2496. Earth’s cosmological contribution

Good Smakin Darit Ingtincton Comrades.

Thank you for inviting my crew and me this Smakin Darit Ingtincton to speak to you. As you know we have just finished a 472-year cruise of liveable planets within our own galaxy. Of course we didn’t visit them all, but we did manage to visit over 400 places during the course of the trip.

Being almost a billion years more advanced than many of them there was little we could learn from most. On Planet Stackton we learnt a solution to the problem we’ve always had here of debris collecting on our stella-panels. Of course the Stacktonians like us are a long-evolving, highly developed planet, so we were not surprised to find something we didn’t know.

Perhaps the most stunning discovery was on Planet Earth. They are a very young planet where intelligent activity has been evolving to a relatively low degree over a mere several million years. There we found they had a contraption that absolutely stunned us. It’s such a simple concept and so obvious. I guess we were more amazed at our own lack of invention in the matter rather than in the creative Earthling invention itself.

We brought several examples with us in order to show the variety of design that is possible, and we shall be passing them on to our scientific experts so they can use these artefacts as a sort of blue print.

What are they, you might ask? Naturally we don’t have names for them as yet, so we refer to them in backward Earth terms. They call them salt and pepper shakers.

1489. Sad but true

The Seilfnogard are a group of creatures that we on earth call “aliens”. They live on a planet roughly one million light years away from Planet Earth. It’s not improbable that they are the most intelligent creatures in the cosmos. Of course, there are probably creatures more intelligent, but how does one judge intelligence when a one-hour old Seilfnogard thinks like Isaac Newton on a good day?

Coming from a life source and a series of genetic mutations completely unrelated to anything on Planet Earth, they don’t resemble anything we might know. I suppose the nearest thing we have to them are dragonflies. You see, the Seilfnogard live for only about a year, but most of that time is spent in the nymph stage. First there’s an egg, then the nymph, and finally the adult Seilfnogard emerges and lasts only a day or two. Those couple of days are spent delving as quickly as possible into the mysteries of the universe. Then death comes knocking in twenty-four to forty-eight hours.

But goodness me! What the Seilfnogard have achieved! The civilization they have built! The body of knowledge! Although they can fly (they have a double pair of wings not unlike dragonflies) they are terrible at space travel. Many years ago a group of fearless Seilfnogard set out for Planet Earth in a spacecraft that travelled almost at the speed of light. One of their major concerns in this lengthy travel was to propagate. Over the time of the journey to Planet Earth a million-plus generations came and went. Upon arrival they had only two days to record first-hand what they observed. However, panic took over, and the two days were spent hurriedly fornicating and laying eggs in order to begin a trail of generations for the return home.

A million generations later the Seilfnogard arrived back on their planet. No two-million old records had survived as to who they were and to where they’d gone. The travellers themselves didn’t have a clue as to what their mission had been; where they’d been and why.

The stay-at-home Seilfnogard had so evolved over the intervening epochs that inferior genes were undesirable. For example, the stay-at-home Seilfnogard, with selective breeding and genetic engineering, were now able to survive in the adult stage for up to five days. That is why the intrepid explorers were immediately put to death as aberrations.

Sad but true.