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Ever heard of the Arecibo message? It’s a radio signal beamed into the stars in the 1970s from the Arecibo telescope in Puerto Rico. The hope was that it would be decoded by any intelligent life receiving it. The message contains a bunch of science-y stuff about Earth and humanity that’s guaranteed to hurt your brain. The details are at Wikipedia and you can see a visual representation of the data nearby.
Now far be it from me to question the world’s finest astronomers, but I’ve been on this planet my whole life (except for brief interval after consuming “space cake” in Amsterdam) and when I look at this graphic I am dumbfounded as to describe what it is. Is it that E.T. game that they dug up in the desert? Is it some child’s drawing? Or something labeled “Modern Art” that morons think is amazing? Some new kind of barcode? Did somebody’s calculator get hit by lightning and gain superpowers?
If I, as a life-long resident of Earth, can’t figure out what this message means, then how is an alien species going to?
Besides, the Arecibo message just isn’t good marketing. I would have sent pictures of the best-looking people on Earth in minimal (or no) clothing hanging out on a beach at sunset. Unite a beer commercial’s hedonism with the placid vistas of a tourism pamphlet and you’ve got a sure-fire alien magnet. Because if the aliens that find this thing are anything like us humans, the trouble won’t be telling them how to get here, but giving them incentive to get off their alien butts and actually do it.
So let’s be honest. This Arecibo message is one big fail all around.
Wait! Wait a minute! Holy crap! Well that shows you how much I know! This just in! Looks like the Arecibo message finally hit pay dirt after all. It’s a message from another planet! They’ve responded to the Arecibo message! Let’s see what our fellow inhabitants of the universe had to say:
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Clik here to view.Dear People of Earth,
We received your message when its frequency began vibrating our holy life-support towers, which caused their bio-distribution systems to fail, resulting in the deaths of 18.3 of our citizens, including 9.7 Glarbooten companion slugs.
We are very sorry to hear that your planet is under siege by a giant purple letter M wearing a toupee, but we will not be visiting you any time soon for many reasons.
First, it appears that your people, depicted with exquisite detail in green, posses at least eight genders. We here on our planet have enough trouble with five. The chaos during your mating rituals would paralyze our fore-brain and leave our tail-brain in perpetual base-nineteen computation mode.
Your planet seems lovely and we are envious that you have two blue ribbons of electrified chlorine gas on either side of your tubular ivory crust. We only have one blue ribbon and it is very boring, but nonetheless, to us it is home. We were however, deeply insulted that you would leave your sacred yellow excrement just lying about in public. Have you no decency? Were you all raised on a nucleo-genetic randomizer farm?
But what really disturbs us in the red object. Our best tri-minded scientists and even our dual-minded monk-beasts cannot compute what that is. It seems to represent one of the fictional creatures from the screech-songs of the wild Ulaniit, with a comical arrangement of the famed twin penises yet lacking the companion vaginal array. Its centrality to your message implies that it carries some kind of importance. Is this some strange monster devouring your people as the Yeznar-Alk-Endro did to our hive-ancestors eons ago? The idea of this beast on the loose makes our poly glands secrete from all of our two dozen orifices.
Though our bi-emotional consensus is grateful for your attention to us, we ask that you cease communication with us at your earliest temporal marker. We fear that this red monstrosity may find the location of our home.
We have a saying here that applies: don’t send us an odor-resonating pulse wave, we’ll send you an odor-resonating pulse wave.
MESSAGE ENDS
This item was originally posted on www.LarryNocella.com.