Tag Archives: Aliens

Shouldn’t We push the big red button?

April 22, 2022 Creasy Leave a comment

So, a flying saucer full of aliens comes down to earth in 1790, about 30 years after the start of the industrial revolution, to study our planet. They are pretty impressed.

“Wow Xanex, this place is off the chart!”
“I know Keanu, look at all this shit! Now this is what you call a rich biosphere right?”
“Totally X, there’s like millions of species of animals and forna, we could be here for yonks classifying it all. Where shall we start?”
“I’ve got an idea Keanu, why don’t we take a top-down approach and identify the species at the very top of the food chain and work our way down?”

And so they do. Keanu tells Xanex to do a quick search to try to find evidence of any intelligent civilisation on the planet. After about 10 alien minutes, Xanex is standing at his console scratching his head.

“Wassup X?”

Says, Keanu

“Erm, honestly? I’m a bit confused. I did my search and I found what looks like one single species, but I’m thinking they are actually two. I mean they are biologically exactly the same except for a few environmental adaptations like skin colour, facial features and what not, but in every other way they are completely different”
“I don’t get you X, how can they be two species if they are biologically exactly the same? That don’t make no sense at all bra'”
“Yeah I dig it Keanu, I wasn’t chosen for this mission because I’m a pretty face you know. I am actually the astro-biologist on this fecking mission”
“So what you flappin’ about then X?”
“Ok look, Let’s give the whole bunch a name so we know what we are talking about. I dunno, how about humanity?

This image has an empty alt attribute; its file name is image.jpeg

So I’ve made a picture of the first kind of human. On the face of it, this geezer seems to be more technologically advanced than the other type (clothes, wigs, sail around in ships and making stuff in factories), but they seem to be spreading all over the planet from this bit of the planet here, taking over all the land but then fucking up everything they come across. Forests, killing all the wild animals for fur, killing all the whales for oil for their lamps and whatnot.

They spend a lot of time killing each other, but they especially like killing this other type of human. It’s almost like a sport! They seem to want to own and kill everything they see. Except for dogs! They love their dogs. Just for the sake of argument, lets call these ones “Greedy Humanity” or “Avarus Humanitas” because us aliens love our Latin don’t we?

Then there’s this other lot. It’s almost like they don’t give a crap about technology. They have basic hunting tools like spears and blow pipes and bows and arrows, and a really weird wobbly stick that they throw at big hopping mice, but it’s quite clever really because it comes back if they miss so they don’t have to run and go pick it up before they can throw it again, and some basic tools for a bit of farming and such, but no machines you can really point at.

They don’t seem to want to own anything at all! In fact, they seem to be very determined to not use anything they don’t actually need. They only hunt what they actually eat and farm in a way that preserves the land. Classic hunter gatherer types. Pretty nomadic bunch following the seasons and allowing the land they just left to recover from their presence. Great wheel of life stuff really. They live in relative harmony with each other (odd scuffle but nothing to write home about), and they seem to show a lot of respect for the natural environment and well, everything really. So whilst they are technologically miles behind these tossers, it strikes me they have a much more sustainable and intelligent way of life; almost wise. In fact so wise that they seem to intuitively understand at a spiritual level that energy and matter are the same thing and that makes everything as valuable as everything else. They make no distinction between a pebble or a person. We could call them “Wise Humanity” to distinguish them from these greedy bastards. “Wise Man” for short or “Homo Sapien”.

“Some are smart but they are not wise”
Shoshone Proverb

So, whilst the greedy ones seem to have all the power, land and technology, I reckon these wise ones, intellectually, philosophically, spiritually, ethically, and environmentally are actually the top of the food chain, but from the looks of it, they are pretty much on their way out what with all the butchering and slaughtering these greedy ones are doing.”

If Keanu had eyebrows, they would have been furrowed in thought. After about a minute he speaks up

“So, we’d better kill all the greedy ones then init?”
“Eh? What all of ’em?”

Says Xanex.

“Yeah, we better kill ’em all. The greedy ones I mean. It’s logical and us aliens are known for our logic and that. Look, if we let ’em live then these wise ones are goners right? Also, if these greedy fuckers keep going the way they are, then I can see a time when they will fill the atmosphere with Carbon Dioxide from all these fossil fuel burning factories they are setting up, and we all know what happens when you pump the atmosphere up with CO₂ right? Just a big mess and all of ’em, including the wise ones will become extinct along with lots of other species. So if you think about it we are duty bound to kill ’em really. Actually, it’s like we are doing them a favour really, because I’m sure that if they were thinking straight, they wouldn’t want to set off a global extinction event.”

Now X is thinking.

“Couldn’t we just show ’em how to do fusion and then they won’t use these fossil fuels?”

“You crack me up X, you really do.”

laughs Keanu

“You really think these nutters would use fusion properly? These dickheads would blow the planet up. No, we’re definitely gonna have to kill ’em. That is exactly, what we need to do”

He reaches over to a big red button on the console, winks at X and pushes the button.

“Kaboom motherfuckers!”

