The new movie “Prometheus” — about man’s origins, spaceships and creatures that like to treat us like we’re chickens in a processing plant — has me pondering the existence of extraterrestrials. Whether there is life out in the stars — out amongst the great unknown.
And what questions we would want answered by these intelligent beings. Unlike great scientists and philosophers, I have simpler mysteries I want solved. Like do they have any colors we don’t know about? Something you couldn’t get in a box of Crayola 64. What would it look like, that amazing, wonderful, never-seen-before discovery? Would it have a cool name like “jimpooza” or something simpler … like “stan?”
So many questions I would want answered: Have they solved universal problems like how to eliminate traffic jams? What does a gallon of milk cost on their world? What’s the strangest food they’ve ever canned? Why don’t dolphins have gills? I mean, that makes no sense!
How many cable channels do they get, and is there ANYTHING worth watching on Tuesday night? Do they have 4-D yet? Do you need glasses for that, or is it all implants in your brain? Why does popcorn pop?
And the granddaddy of them all: Does everything on their home planet taste like chicken?
Wouldn’t you love to know the answers to these questions? They’re real. They’re important. And they’re worth asking should an alien ship ever dock for the weekend.
But I doubt we would. I bet we have ridiculous, “smart” questions we’re going to ask. (Translation: boring!)
That’s going to offend them. Make them think we’re just a bunch of backwater rubes stuck on this B-list planet. They’ll fill up the gas tank, ask for directions to the nearest solar system, buy a hat or a key chain to make us feel better about ourselves and then peel out faster than you can say, “light speed.”
We’ll end up with poor reviews on travel web sites with comments like: “Locals badly dressed. Total dullsville. All they wanted to talk about was origin of life and DNA sequencing. LAME! Take me to your leader? Try: take me to your daiquiri machine! Learn how to party, inferior beings!”
I bet no one is thinking about what we would show our new alien visitors when they arrive. I mean, we’re not going to just send them off to their hotel rooms and tell them to watch HBO all night. No, we’ve got to go wine and dine them. Show them the sights. And these sights better be pretty darn spectacular if we’re going to get on their regular circuit.
I’m thinking bull riding! Dude, you want to impress some super-cool alien beings who have probably seen it all? Show them a cowboy flopping about on a horned animal while a guy in a clown suit prances about the ring.
They’ll think we rock!
We’ve got to get it together. We could be visited any day now. And what do we have to show for ourselves? Take our so-called space program. Say an alien vessel arrives in our atmosphere tomorrow and challenges us to an interstellar drag race. What are we going to do? We have space capsules that look like Hershey’s Kisses and Mars rovers that would lose a race to spilled syrup. They’re going to have something that looks like a Harley Davidson with a big alien skull and cross bones on the handlebars and a green alien hottie on the back wearing cutoff jeans and a bathing suit top. We’d lose to their kid on a skateboard!
If the human race is about one thing, it’s having cooler stuff than everyone else on the block. And science fiction should teach us there’s a lot of cool stuff we don’t have. Warp speed. Ray guns. Space ships that look like space insects. Why are we wasting billions of dollars on particle accelerators and colliders in an attempt to figure out how we came to be? Can we impress a space-travelling alien with that? “So you crash this tiny little speck of dust into that tiny little speck of dust?!? Don’t you people have pinball?”
Answers? Who needs answers! We need “cool.” We need to dress to impress. We need the letters in NASA to stand for: “Not Awesome … Super Awesome!”
It’s time to stop studying stuff and start thinking about how to become the coolest planet in the universe. And somebody PLEASE work on inventing a new color!