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Sci-Fi Earth Science

Would You Fear Alien Life or Welcome It? (cnet.com) 226

Posted by BeauHD from the mixed-emotions dept.
If you've ever watched a science fiction movie about aliens, you'll know that humans tend to freak out and destroy everything when faced with incontrovertible proof of the existence of alien life. But a new analysis from Arizona State University psychology professor Michael Varnum and his colleagues suggests that humans might actually remain pretty calm and collected when that big news breaks. CNET reports: Varnum makes this conclusion based on an analysis of newspaper articles covering past potential discoveries of extraterrestrial life. Specifically, he and his colleagues looked at articles about the weird dimming of so-called "Tabby's Star," Earth-like planets around the star Trappist-1, and the potential discovery of Martian microbe fossils from 1996. They found language in the stories demonstrated much more positive emotion than fear or other negative emotions. In a second study, the team also surveyed over 500 people, asking them to guess how they and humanity would react to an announcement that alien microbial life had been discovered. In the case of both their own reaction and everyone else's, the participants hypothesized responses that were more positive than negative. The research was published last month in Frontiers in Psychology.
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Would You Fear Alien Life or Welcome It? More

Would You Fear Alien Life or Welcome It?

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  • Stay calm, unless you're RIAA/MPAA. (Score:5, Funny)

    by Z80a ( 971949 ) on Saturday February 17, 2018 @02:07AM (#56140566)

    Given the only truly unique resource we have is our media, there is a possibility that the aliens would be here just to pirate everything, fly away and sell it on some space market.

    • Re:Stay calm, unless you're RIAA/MPAA. (Score:5, Funny)

      by PolygamousRanchKid ( 1290638 ) on Saturday February 17, 2018 @02:44AM (#56140660)

      Given the only truly unique resource we have is our media, there is a possibility that the aliens would be here just to pirate everything, fly away and sell it on some space market.

      I'm thinking that the aliens will be interested in our socialist media. They will hack Facebook and meddle with the world's election systems to get themselves elected. Then we will all be enslaved building pyramid alien monuments, and be slowing siphoned off as food.

      Don't blame me. I voted for Kodos.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Z80a ( 971949 )

        I'm not talking about just the modern media, i'm talking about EVERYTHING.

        And there's nothing RIAA/MPAA/ESA or disney can do to stop it.
        Our DRMs will be cracked in seconds.

        • Our DRMs will be cracked in seconds.

          Since when do you need aliens for that?

        • I forget if it was Douglas Adams or who talking about WWII being a cultural drama for aliens, with a climax of two thermonuclear detonations...

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by DeBaas ( 470886 )

      Give them as a sample the X-factor and dancing on ice. They'll move on and never bother us again.

  • Would alien life fear us or welcome us, that is the question.

    • Would alien life fear us or welcome us, that is the question.

      I'm fairly convinced any discovery of alien life is bad bad news for us.
      If its the more likely finding if microbial life, we'd have to wonder what happened to the complex life, and is there some "great filter" that means our time is numbered.

      And if its complex grey-alien type life, we're screwed because they'd take one look at our hyper aggressive territorial species that's insane enough to use nukes on our own species and conclude that since we'r

  • I for one... (Score:3)

    by darkain ( 749283 ) on Saturday February 17, 2018 @02:12AM (#56140584) Homepage

    I for one, welcome our new alien overlords!

  • Iain M. Banks on 'Outside Context Problems' (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Hal_Porter ( 817932 ) on Saturday February 17, 2018 @02:15AM (#56140586)

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]

    This novel is about how the Culture deals with an Outside Context Problem (OCP), the kind of problem "most civilizations would encounter just once, and which they tended to encounter rather in the same way a sentence encountered a full stop."

    This is a problem that is "outside the context" as it is generally not considered until it occurs, and the capacity to actually conceive of or consider the OCP in the first place may not be possible or very limited (i.e., the majority of the group's population may not have the knowledge or ability to realize that the OCP can arise, or assume it is extremely unlikely). An example of OCP is an event in which a civilization does not consider the possibility that a much more technologically advanced society can exist, and then encounters one. The term is coined by Banks for the purpose of this novel, and described as follows:

    The usual example given to illustrate an Outside Context Problem was imagining you were a tribe on a largish, fertile island; you'd tamed the land, invented the wheel or writing or whatever, the neighbors were cooperative or enslaved but at any rate peaceful and you were busy raising temples to yourself with all the excess productive capacity you had, you were in a position of near-absolute power and control which your hallowed ancestors could hardly have dreamed of and the whole situation was just running along nicely like a canoe on wet grass... when suddenly this bristling lump of iron appears sailless and trailing steam in the bay and these guys carrying long funny-looking sticks come ashore and announce you've just been discovered, you're all subjects of the Emperor now, he's keen on presents called tax and these bright-eyed holy men would like a word with your priests.