Image result for the day the earth stood still

Ok, so I’ve sort of nicked the idea from the movie “The Day the Earth Stood Still”, but I have modified it in two important ways: A) I didn’t want to kill off ALL of humanity and B) I didn’t pussy out at the last minute because John Cleese reckons we are all capable of changing our ways if only we were allowed to get to the point where everything was teetering on the brink of an abyss.

If the aliens had visited back in the 1790s, and had pushed the big red button (and they would’ve), wiping out Avarus Humanitas, the world would be a very different and better place today, because the ethical, philosophical and religious worldview of the remaining indigenous peoples is so fundamentally centred on the idea that

“Man belongs to earth, earth does not belong to man.”
Native American Proverb

Geographically, the remaining peoples of the earth would include Native Americans, South American indigenous tribes, Pacific Polynesian peoples, New Zealand’s Mauri peoples and Australian Aboriginal peoples.

All these peoples shared a common understanding and acceptance of our place in the world and the need to live in a way that maintains Nature’s fine balance.

All things are connected. Whatever befalls the earth befalls the children of the earth.
Chief Seattle (Seathl)

Now, I know what you’re thinking…

“Isn’t it a bit insensitive to be talking about pushing a big red button that kills pretty much everyone, when Russia’s invasion of Ukraine means we are teetering on the brink of WW3 Creasy?”

I can see why you might think that mon brave, but A) I would retort that I have actually been thinking about writing this blog for about 6 months (way before comrade Putin and NATO bolloxed everything up) and 3) what better time is there to demonstrate that not only have we not changed since the industrial revolution, but that we never will and that pushing that big red button (not the one that sets off all the nukes, the other one the Aliens had), is really the only logical and ethical thing left for us to do.

We have lost our humanity, or rather, our technological evolution has stolen it from us. We have lost our spiritual connection to the Earth. Walking the dog in local woods with the sound of the M25 ringing in your ears doesn’t count. It really doesn’t.

“What is life? It is the flash of a firefly in the night. It is the breath of a buffalo in the wintertime. It is the little shadow which runs across the grass and loses itself in the sunset.”
Crowfoot (1836-1890) warrior and peace-promoting head chief

Implicit in these words, is the notion of being still in the world and simply observing, and in that observing we learn truth and nothing could, or should, be more important. Instead of this simple but powerful truth, we, Avaratus Humanitas, have chosen to define and teach and reinforce a set of “moral” and “ethical” values based solely on the assumption that people are more valuable than everything else.

This is the fundamental difference between the world’s wise people and the rest of us. If a single human life is more valuable, more sacred, than everything else, then everything we do to preserve, enhance or worship that life becomes ethical. If human life is so sacred why wouldn’t we build temples of concrete and steel to worship it? Why wouldn’t we sacrifice everything that was there before to build those temples? Why wouldn’t we rape the earth over and over to grow the things we need to feed or decorate that abundant and most precious life? Everything else is secondary, everything else doesn’t matter. Only we matter, and we have enshrined that core value deeply into our collective psyches and our religious beliefs.

“Human life is sacred because from its beginning it involves the creative action of God and it remains for ever in a special relationship with the Creator, who is its sole end.”
Catholic Catechism

Whether it is Christianity or Islam or Judaism, the basic premise that we are more special than everything except God is baked in. This is the most basic and flawed form of logic. All cats have three legs. Tom is a cat. Ergo, Tom has three legs. Logically flawless and absolutely wrong. Humans have value, trees are not human, therefore trees are not valuable. The initial premise for the function is wildly incorrect, so no matter how logical or flawless the rest, the final conclusion will always be wrong.

You have to start from a different place. A more correct premise. A place where a pebble has the same exact value as a new born human baby.

“From a grain of sand to a great mountain, all is sacred”
Peter Blue Cloud (1935-) Mohawk writer

You have to start from a place of simple need versus want. If our only purpose was to survive, using only that which the world could sustainably and naturally provide, we would understand that our current rate of consumption of natural resources was not a problem to be solved later, but one which should occupy our every action and decision.

We would be watchful and careful in the way we shared this space and it would be entirely natural to preserve it so that our progeny could survive and know that everything had equal value too. Imagine the wisdom required to consider the impact of our every decision on the next 7 generations? We don’t even have the wisdom to think about the next one.

If we had this mindset, the decisions we would take would be very different. If nature produced a female that could not bear children, or a male that could not produce sperm with high motility, the decision wouldn’t be to conquer that natural selection with technology over and over again until the infertile couple actually produce another unnecessary child. Instead, adoption would be as normal and natural a way of “having” children, as actually giving birth to your own or having someone else do it for you as a surrogate. Sacred cow, right? Every man and woman have the right to have their own child whatever it takes, right? Why, because we are more valuable than the beasts of the field who naturally have the same condition, and anyway we have the tech to do it so what’s the problem?

The problem is that nature never gets a say. It tries to rebalance our numbers to levels it can sustain all the time, and we just keep giving it the finger. Disease? No problem. Famine? No problem. Floods? No problem. Infertility? No problem. Soil not producing enough human/livestock feed? Industrial Agro, no problem. Global warming? Bigger A/C units and houseboats, no problem. We think of everything as a problem to solve except us!

