Lio by Mark Tatulli for September 26, 2017

Oh really?

“You will never find a more wretched hive of scum and villainy.”

It’s pretty hard to argue with that claim.

So much for Deep Thought’s plans – I hope Lio has a towel…

Don’t Panic!

The Earth is about to be gentrified.

As Mr. Spock said when he was exploring Earth: “Beam me up Scotty, there’s no intelligent life down here.”

Various SF authors have posited that the reason we haven’t been contacted by advanced alien civilizations is that we are for some reason “off limits” to the galactic family of societies. In “Day the Earth Stood Still” we were even regarded as dangerous, possible candidates for destruction lest we contaminate other inhabited worlds with our warlike tendencies. C.S. Lewis, Protestant apologist that he was, suggested that though the human race was a “fallen” species, that other worldly people might not be. His idea was that God might have told the aliens to keep away from sinful humans for their own good. Interestingly, this is why Adam and Eve were warned away from the fruit that gave “knowledge” of good and evil according to Genesis. I wonder which writer first proposed the idea that we were cosmic outcasts because of some human fatal flaw. Anyone know?

An intergalactic space highway is coming through.

Mostly harmless.

Many years ago, Isaac Asimov wrote a short story about how Earth was going to be invited into galactic society. What made Earth worthy was that humans had discovered how to use nuclear power. But when the alien visitors discovered that humans were using nuclear energy to make weapons, they turned around and went home. To quote the alien, “Silly asses”.

I’m guessing the aliens just did the “take me to your leader” bit.

I read a story where a visitor violated the ban on going to the earth and died a rather grizzly death from one of our cold viruses. The ban was to protect them!

A question to ponder in the wee hours of the morning – when was the last time you heard any ‘developer’ requesting “comment” from the rats and cockroaches in a building they were about to demolish?

That should be “intragalactic”. It’s interplanetary but it’s intragalactic. I don’t think residents of The Andromeda galaxy give a darn about what happens here. As far as they know, there is no human race yet.

Bring on the hyperspace bypass.

When the ICP condemns your property in preparation for exercising Eminent Domain, you can be pretty sure their motives are not all that innocent….