    • Hey! An intelligent commenter!
      To my mind, it would depend upon how the aliens presented themselves visually --- giant creepy spiders I cannot tolerate, nor any snake-like life forms, but if they be magnificent and beautiful females, that would be most welcome (although, preferably, natural ones, not the ones the Trumpster and that golfing athlete prefer, the ones with fake boobies --- that's a No-No!).

      • It's interesting in the refugee crisis in Europe how the fact that the refugees were young men affected the way men and women reacted to the idea of letting them in.

  • I'd try to be welcoming; hopefully there wouldn't be cause for fear - whether from the aliens themselves or from humans making a wrong impression on them

    • To take it back a step: If it's simply a signal, indicating technologically advanced life, I suspect most humans would be elated - especially if the signal could be determined to originate from 50,000 ly distant. As a science fiction reader, I would immediately ponder "I wonder how advanced they are now?". Those who might be scared by a physical contact may be relieved that the distance is so vast, and plug their ears when people like me tell them that the aliens, if not extinct may be about 50,000 years

      • Comment removed based on user account deletion

        • Re: (Score:3)

          by dryeo ( 100693 )

          There's also the panspermia hypothesis where life has colonized the planets of the solar system (or further) and all the life is related, eg life originating on Venus and colonizing the Earth (and Mars) through meteors or such, in which case it may very well use the same amino acids. There's also the science fictional idea of a former civilization seeding the galaxy with life.
          https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]

        • "Even if alien life evolved in a similar way as us, it's unlikely that they'd use exactly the same amino acids"

          Good points, but since we can't know for certain, I would still be concerned. Then there's always mutation & evolutionary processes. In the meantime, I'm not going to worry about it - I'm more concerned about some rogue state/terrorist group developing genetically re-engineered terrestrial-based pathogens*.

          *tinfoil hat secured

  • Hasn't worked out well in our history (Score:5, Insightful)

    by whoever57 ( 658626 ) on Saturday February 17, 2018 @02:34AM (#56140630) Journal

    In every case where an advanced civilization has encountered a much less advanced civilization, it hasn't worked out well for the less advanced civilization. Ask Native Americans if they think that the arrival of Europeans was good for their culture.

    So, why should we expect that the arrival of aliens (who one can expect to be much more advanced than us) would be good for us?

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by symes ( 835608 )

      I don't think advanced human civilization meets less advanced civilization and all goes wrong is something we can apply to aliens from outer space. For one, humans meeting humans in the same space mean they are potential competitors or at least hold territory the more advanced guys would like to own.

      Aliens from outer space might want Earthly resources, or they might not, it is not a given. Given the aliens traveled here using technology we do not possess my guess is the need for Earth-like resources could b

      • the need for Earth-like resources could be met by visiting a whole range of unoccupied planets.

        Only if the resource they need is minerals or water. Not if it's lunch.

        • The likelihood that our two chemistries are compatible enough to eat one another is small, and even if they are, a species that can travel across light years, with all the power and tech that requires is likely to be able to manufacture their food much cheaply than what it would take to come down the gravity well just to get lunch.

          • You're assuming they don't have hipsters who want to tweet about how free range has a more artisan taste.

            Now you'd think a sufficiently advanced civilisation would have found a way to eliminate them, but we've got them and the Romans didn't.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by Whibla ( 210729 )

          Not if it's lunch.

          Or "sport".

      • That depends. If they are expanding in our neck of the galactic woods, and do not have the means to easily go to other distant solar systems (i.e. have no FTL travel that lets them go anywhere at the blink of an eye), then they might well see us as potential competition, and decide it's best to wipe us out before we spread. Would aliens undertake an incredibly long - perhaps multi generation - journey at enormous cost just to say hi? Perhaps. But they certainly would to wipe out a perceived thread to th

    • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward

      I'm (part) Native American and I am glad for the mixing of cultures. We've benefitted tremendously from the adding of European's. You make the mistake of seeing all Native Americans as one monolithic failure but the reality is most of us adapted and merged with the waves of Europeans and benefitted from the change.