“We cultivated our land, but in a way different from the white man. We endeavoured to live with the land; they seemed to live off it. I was taught to preserve, never to destroy.”
– Australian Aboriginal – Tom Dystra

If our only purpose was to survive using only what the world could sustainably and naturally provide, we would not allow our population to to burgeon. It simply wouldn’t make any sense for our survival, or the survival of the other species that share this world. Look at the fuss we made about a few people who died during the COVID pandemic. Yeah, I said it! As I write, 5.98 million people have died of COVID. That’s 0.07% of the world population (7.8Bn and rising), and the vast majority of those people were over the age of 75! Shit, it’s not even one city’s worth of people. A normal and sane thought process would say “ahh, poor Doris/Jim, but s/he did have a good innings”. Instead, we were beating our breasts and going on and on about how unsafe care homes were, when we should have been taking them on daily outings to Val Doonican concerts in the COVID wards!

Too soon? Put it in the comments section.

If we were sane, every school in the world should have at least half their teaching staff come from the indigenous peoples of the world. That would be the only qualification they needed. The other half should only be allowed to teach knitting (with sustainably sourced wool). I accept that there aren’t enough Native Americans, Mauri or Aboriginals etc. to go round because we killed most of them, but if for the sake of argument we could, they would teach our children that living wisely is consistent with the certain knowledge that no one thing in the universe has greater value than any other thing because everything in the universe is exactly the same as everything else. Everything is ultimately energy and it simply moves from store to store (matter). They would teach them that as sentient and spiritual beings, we carry more responsibility for recognising and respecting that value in everything, not less.

If we were sane, only indigenous people could stand for public office. If you live somewhere where you have already wiped out the indigenous people, then you would have to vote for one that lives somewhere else. As our leaders, they would ensure that every decision taken took into account the impact on our world.

Apart from the practical problem of most indigenous people being dead depriving us of the teachers and leaders we really need, we also have the lightbulb problem.

We can no sooner go back and start from a new set of values, than we can uninvent the light bulb. It’s like someone pointing at a yellow cup and saying “that cup is red”. Nothing will convince you that the cup is red when you can see it is yellow. Our value system and beliefs are so deeply entrenched that they cannot be unbelieved. They can only die out. We have set our avaricious foot on a trail that has a clear and unambiguous destination and all the tree hugging in the world will not stop us from getting there. We are collectively consumed with consumption, engorged by our bottomless appetites (ever been to an “All you can eat” buffet in the US?), and yet more individually isolated and lonely than ever before, as Globalisation lays waste small communities in favour of anonymous city life. At the same time, we’re all so badly trying to be woke about some things that we have forgotten that we are deeply and artificially asleep to the single central truth; everything has equal value to everything else. If we woke to that simple truth, then no other wokeness would be needed. Bias and prejudice and intolerance cannot stand up in water that deep.

“It’s impossible to awaken a man who is pretending to be asleep.”
Navajo Proverb

I wrote a blog a while ago called Shouldn’t we Weaponise Babies? because I believed that the root cause to all of our problems today is the sheer number of humans that are consuming resources on our world. The basic concept behind that blog was to rapidly and radically reduce the world’s population to preserve the ecosystem required for high biodiversity on earth. I’d like to update that belief a little because it occurs to me that massive population reduction alone, albeit still very much needed, will not do the trick.

I seem to recall that I proposed a reduction from 7.8Bn people to say 500m people because at that level, provided that we never allow the global birth rate to grow above the replacement rate (2.1 kids per female), our level of consumption would be so low that the damage we have done could be healed naturally. I’d like to revise the reduction in population to 370m people, which just happens to be the total global population of all remaining indigenous peoples.

“That is a very spooky coincidence Creasy!”

Isn’t it?

I think I proposed that today’s children should be persuaded to not have children or to only allow 1 in 2 girls to have babies or something. So, I’ve changed my mind on that too. I don’t think that our selection of who can reproduce and who cannot should be random any more. We should limit reproduction to indigenous peoples only. What good is it to reduce the population if the people left teach those children the same values we carry around today. No, no, no, no, no! That won’t do at all. We have to scrape those values from the human consciousness like a burned lasagne from a baking dish that wasn’t stacked properly and therefore never made it into the dishwasher.

By only having indigenous people procreate, we can ensure that their children go to schools that only have indigenous children and indigenous teachers. To make sure that they don’t become infected by our values, we can create reservations in the cities for everyone else, where they can live out their lives. In 100 years they, and their values, will have all died out and the cities can be left to entropy to sort out. During that 100 years we should provide these people with every luxury their hearts may, and will, desire so they don’t feel like, well, like the indigenous people did when they were sent to a shithole reservation. Most importantly it might stop them from trying to escape or go to the countryside.

All other land should be returned to nature immediately and shared by the indigenous peoples of the world. We can’t give it back to them because their own system of values meant they never owned it in the first place.

