right: the best hope for the US economy is that Independence Day turns out to be a documentary. But is Krugman right? In a time of unprecedented partisan rancour, how would today’s America really respond to a future interstellar invasion?
April 26, 2016: A sombre President Obama addresses the nation. He announces that a fleet of spaceships is rocketing toward Earth. Quick calculations reveal the alien home world would just now be receiving radio signals carrying the first album by Black Eyed Peas, so a declaration of war by the aliens seems certain. Also a lot of questions about exactly what Taboo does in the band.
April 27: Military experts say the warships are heavily armed and likely to first target the United States, owing to the country’s unequalled array of monuments and buildings that would look awesome exploding.
April 29: Obama proposes construction of the SuperRay, a massive weapon to which the alien spacecraft are believed to be vulnerable. Estimated cost: $3 trillion. Republican reaction is swift. “It’s just another example of big government sticking its nose into the survival of the human sp
ecies,” Marco Rubio says.
May 8: Tea Party darling Rand Paul gives an impassioned speech insisting the best way to repel the aliens is to give the wealthy more tax breaks, or maybe a cool speedboat.
June 24: After weeks of fruitless talks, Obama accidentally negotiates away two key bargaining chips while talking to himself in the mirror.
June 28: Alien ships enter Earth’s atmosphere and begin destroying buildings and roads. The Republican Party issues talking points highlighting how America’s urban infrastructure has crumbled under Obama.
July 3: Sarah Palin launches a last-minute presidential bid, claiming she is best qualified to battle the alien invaders because she can see the moon from her house.
July 14: The alien armada lands troops as the SuperRay proposal remains bogged down in Congress. “The American people can’t come crying to Congress every time their very existence is threatened by a plague of cruel, murderous extraterrestrials,” Palin says. “We have to learn to die within our means.”
August 2: Polls show Palin trailing badly in fourteen of the seventeen US states that have yet to be enslaved.
August 30: Zorgon the Unfathomable handily defeats Sarah Palin to win the Republican nomination for president. In a show of unity, he is joined onstage by his rivals, whose arms he raises. And rips off.
October 12: The presidential debate between Hillary Clinton and Zorgon, a 25-foot-tall alien lizard man, ends in acrimony and devouring. Clinton later apologizes for losing her temper.
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Looking for an unforgettable Christmas present for your loved ones? Now, thanks to science, you can give them the gift of telling them how they’re going to die.
Remember back when researchers announced they’d sequenced the human genome? Turns out that was an actual thing they actually did and not, as I had suspected, an outlandish prank to get on 60 Minutes. In fact, even greater progress has since been made—and now you can reap the futuristic benefits by finding out things that are wrong with you that even your nagging spouse is unaware of.
The Future and Why We Should Avoid It Page 23