    • If, by more advanced, you mean more tightly packed into shithole cities and highly exposed to all kinds of microbial agents - with global air-travel we might just have the upper hand on "advanced" aliens who have transcended the desire to overpopulate.

    • For the native americans then? It was terrible.
      For the native americans that survived and their descendants? Not so bad.

      They're no longer stuck in a dead-end culture that hadn't invented the wheel, medicine, open ocean navigation, literacy, or mathematics. Now they have lifespans almost that of the advanced culture that overran them, and tax- and educational-advantages in which the faintest willingness to work hard and not become a drug-dependent welfare monkey means it's easy to get an excellent free e

  • First, any aliens will be literally alien to us. We have no way to predict what some alien intelligence might look like. Predators? Aliens? Arisians? Would we taste good to them, or them to us? At present, all we have are our fears and imaginations.

  • The bleached Tribble on Trump's head kind of freaks me out.

  • How much worse could it be with aliens?

    Here's a joke:

    So, the aliens land on the White House lawn and say, "Take us to your leader".
    They are brought to Vladimir Putin.

    [I see you there laughing. Even mi and APK cracked a smile. Don't deny it.]

  • Murphy's law of quantum superposition (Score:3)

    by Solandri ( 704621 ) on Saturday February 17, 2018 @02:47AM (#56140666)
    If we fear it and kill the first alien visitor, they will turn out to be peaceful and friendly, and our hostile reaction will cause galactic civilizations to shun and ostracize us.

    If we welcome it and greet the first alien visitor with open arms, they will turn out to be conquerors who will ruthlessly subjugate the planet, enslaving half the population and eating the other half.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by Kjella ( 173770 )

      I think it's overly optimistic that our opinion would matter. Either we're likely to discover some extinct or microbiological life that is no threat to us at all or a civilization so advanced that even if we were aggressive it'd be like those isolated Amazon tribes throwing spears after helicopters. Remember that 10000 years ago we were cavemen, in 10000 years we'll either be demigods or have destroyed ourselves. In the billions of years the universe has existed we're a very tiny blip and that we should hap

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by mentil ( 1748130 )

      I imagine the 'Alien ambassador is killed due to misunderstanding' trope will be well-worn in the fiction/parables/diplomacy literature of an intelligent alien species. I imagine they'll be understanding rather than immediately switch to "kill all humans!!"
      Chances are especially high that they'd communicate via drone, since a) they can engineer it to look like our drones, so it wouldn't look so disconcerting
      b) they can do so without putting the messenger at risk, and
      c) they could observe us without giving u

    • They'll likely have seen our movies and I'm sure they will conclude from that that we are peaceful.

  • Indians (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward

    Should the Mayans and Aztecs have feared the Spanish conquistadors, or welcomed them?
    Should the Aborigines have welcomed the colonizers from England, or feared them?
    Should the American Indians have feared the colonizers from Europe, or welcomed them?
    Should the North American beavers have welcomed the colonizers from Europe, or feared them?

    When people fantasize about intelligent alien visitors, they usually place their intelligence level and physical characteristics close to our own. I am certain that would

    • Re:Indians (Score:5, Insightful)

      by quantaman ( 517394 ) on Saturday February 17, 2018 @03:30AM (#56140758)

      Should the Mayans and Aztecs have feared the Spanish conquistadors, or welcomed them?
      Should the Aborigines have welcomed the colonizers from England, or feared them?
      Should the American Indians have feared the colonizers from Europe, or welcomed them?
      Should the North American beavers have welcomed the colonizers from Europe, or feared them?

      When people fantasize about intelligent alien visitors, they usually place their intelligence level and physical characteristics close to our own. I am certain that would not be the case. Most likely they would mash us like potatoes. On the off chance they come in peace, the level of disruption they would cause to our worldwide community and economy would be immense.

      European colonization was undertaken by a culture primitive by our standards, not to mention the standards of technologically advanced aliens.

      Using European colonization as a template for alien contact will serve us about as well as using local conflicts as a template for European colonization served aboriginal populations.