Rewrite the 10 commandments as well, the one’s we have are pretty useless and nobody follows them, and they just keep going on and on about not committing adultery or not coveting they neighbours wife or not coveting they neighbours house which is fundamentally the same thing. If you ask me, the bloke who wrote the commandments is basically telling a crowd of sex starved other blokes, who have been wandering about for 40 years in a desert that takes a couple of weeks to walk across, not to shag his missus.

Our new commandments might look something like…

In our every deliberation, we must consider the impact of our decisions on the next 7 generations (Iroquois Proverb)
Regard Heaven as your father, Earth as your Mother and all things as your Brothers and Sisters (Native American Proverb)
Remain among the clumps of grass and do not elevate yourself (Hawaiian Proverb)
Treat the earth well: it was not given to you by your parents, it was loaned to you by your children. We do not inherit the Earth from our Ancestors, we borrow it from our Children (Native American Proverb)
Take only what you need and leave the land as you found it (Arapaho Proverb)
Pray to understand what man has forgotten (Lumbee Proverb)
The love of possessions is a weakness to be overcome (Santee (Dakota, Sioux) Proverb)
Only have 2 children. If one dies adopt another, or buy a dog….same thing. (Creasy)
Sit still on this high rock, look closely and you can see the pub from here (Aboriginal Proverb)
Don’t go near anything alive in Australia because it will bloody kill ya’ mate (Aboriginal Proverb)

These few simple measures, self evident and obvious, set the stage for a global renewal, not just of the land, but a healing of the collective mind. We have been poisoned but the poison is sweet and while the sweetness hides it’s fatal toxin, fatal it will be.

All but a few have forgotten the central truth of being, but it is still lying there in the pockets of those few, polished by soft hands and passed secretly from old pockets to new pockets, as they patiently wait for us to finish our feeding and move on like a great heard of bison, knowing that the wide trail of broken grass we leave behind will grow again as soon as we have gone.

If we want the best of humanity to go on, then the rest of us must “go quietly into the night”, so that the others can recommence their guardianship of this very special island in the cosmos.

“But how do 370m peacefully minded people force 7.4Bn people who don’t mind massacring all the peacefully minded people because it happens to be Tuesday and that’s when we do all our killin’ and butcherin’, to stay in the reservation Creasy?”

Ah! a crease in the Creasy solution. A crinkle in the Christmas wrapping paper of our Global gift. To a lesser man your observation might pose an insurmountable obstacle; a mountain range blocking our route to Nirvana (not the band). A chasm so deep and so wide that you could only fill it with the putrid dead corpses of Avarus Humanitas! And that, my little piranha, is why I have hatched PLAN B!

We’re going to need a Big Red Button….

Fiction, Light Relief, Philosophy, Science & Technology

Shouldn’t you leave my GoPro alone?

May 4, 2020 Creasy 4 Comments

I love to travel, don’t you? It’s such a buzz. The excitement builds the closer the trip gets until it’s only a few days away, and then it gets all frenetic and busy.

” Have you checked us in online?
I can’t find the passports babe!
Have you booked the car into the valet parking yet?”

I love the valet parking! Just drop it off and leave the keys, and then a few short steps to the terminal building.

I love the limo pick-up more.

Oh lovely Limo Pick-up
How I love thee though
I love thee twice, nay trice as much
as going low price, cheap eco....

Then there’s my favourite bit of all, well almost. Fast-Track. I LOVE FAST-TRACK. It’s not the fact that you get through customs quicker, I couldn’t care less about that. It’s the walking past the big, huge queues of angry looking people who don’t have Fast-Track that does it for me.

As the doors of the Business Lounge swish open, welcoming me into the sumptuous interior, I always have an incredibly strong urge to turn and shout at the top of my lungs

“I AM ENTERING THE BUSINESS CLASS LOUNGE WHERE I WILL DRINK AND EAT FOR FREE! I MAY TAKE A NAP ON A FULL-LENGTH BED, OR HAVE A HAIRCUT OR A MASSAGE WHILST ALL OF YOU TRY TO FIND SOMEWHERE TO CHARGE YOUR HUAWEI PHONES!”

Then there’s the sitting in the huge mahoosive seats in Business, sipping champagne and nibbling a canopé, whilst those same, now red-faced on the verge of a meltdown people, file past with their backpacks and their Costa coffees and their half-eaten caramel raisin muffins, muttering under their collective breath about how these bastards have never done a real days work in their lives, and Lu in the background bitterly complaining…

“My Entertainment system only has 73 channels Daddy and my seat is too wide and I cant kick Mummy’s seat in front because there’s too much legroom, and why does it keep turning into a bed with duvets and pillows and everything when I press this button?”

“yes, yeS, yES, YES, YES, YES, 7,7,7,7…. “

Whoa, whoa, whoa. Let’s slow this thing down before we all do something we regret, shall we?

My point was, I love to travel. Always have. And whilst my wife and daughter say I’m a travel snob (dunno what she’s talking about), let me tell you that I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate.

OK, that’s not mine. That was from that great scene in Blade Runner with Rutger Hauer, but I have seen some pretty amazing stuff.

