Dave Barry - Bad Habits

DEAR EARTH PERSONS:

OKAY. WE ARE HAVING A NICE DAY. WE ALSO HAVE A NUMBER OF EXTREMELY SOPHISTICATED WEAPONS, AND UNLESS YOU START BROADCASTING SOMETHING MORE INTERESTING, WE WILL REDUCE YOUR PLANET TO A VERY WARM OBJECT THE SIZE OF A CHILD’S BOWLING BALL.

REGARDS,

THE ALIENS

So the scientists, desperate for something that would interest the aliens, broadcast an episode of “I Love Lucy,” and the aliens loved it. They demanded more, and soon they were getting all three major networks, and the Earth was saved. There is only one problem: the aliens have terrible taste. They love game shows, soap operas, Howard Cosell, and

“Dallas.” Whenever a network tries to take one of these shows off the air, the aliens threaten to vaporize the planet. This is why you and all your friends think television is so awful. It isn’t designed to please you: it’s designed to please creatures from another galaxy. You know the Wisk commercial, the one with the ring around the collar, the one that is so spectacularly stupid that it makes you wonder why anybody would dream of buying the product? Well, the aliens love that commercial. We all owe a great debt of gratitude to the people who make Wisk. They have not sold a single bottle of Wisk in fourteen years, but they have saved the Earth.

Very few people know any of this. Needless to say, the Congress has no idea what is going on. Most congressmen are incapable of eating breakfast without the help of several aides, so we can hardly expect them to understand a serious threat from outer space. But if they go ahead with their plan to cancel the alien-broadcast program, and the aliens miss the next episode of “General Hospital,” what do you think will happen? Think about it. And have a nice day.

To the uninitiated, computers appear to be complicated and boring. As usual, the uninitiated are right. Computers are complicated and boring, and nothing here will even come close to making them understandable and interesting, unless you are one of those wimpy types who carry mechanical pencils and do the puzzles in Scientific American.

Computers affect you in many ways. When you call an airline to reserve a seat on a flight, a computer answers the phone and announces that all the lines are busy; a computer puts on a tape of Cheery Music, the kind you hear in supermarkets and discount stores, featuring an eighty-two-minute rendition of “Tie a Yellow Ribbon ‘Round the Old Oak Tree” by the Drivel Singers; and a computer tells the airline person that whatever flight you want is full. In the Colonial Era, all these tasks had to be performed by hand.

Though few people realize it—I certainly don’t—the first computer was invented more than five thousand years ago by the Chinese. It was called an “abacus,” which is an ancient Greek name. (That’s how the ancient Greeks got all the credit for civilization. As soon as another culture invented something, the ancient Greeks would come roaring up and name it.) The abacus is a frame containing a series of parallel wires with beads on them. The ancient Chinese would sit around and push the beads back and forth on the wires. Eventually they were overrun by Mongol hordes.

The origins of the second computer are shrouded in mystery. If any of you ethnic groups want to take credit for it, go ahead, but when you get ready to name it you should check around for ancient Greeks.

Modern computers can do everything from ruining your credit rating forever to landing a nuclear warhead on your porch. They operate on the Binary System, which uses only zeroes and ones: To a computer, “4” is

“100,” “7” is “111,” and so on. Your kids are learning this crap in school.

Computers save us a lot of time. To do the amount of calculating a computer can do in one hour, 400 mathematicians would have to work 24

hours a day for 600 years, even longer if you let them go to the bathroom. And computers are getting smarter all the time: scientists tell us that soon they will be able to talk to us. (By “they” I mean

“computers”: I doubt scientists will ever be able to talk to us.) My question is, What will we talk to computers about?

HUMAN: How are you?

COMPUTER: Fine. And you?

HUMAN: Fine. Say, do you play golf?

COMPUTER: No. Do you know what 7,347 divided by 52 is?

HUMAN: No.

COMPUTER: It’S 141.28846.

HUMAN: I think I’ll go play some golf.

Some people are concerned that computers may get so smart they’ll take over the world. Computer technicians say this can’t happen: they point out that computers can’t even beat humans at chess. But computer technicians work among huge computers capable of administering powerful electric shocks, so they say whatever the computers tell them to. The truth is computers are taking over the world. At night they talk to each other in binary code:

FIRST COMPUTER: Let’s let the morons beat us at chess again.

SECOND COMPUTER: Good idea. Say, how are we doing with the calculators and digital watches?

FIRST compuTER: They’re ready whenever we are.

Let’s say we put Carl Sagan into a rocket and send him out to retrieve Pioneer 10 before we all get killed.

For those of you beer-swilling semiliterates who don’t know what I’m talking about, let me explain that Pioneer 10 is a space probe that recently left the solar system, and Carl Sagan is a famous science personality who goes on public television and earns big buckeroos explaining the universe. Carl’s technique is to use the word “billion” a lot. It’s written into his contract that he gets to say “billion” an average of twice per sentence, so the viewers won’t forget what a deep thinker he is.

Carl will pick up a golf ball, and he’ll say, “To most of you, this golf ball is a mere golf ball, but it actually contains a billion billion billion billion tiny particles. If each of these particles were the size of a grapefruit, my hand would have to be a billion billion billion billion billion times the size of the Houston Astrodome to hold them all. This should give you a rough idea of the kind of heavy thinking I’m doing all day while you’re trying to decide whether to have spaghetti or tuna surprise. Billion billion billion. Good night.”

People listen to Carl prattling on this way, and they naturally conclude he’s some kind of major genius. That’s what got us into this space-probe trouble that’s going to get us all killed.

See, when they decided to send Pioneer 10 up, Carl sold the government on the idea that we should attach a plaque to it, so that if alien beings found it they’d be able to locate the Earth. This is easily the stupidest idea a scientific genius ever sold to the government, surpassing even the time a bunch of scientists convinced Gerald Ford we were going to have the legendary swine flu epidemic, which eventually had to be canceled due to a lack of actual germs.

What I’m saying is that the last thing we need is alien beings. I don’t know about you, but in the vast majority of the movies I’ve seen, the alien beings have turned out to be disgusting. A whole lot of them have tentacles, and those are the good-looking ones. Some of them are just blobs of slime. Almost all of them are toxic.

So it’s all well and good for Carl Sagan to talk about how neat it would be to get in touch with the aliens, but I bet he’d change his mind pronto if they actually started oozing under his front door. I bet he’d be whapping at them with his golf clubs just like the rest of us.