      Aliens are unlikely to mash us like potatoes if for no other reason than they don't need to, they'll come at us with an extremely complex civilizations and deal with us without the bounds of the rules of that civilization.

      I think an "extinguish all other intelligent life" rule is unlikely if for no other reason than they really don't want that rule to be in effect if they encounter a superior civilization. More likely we'll be pulled into some kind of interstellar bureaucracy, the objectives of which change on whether one species or multiple species is actually in change.

      • Re: Indians (Score:3, Insightful)

        by jecowa ( 1152159 )
        Earth develops the warp engine and can travel 10,000 times the speed of light. A planet is discovered containing extra terrestrials with technology as advanced as the Native Americans were in the 1700s. How do you think the people of Earth would treat them? If the alein planet were found to be rich in a valuable natural resource, do you think this would change Earth's reaction?

        • Re: Indians (Score:5, Funny)

          by Hognoxious ( 631665 ) on Saturday February 17, 2018 @05:09AM (#56140940) Homepage Journal

          They should make a movie about that. Make the aliens blue, just because.

        • Earth develops the warp engine and can travel 10,000 times the speed of light. A planet is discovered containing extra terrestrials with technology as advanced as the Native Americans were in the 1700s. How do you think the people of Earth would treat them? If the alein planet were found to be rich in a valuable natural resource, do you think this would change Earth's reaction?

          If we have a warp engine then valuable resources are abundant without having to affect any civilization. Earth based conflict is inherently because of the limited resources we have, those limits disappear with interstellar travel so their would be no reason to treat them any different.

  • Do you fear it or welcome it?

  • FEAR! (Score:2)

    by DrTJ ( 4014489 )

    Simple Logic:
    1. Human are afraid of the unknown. Every horror movie director knows this. It seems to be evolutionally programmed into us. (Perhaps for good reasons)
    2. We would know extremely little about the aliens, i.e. being a very big unknown.

    1 and 2 => Fear, big time!

    Is it possible to concieve a more polarized "we and them" situation? On top of that, they stepping on to our (rather defensless) lawn with equipment that took them across star systems?

    How would it be anything but a paralyzing fear and pa

    • Simple Logic:
      1. Human are afraid of the unknown. Every horror movie director knows this. It seems to be evolutionally programmed into us. (Perhaps for good reasons)

      Tell that to the hundreds of thousands of humans who sailed the unknown seas, bashed their way through unknown jungles, explored the unknown depths of the oceans, and blasted off into the unknowns of space.

      The problem with "simple logic" is that it's almost always overly simplistic.

  • Sorry but aliens were invented to convince dumb people to give smart scientists money. Let me explain. No life can exist without a sun, which is actually a star. The closest star to us is about 4 light years away. That means it takes light 4 years to travel that distance. Light travels extremely fast, 186,287 miles per second, and according to special relativity we can never go the speed of light because it requires infinite energy. So even if we could go a speed we can never go, it would take 4 years

    • No life can exist without a sun, which is actually a star... according to special relativity we can never go the speed of light because it requires infinite energy... it would take 4 years to get to the closest star... why in the hell would they waste hundreds or thousands of years to visit us?

      Perhaps they are relentless pedants and they're coming to disabuse you of your preconceptions which are DEMONSTRABLY WRONG.

    • Re:Aliens can't or won't visit us (Score:5, Insightful)

      by geekmux ( 1040042 ) on Saturday February 17, 2018 @04:23AM (#56140850)

      Sorry but aliens were invented to convince dumb people to give smart scientists money. Let me explain. No life can exist without a sun, which is actually a star. The closest star to us is about 4 light years away. That means it takes light 4 years to travel that distance. Light travels extremely fast, 186,287 miles per second, and according to special relativity we can never go the speed of light because it requires infinite energy. So even if we could go a speed we can never go, it would take 4 years to get to the closest star. From there the distance goes up. Those stars you see in the sky are hundreds and thousands of light years away, which means at the fastest speed man has ever heard of, it would still take hundreds or thousands of years to reach. But imagine for a second there is some being that has the technology to travel that fast, why in the hell would they waste hundreds or thousands of years to visit us? Their technology compared to ours is like comparing humans to ants, there is nothing interesting about us at all compared to them. So aliens either don't exist or can't or won't visit us

      "Time is an illusion. Lunchtime doubly so."