I’ve stood on the edge of the Grand Canyon and watched the sun set over the desert. I’ve swum in 3 out of 5 of the earth’s oceans. I’ve driven across the US, coast to coast, in a car that cost $250. I’ve bummed all around Europe and lived on a beach in Greece for 6 months. I have sat and warmed myself amongst the ancient ruins of the Acropolis, with a bottle of Retsina, a loaf of bread and Plato’s Republic. I’ve swum with Sharks and Whale Sharks in the open sea. I’ve seen some of the most beautiful reefs you can imagine, in the bluest, clearest waters of Thailand, the Maldives and the Red Sea. In fact, here is a great picture of an extremely healthy reef in the Red Sea. Notice the sleeping octopus under the brain coral?

Oh, hang on a mo. Just a tick. Yes, that’s right. That picture is on my GoPro SITTING ON A CORAL REEF AT THE BOTTOM OF THE BLOODY RED SEA!!

“HOW ON EARTH DID THAT HAPPEN CREASY?”

Well, I’ll tell ya if you’ll just calm yourself down a bit.

We, that’s me, my wife and daughter, were on vacation in Egypt. Amazing country and amazing people. It was the perfect sunny, hot Egyptian day. We decided that we would go snorkelling in the Red Sea, because why wouldn’t you? It’s only one of the best snorkelling/dive locations in the world. Crystal clear waters and some of the healthiest reefs I have ever seen.

I love to snorkel on coral reefs, but I always wished I had a record of what I had seen. So, a few years back, I decided I would get a GoPro so I could film these soon-to-be-gone natural wonders. I also decided to get a headband that attaches to the GoPro to leave my hands free. I don’t know what for. Maybe for grappling with a particularly aggressive parrotfish or to point dramatically (with both hands), at some point of interest.

Now, these headbands are great. Everything you see, the GoPro also sees. You have to learn to turn your head slowly and get the angle of the camera right or it ends up looking like you’re being attacked by a Great White whilst examining your own nipples. Once you have cracked these two though (head and angle, not the nipples), these headbands are the dog’s bollocks.

Anyhoo, we’d decided to go snorkelling in the Red Sea and we managed to find a good boat that would take us out to the really nice reefs about an hour or so offshore. Once or twice, the crew pointed out dolphins gambling around the boat as my wife and daughter read and sunbathed on the afterdeck. I spent most of my trip making sure I had my GoPro all set up, in the right waterproof case and properly attached to the headband and with plenty of battery life.

When we arrived, I got all excited about getting into the water. I rinsed my mask in the soapy water provided, donned my fins and mask and then I slipped the GoPro headband onto my head. I changed the angle of the camera to where I knew my nipples would be absent from the shot, and I was all set.

One of the key things to remember when you are using one of these headbands is to make sure you hold on tightly to the camera as you enter the water. Two reasons really. If you are jumping in from a high deck, the force of the water can change the angle of the camera lens and we’re back to nipple shots. The other rather obvious reason is to prevent the headband from coming loose and falling off.

I know what you’re thinking. Creasy forgot to hold onto the GoPro as he jumped into the water and it slipped off and sank down to the reef below.

WRONGO!

I held on perfectly. I struck the perfect pose as I entered the water holding both mask and Camera in place. So you shouldn’t jump to conclusions, should you?

Once I was in the water and back on the surface, I looked around to see what’s what. Either my wife or my daughter was calling to me from the boat, so I raised my mask and said

“HUH?”

Whoever it was muttered some gibberish which I pretended to hear, and then I pulled my mask back down and started my Red Sea Reef Adventure. As I glided along, I made sure to slowly move my head from left to right so as to capture the fullest view of the reef 25ft below. When I noticed something of particular interest, be it a colourful fish or a bright coral, I would stop and look directly at the item of interest and be still for five to ten seconds to get a good shot (you can make stills from them later), before gliding gracefully away to the next spot.

The reef was magnificent. Nowadays, it is quite common to dive on a reef only to find that it has bleached and is dying. If ever there was a more telltale sign of Global Warming, it is the destruction of the world’s reefs. I always feel very lucky when I come across a healthy reef, and particularly happy that my daughter is creating memories of something that could well be gone by the time she is all grown up.

After an hour or so, I glided back towards the boat feeling relaxed and content. I was intrigued to see what the camera had picked up that my eye might’ve missed.

As I approached the ladder of the boat, I bent down to remove my fins and passed them up to a crew member. Then I reached up to remove the GoPro and….I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking that it slipped off while I was snorkelling around the reef.

WRONGO AGAIN!

It had actually come off when I raised my mask to listen to the inane babble of my wife and daughter.

“WHAT A DICK CREASY!”

Steady on. It’s a simple mistake to make. As I had raised the mask, so the headband had been flipped off behind me and the GoPro had sunk to the reef below. What? Have you never done something incredibly dumb in your life?

What made it worse, is that it dawned on me what a complete and utter twat I must have looked, paddling around, slowly turning my head left and right, to my mind demonstrating to any onlooker the correct way to get impeccable GoPro shots.

