An open letter from the Zargon family
By Duncan Fingarson, Senior Columnist
The following was recorded at the Areciba Observatory in Peurto Rico, shortly before New Year’s Eve:
Is this thing on? Testing, testing… ah, there we go. All set for English translation… ahem.
Dear Earth! We recently got the spacecraft you sent—Voyager, I think it was called. We decided to take it as an open invitation to come by and check things out. We remotely looked in on you last year, around your Earth month of July.
Anyway, it looked like things were going alright down there, so we set course. We saw that election you had in the United States, and felt a bit worried about it, but we thought that surely you’d get rid of the orange toad before we arrived. Earth seemed like a largely reasonable place, there was no way he’d stick around, right? Frankly, it was amazing that he even won.
Well, we’re here now, and I must say we are quite disappointed with all of you. The one you call Trump is STILL president, an entire year later. We regret to inform you that, as a direct result, we’re cancelling our vacation to Earth this year, and will be going to Alpha Centauri instead.
Unfortunately, this means you will not be receiving any gifts from us. We had gathered that Earth month December was a time for showering acquaintances with gifts for some reason, and had brought a few along in case we needed to fit in. You were going to get blueprints for a jump drive, and an assortment of replicator arrays, as well as the answer to Fermi’s paradox, but we can’t in good conscience allow you out into the universe with that unmitigated disaster of a leader at the helm.
We might check back in a decade or two and see how things are then. We’re hopeful, but you’re really going to have to get things together if you want our tourist dollars. We have left Earth a bad review on our travel website, so don’t expect any other visitors in the next little while. We’ll revise it next time we stop by if things have improved.
I suppose this means you know there’s other life out here, now. Well, at least we’ve answered that one for you. Now where’s the… ah, here we go.
The transmission terminated after that. Scientists are still debating as to the exact meaning of the message. So far, they have managed to access Space Yelp, and are hard at work trying to make an account without a universal translator.