      To clarify my H2G2 reference, time is a human concept. Humans tend to have a specific definition of a lifetime based on our biological makeup and limitations, roughly equating to a century or less. We have no idea what alien makeup will be, but logic dictates that their definition of a lifetime will be relative.

      There are countless galaxies in existence, and you are failing to take into account that an alien lifetime could last a million light years, and a trip to our planet could be no more than a lunchtime break for them, even traveling considerably slower than our perceived light-speed limits.

      TL; DR - Stop limiting your thinking within human-defined bounds. Whomever may come and visit, I just hope they know how to make a decent Pan Galactic Gargle Blaster. It would certainly help answer the question posed here.

    • Sorry but aliens were invented to convince dumb people to give smart scientists money. Let me explain. No life can exist without a sun, which is actually a star.

      This is just plain false. No life can exist without an energy source. So your first assumption is wrong.

      Light travels extremely fast, 186,287 miles per second, and according to special relativity we can never go the speed of light because it requires infinite energy.

      It doesn't say that it's not possible to travel faster than light, though. It only says that mass can't be accelerated to a speed that's faster than light. So your second assumption is false.

      So even if we could go a speed we can never go, it would take 4 years to get to the closest star.

      If you can't go a speed, what sense does it make to talk about it?

      But imagine for a second there is some being that has the technology to travel that fast, why in the hell would they waste hundreds or thousands of years to visit us? [...] there is nothing interesting about us at all compared to them.

      Art and food. Do I need to expound, or do you understand now?

  • ...rejoice!

    Why? Well, most have been mention in this thread, I'm going to summarize those I agree with:

    Fear factors:

    - Viruses and Bacteria unknown to us.
    - Increased demand for our resources (which btw, we're running out of, FAST!).
    - Unknown motives, why did they decide to take contact? This is usually either because of two things, curiosity and the need for new resources. The last one should worry us... A LOT!

    Good things:

    - New technology (they traveled this far, we didn't manage the opposite so chances are

    • A lot of bad things we dealt with on our planet, often "belief" based, can finally be laid to rest ...

      I don't know. We still have Flat Earthers trying to launch rockets to prove the Earth is flat or at least enough of them to fund a guy to do it.

  • With it would come huge disruption. Forget SF tropes about FTL drives and so forth. The most likely reason somebody would cross that huge divide, would be on generation ship and to colonize. Nuff said.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by mentil ( 1748130 )

      If they live long enough, it wouldn't really be a 'generation ship'. If they were effectively immortal, the "everyone I love will be old/dead when I get back" angst wouldn't exist.

    • Forget SF tropes about FTL drives and so forth. The most likely reason somebody would cross that huge divide, would be on generation ship and to colonize. Nuff said.

      That's the likeliest (only?) reason to cross that huge divide without FTL. If you had FTL, though, it's not a huge divide any more, and then you might just do it to go sightseeing.

      AFAWK you can't go FTL, so worrying about aliens is a waste of time.

      If aliens show up, welcome them with open arms, because if they show up to kill us we can't do anything about it, but if they aren't then we want to be friendly.

      • So the logic is "welcome them, because we can't fight them anyway".

        Didn't work so great for the natives in the various continents we "discovered", did it?

        • Didn't work so great for the natives in the various continents we "discovered", did it?

          No, but some of them still exist which is more than we could hope for if we resisted aliens with the technology to cross the void between the stars. Diseases of the Spanish had already wiped out up to 90% of native Americans by the time we showed up to wipe out most of the rest of them, though. They really had no chance to mount a defense of the entire nation. If you take a dispassionate, game player's view of the situation, their only sensible move was to abandon most of it and move west of their own volit

  • On several things.

    First and foremost, did we encounter alien life HERE, or did we encounter it wherever it evolved.

    In the latter case, I'd welcome it. In the former, not so much.

  • Green alien women!!! Oh the forbidden pleasure! I welcome them.

  • If they are then we're fucked if we get visited.

    The more alien they are, the higher our chances for survival.