Of course, the boat had drifted while I was out, so the odds of the GoPro still being directly below us were about as strong as Neddy the Blackpool donkey winning the Grand National. Nonetheless, I pleaded with the crew, who took the whole thing very seriously, to come and help me look, and implied that there would be a magnificent reward for the recovery of the GoPro.

These lads were like fish. We were in about twenty-five, maybe thirty feet of water, and these boys were up and down like a bride’s nighty as they attempted to first find, and then recover, the GoPro. All to no avail. We searched around for about 20 minutes but it soon became clear to everyone that the dumb white boy had properly lost his camera and there would be no reward today.

A gloomier boat ride home you have never seen. Mostly the crew, who appeared to be truly distraught that they had missed out on the reward. It was clear that they blamed me for ruining their day. I was none too cheerful myself and not entirely sure I would make it back to the dock. Lu had her head back in her iPhone and didn’t give a monkey’s, but the wife? She chuckled contentedly all the way home. When I implied that had it not been for them distracting me it would never have happened in the first place, she chuckled a bit harder. This one would take a while to get old.

When we got back to our room, the conversation took a different turn

“Shall we get you a new one babe? No? You sure? I bet we can get one here in the hotel if you want one babe? Are you sure you’ll be able to hang on to this one though Jacques? ……heh heh heh”

Lu had something else on her mind.

“Daddy, what will happen to the GoPro now?”

I stopped and reflected for a moment before I said,

“Well baby, it’s probably still on and capturing all sorts of images on the reef, but eventually it will run out of battery and just lie there. Maybe a tourist will stumble across it and it will somehow make it’s way back to us?”
“But what if nobody finds it?”
“Well in that case, as the years go by, the coral will hopefully grow, and eventually the GoPro will become embedded in the reef until it is finally totally buried.”
“So will nobody ever find it then?”
“Well, never say never baby, but it’d be pretty unlikely…unless”

And then the Irish kicked in. Want a good story? Go to any pub in Ireland and buy a man a drink, and he will regale you with tales of leprechauns and the Republic until you buy him another drink, and then he will regale you some more.

“Unless…..one thousand years from now, all the people become extinct due to global warming. Then twenty-five thousand years later, after every sign of humanity has been covered over by the sands of time, a shining, slender, silver craft descends through our atmosphere, down through the clouds and swoops low and fast over the land. Searching. Searching. Until finally, its course takes it out over the clear, blue, unpolluted waters of the Red Sea, where it sinks lower and lower until it seems like it is just skimming the tops of the waves.
In a moment, the craft comes to a halt and hovers silently over the water. If there had still been people to hear, they would have heard the low hum of the craft increase as it starts to circle slowly around the same spot on the water. Has it found something? What can it be? Its sensors have picked up something. Something small and in the water. Maybe it’s nothing at all, but the sensors….something is there.

A small aperture in the belly of the craft seamlessly opens and seven shimmering orbs emerge. Immediately, they drop and sink beneath the waves, too small to hold beings but perhaps they’re drones of some sort. Seekers.

A little while later they surface and gently rise to meet the craft overhead. The aperture opens and the orbs slowly disappear inside one by one.
Onboard the craft, the visitor lifts the object that one of the Orbs has recovered. It has clearly been manufactured. It’s anything but natural. The angles are measured and symmetrical in a way that nature rarely is. The visitor became thoughtful. Scans of this world revealed no signs of any civilisation and yet here was this object. There are symbols on the casing of some kind. Perhaps the linguistic science group will decipher this later.

The visitor notices a button on what looks to be the top of the object. Pressing the button achieves nothing. Perhaps its energy source was depleted? Examining the object further, the visitor identifies the energy port and touches a panel in front of him. A fibre as fine as spider’s silk flows from the panel and connects itself to the energy port on the device. He presses the button again.

The screen on the device flickers into life. The visitor touches another console and the images on the screen of the device slowly appear holographically in the air in front of the visitor.

The visitors capacity for learning is clearly advanced, and before long the visitor has worked out how to playback the recorded content, which now starts to play on the holographic display.

Beings! The moving images on the device are clearly biological beings. Tactile beings clearly familiar with one another. Close. A family unit perhaps. Two mature beings and one smaller being. A black furry being also appears to be part of the family unit.

As the visitor continues to watch, images of structures, large groups of structures and rudimentary ground, air and marine vehicles are displayed. There are also many, many beings. The bipedal beings appear to be self-aware and intelligent. They make organised, systematic sounds that can only be language, and less ordered sounds that can only be emotional responses to stimulae. Other species are also apparent but appear to be less capable of organising behaviours or verbal communication. However, the black furry creature, who the bipedals in the recording refer to as “Bob”, appeared to have emotional responses at least as well developed as the bipedals.

As he watched, it became clear that the extremely good looking, and physically fit bipedal was the alpha in the group. The other’s referred to him as John or Creasy or Daddy or Babe or Handsome. These designations seemed to be entirely interchangeable.

As the visitor watched, the bipedal known as Creasy was now on a marine vessel and had evidently attached the device to his head via some means. Looking at the device now, the visitor could see no sign of how this attachment could be achieved and concluded that it must, therefore, have been either some degradable headband arrangement or the heads of these beings were magnetic.

