Brewster Rockit by Tim Rickard for September 18, 2023

Ah, yes. Anti-social media.

If that doesn’t motivate the extraterrestrials to send an armada to destroy us, nothing will.

Wait until O-dor gets a message.

“The Babel fish is small, yellow and leech-like, and probably the oddest thing in the Universe. It feeds on brainwave energy received not from its own carrier but from those around it. It absorbs all unconscious mental frequencies from this brainwave energy to nourish itself with. It then excretes into the mind of its carrier a telepathic matrix formed by combining the conscious thought frequencies with the nerve signals picked up from the speech centres of the brain which has supplied them. The practical upshot of all this is that if you stick a Babel fish in your ear you can instantly understand anything said to you in any form of language. The speech patterns you actually hear decode the brainwave matrix which has been fed into your mind by your Babel fish.Now it is such a bizarrely improbable coincidence that anything so mindbogglingly useful could have evolved purely by chance that some thinkers have chosen it to see it as a final and clinching proof of the non-existence of God.The argument goes something like this: “I refuse to prove that I exist,” says God, “for proof denies faith, and without faith I am nothing.”“But,” says Man, “the Babel fish is a dead giveaway isn’t it? It could not have evolved by chance. It proves you exist, and therefore, by your own arguments, you don’t. QED.”“Oh dear,” says God, “I hadn’t thought of that,” and promptly vanishes in a puff of logic.“Oh, that was easy,” says Man, and for an encore goes on to prove that black is white and gets killed on the next zebra crossing.”

Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

The Universal Translator is mostly a devise to keep Science Fiction films/TV shows from getting to bogged down in the realty of everyone trying to understand what everyone else is saying.

If he could invent a translator that converts lies into truth, he’d make a fortune. Unfortunately, liars would do everything they could to eliminate him and that invention.

ka-slam dunk

OH No! Now the Aliens will come and trade us cool looking trinkets for some place like Long Island. Not a bad idea, lets Con the Aliens into buying New York City for almost nothing.

I want to learn Klingon.

I can’t even understand spoken English half the time. I need the subtitles on TV to make sense of all the Irish, Scottish, Aussie, Indian, Arkansas, Maine, East London, and other “native English” accents. My book club just read Huckleberry Finn. One of the members for whom English is a second language, gave up because he couldn’t understand the dialect.

Oh great now Martians will never let us move there and trash their planet like we’ve done to ours

“Bet you can’t eat two of a chip so hot it will make your head explode”

Aliens: fire up the death ray

Okay, which one is Gidney and which one is Cloyd? (Yes, I’m aware that this is Mars and not the Moon…)

A universal translator would be handy sometimes within the same family.

Not such a good idea that we talk to them like we talk to each other.

I’d rather have a visit from The Doctor and get inside his/her Tardis in order to understand the alien languages. (Except, it doesn’t appear to work on the Judoon.

In almost all cases I prefer the book (whichever it is) to the movie.

I tried to read ‘Hitchhikers Guide…’ gave it up as not funny. Loved the movie!

JUST like we communicate with each other.

To seek out new life and new civilizations. And flame the holy _________ out of them.