  • It will be like a prion disease such as (https://www.cdc.gov/prions/index.html), but utilized in a way that's similar to CRISPR gene editing (https://www.technologyreview.com/s/609722/crispr-in-2018-coming-to-a-human-near-you/) except it'll rain from the sky during a meteor shower from the debris of an asteroid with a hyperbolic trajectory (https://www.space.com/38580-interstellar-object-spotted-comet-asteroid-mystery.html) or the worse case scenario is that it directly hits Earth and wipes us all out excep
  • Comment removed based on user account deletion

  • What if we're the first? (Score:3)

    by mark-t ( 151149 ) <markt AT nerdflat DOT com> on Saturday February 17, 2018 @10:55AM (#56142150) Journal
    Flipping the question around, what if we are the first sentient species in the universe? What if the next one isn't likely to come around for billions or even trillions of years? If it were possible, somehow, for us to know this, what would that mean,,or what should that mean for us, as a species?

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by JustNiz ( 692889 )

      The only thing that would noticeably change is an insufferable loud and long-term reaction from all the religious nutjobs claiming that it definitely proves the existence of God and that he made us, and that any/all evolution is necessarily false.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by mark-t ( 151149 )

        Yeah.... there'd be that. I was more wondering what the reaction from the more rationally-minded community would be.

        Such a thing would hardly prove the existence of God even if God *did* exist, because God is not necessarily a part of creation, and you can't use X to prove Y when Y is not inside of the domain of X in the first place.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by JustNiz ( 692889 )

          >> Such a thing would hardly prove the existence of God

          True but good luck trying to use reasoning and logic-based argument with people that believe sky fairies are the answer to everything.

  • Arizona State Psychology Professor conducted a study and determined that "people" are more likely to welcome Aliens than shoot at them. Some facts:

    1. The students that participated in his study, nor the commentary from past articles are representative of "people" as a whole.
    2. Younger people have less fear of death than older people.
    3. *NO ONE* that he conducted a study on is remotely representative of the governments of the world that have the resources and authority to initiate a meeting with Aliens i

  • If we find alien life existing around another star 50ly from us (through messaging, or even just chemical signatures), i imagine few people would be overwhelmed by that. on the other hand, if we discover alien life because we wake up one morning to hundreds of 100 mile long spaceships with a full invasion going on, i'm expecting people would probably freak out... at least a little. It's all about context.

    The LGM's (little green men) we don't have to worry about, it's the LGM's (large green motherfuckers

  • I know, this is /. where actually reading the summary, or the secondary source used to goose clicks, or the original article is a faux pas. But responding to what the researcher actually said/did - it is a fairly underwhelming conclusion: "Taken together, this work suggests that our reactions to a future confirmed discovery of microbial extraterrestrial life are likely to be fairly positive." hyped by silly references to B-movies.

    I have yet to see any movie, or popular fiction, where the discover of non-Ear

  • Let's think this through.

    If it's just other life - microbial - this might come as a surprise to some, but honestly, the universe is so big, it's bound to happen. What's it mean for us in the long run? Eh, does it really matter? It'll mean that the next step is more likely, but given the odds already ...

    Technological life - eg life that has altered its planet's atmosphere enough that we can detect it using standard astrophysics. Well, this is interesting, but unless we can contact them, it doesn't mean much

  • Or make sure my one year old sneezed on it.

  • Both (Score:2)

    by HiThere ( 15173 )

    You did say "Alien Life", not advanced technology alien visitors.

    If they were "advanced technology alien visitors", then given no more information than that they exist, I'd probably be more fearful than welcoming. If you want to know why you could ask the Aztecs. (OTOH, the neighboring tribes that weren't Aztecs *might* have a different opinion.) Or you could ask the native Hawaiians.

    Now these analogies aren't exact, but they are legitimate causes for trepidation.

    OTOH, they might help us get safely throu

  • Does ET qualify for a Twitter account? If so, then I fear ET.

    Even if the Green Borg is very far away and merely Tweeting over FTL subspace using his handy hive-mind Ansible client, that's clear and persistent danger, sure enough.

    Even a fusty Mormon Morkman from Gorkmon space-scroll that's jitterbugged the Feynman shuffle through not-so-empty space for 3000 years bearding the Mesonic Moses' Galactic n Commandments (one for every pudgy finger, floppy tentacle, and buoyant teat, slyly encoded in the serpentin

    • Not intended.

      I have no idea how that d got in there.

      Moses must have burst his visual category. Word play requires lowering your mind to a very low lateral activation energy, and then this kind of thing happens, but that's a lot weirder than most.

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