Creasy was now looking down at the water from the edge of the vessel, before raising his hands to hold onto the camera and what appeared to be a mask. This being then suddenly launched himself into the water from the vessel and became briefly submerged before surfacing and looking about, gasping and spluttering for air.

The camera had picked up some sounds emanating from the vessel. Creasy turned to look in the direction of the sound. It appeared to be coming from the alpha’s mate. A creature of such beauty and grace that the visitor had to wonder what had attracted her to Creasy in the first place. She was calling out to creasy…
“Hey baby, are joo hokey in dere? Joo looked like joo landed flat on joor stomach!”

For some reason unbeknownst to the visitor, for it would not have affected the audibility of the exchange between the two beings, Creasy reached up and lifted his mask. As he did so, the recording device fell from his head and submerged beneath the waves drifting down toward the large crustacean organism below.
As it drifted down, it would periodically point upwards to show Creasy propelling himself frenetically along the surface, slowly moving his head from side to side as he did so. Every now and again, Creasy would halt in the water for quite a long time staring at something on the large seabed organism. Then for no apparent reason, off he would go again.

As he watched, the visitor’s shoulders began to shake and then heave as the realisation of what had just happened dawned on him. The visitor opened his feeding orifice and emitted a long loud howl.”

I stopped, opened my eyes and looked at my daughter expectantly.

“Why do you always do that?
“Do what?”

I said.

“That. You always end up goin’ on and on talkin’ rubbish when I could be on my iPhone”

I was a little saddened by, although not unused to, her response.

“I think I needed a way to make being such a plonker ok. I like the idea that all those memories we captured are not lost forever and that someday, someone will see them and remember us. All of us.
I think I just needed to convince myself that we should just leave my GoPro alone and let time figure out what to do with it. Now I don’t feel so bad about your Mum making me lose it, and we can forgive her and move on.”

She never did replace that GoPro.

Sometimes, me and Lu wonder if anyone found it or whether it is now buried in the coral. Whenever it does come up though, so does the story about the visitor, and Lu smiles and comes a little closer to hear it again.

Here’s a thought. If visitors do come, and we are gone by the time they get here, maybe they’ll find my GoPro, and then, because they have superior technology, they’ll be able to find this blog too!

So, if you are a visitor and you are reading this, first of all, Nanu-Nanu. Second of all, we were called Humans, Mankind, Humanity or Man and we were of the genus known here as Homo and the order known as Primates. Despite the nomenclature, 50% of our species were actually female – we called them women! We were sentient and in our history as humans (circa 200,000 orbits of the nearby star), many civilisations rose and fell. It may well be that other, less advanced, primate species have survived on Earth. That’s what we called this place you have come to. Earth.

We made some mistakes. Actually we made a lot of mistakes and it got us into trouble. So much trouble that unfortunately we cannot be here to greet you and welcome you to our world.

When we were here, it was still a beautiful place despite the mess we were making. During our lives (we lived, on average about 80 orbits of the star we called The Sun), it was becoming increasingly clear that the way we had created our society would not last. We were many, and we crowded together in great cities. We burned natural resources and filled our air with gases that warmed our planet too quickly, and we filled our land and oceans with our day to day detritus. We burned, and cut down the forests which were able to clean the harmful gases from our atmosphere. We didn’t think. Earth’s ecosystems were dying and we started to talk about the 6th great extinction event on our world. We didn’t believe.

We fought wars. Sometimes we fought on a planetary scale. Often we fought so that one group could control more resources than the next. Sometimes we squandered our youth for no reason at all.

We stifled our imagination and creativity in the pursuit of material wealth and we consumed and consumed and consumed.

We lost our way.

It must sound horrendous, and in many ways it was. Perhaps you feel that it is a good thing that such a species has gone. We were not all bad though. We achieved some amazing things too.

We were scientists and learned how to harness the power of a nucleus by splitting it or by fusing them together. Our scientists were closer than ever to finding a single unifying theory for everything.

We were explorers, it defined us. We built machines that took us to the bottom of our deepest oceans. We built rocket ships so we could leave the confines of our planet. We visited our moon. Men walked there. We sent probes to the farthest reaches of our star system and some went beyond into interstellar space. Is that why you are here? Did you find one?

We began the development of the technology that would take us to the 4th planet in this system. We called it Mars. We were going to make a colony there and protect our species from any extinction-level event here on Earth. I suppose that didn’t happen?

We listened to the stars. Once we knew how, we listened every hour, of every day for one sign that would answer our most important question, “Are we alone?”. We didn’t hear anything. We dreamt about a time when maybe one day, friendly visitors would arrive and announce themselves, and we would finally know there were others. We could learn from them and maybe they could learn something from us but either way, things would be different from that day forward.

If we couldn’t hear anyone else and nobody came, we imagined a time when we might go to the stars and meet, well, you.

We were poets and artists and musicians too. We created works of art of such beauty that, if you could only see them or hear them, your heart would fill and your eyes would weep. I hope you find examples as you explore this place.

We knew how to love. We knew how to hold each other close when we were feeling sad and alone, or hungry and cold. Then we were at our best. You would have liked us, then.

I hope you are seeing our world the way we found it, not the way we left it. I envy you this. I think you would probably have to travel a very long way before finding somewhere that has the beauty and richness of our world.

But no need to go find somewhere else. Stay awhile and explore the beauty, grace and diversity of our world. Maybe you shouldn’t stay here forever though. Come and visit of course, but keep Earth’s location a secret. Find out about us and our ways, but learn from our mistakes. Make sure that others leave the Earth alone. Guard this place the way we should have. Let it stay an unspoiled paradise again. Oh, and maybe you should return my GoPro to the reef.

Until next time, stay well. Creasy signing off

Body Politic, Light Relief, Science & Technology

Shouldn’t we play a prank on the ISS?

March 18, 2020 Creasy 2 Comments

It’s going to be April soon. More specifically April 1st.

There will never be a better time. We’re all down here. They’re all up there. Down here with us is the Coronavirus!

Oh come on! You have to see the practical joke potential in that for God’s sake!

Hang on. Rewind a bit. Just make sure we are all on the same page. The ISS is a big spaceship (International Space Station), which, at 357 feet is about the size of an American football pitch. It’s big, always occupied and orbits the earth 16 times a day. There are usually 3-6 astronauts there at any given time, floating about, doing all sorts of experiments and such, but it has been continually inhabited for the last 20 years. In total, 239 people have lived there. There’s a ton of other facts and figures about the ISS here but you get the point. Big spaceship, people on board, going round and round and totally away from the ole Coronavirus.

As long as we can control the uplinks to the ISS, we can tell them anything and they won’t know any different. Our current predicament presents an opportunity to execute the best prank since Orson Welles told us the Martians were coming!

There’s going to be a bit of co-ordination needed to pull it off mind, but there’s still time if we all dig in and put our minds to it.

What we should do (you’re gonna love this),….on April Fools Day (Larf? I nearly Coronavirused meself)…..just before the Astronauts wake up (can’t believe I came up with this)…..wait for it…………iiiss…….

WE SWITCH OFF ALL THE LIGHTS ON THE PLANET, GO SILENT AND MAKE ‘EM BELIEVE WE ARE ALL DEAD AND THEY ARE THE LAST HUMANS ALIVE!!!!!!

They’d be like

YAWN….”Hey Jess what time is it?”
“Hmmm? Mornin’ Andy. I dunno, I was asleep until you woke me, you dork”
“Hey Ollie, What time is it man?”
“Do I Lyook lyike a clyock you cryazy Amyericyan? Ayctyually I knyow thye tyime byecyause I am effyicyient Rysussyian Cyosmyonyaut….iyt’s Lyunchtyime”
“Ollie that can’t be right we always get woken up at breakfast time”
“Hold up Jess, he must’ve got that wrong. Need to get yourself an American watch Ollie!”
“Andy he’s right! We’ve missed breakfast – look at my superior American watch…IT IS LUNCHTIME!”
“WHAT? What in the name of snap, crackle and pop is going on down there in Mission Control”
“Houston? This is ISS. Come in please”
“Houston?”
“I’m not getting any response Jess”
“Thyat’s byecyause you hyave infyeryior American ryadyio eqyipmyent…lyet mye try on nyew myodyern Ryussyian Ryadyio Syystyem”
“Upravleniye poletom? Eto Olli, ya propustil zavtrak iz-za etikh imperialisticheskikh amerikantsev, zakhodite?”
“Privet, upravleniye missiyey?”
“I thyink thyey myust hyave gyone tyo lyunch. We hyave myany byeef styeaks in Myothyer Ryussyia”

Then, just when they are trying to figure out just what in tarnation and the heck is happening, we send the “Recorded Message”

ALIEN VESSEL, ALIEN VESSEL, COME NO CLOSER

This is a warning message from the ex-inhabitants (Wo/mankind or Huwo/manity) of the third planet (we called it Earth), of the star system with 8 (maybe 9?) orbiting worlds, to all Alien vessels (in the sense of extra-terrestrial, not immigrant) approaching Earth.

ATTEMPT NO LANDING ON THIS PLANET!

Our civilisation was attacked and annihilated by a Global virus called the Coronavirus. This virus attacks the respiratory system and unless you wash your hands, in the country we call the UK, you will die (cluster of little islands to the right of the big ocean, that looks like a squirrel eating a big nut. The nut is called Ireland. Note, you can wash your hands and survive in the North East of the nut but NOT, I say again, NOT, the South East, South, South West or West of the Nut.

ATTEMPT NO LANDING AND PLEASE MARK THIS PLANET WITH A SOPHISTICATED BIO-HAZARD BEACON (like in that awful movie After Earth) TO WARD OFF OTHER INTERSTELLAR VISITORS.

Live long and prosper.

And the ISS be like….

Nothing flusters Jess, but Andy and Ollie are crappin’ it. Especially Ollie who is apyoplyectyic!

“THyIS CyAN NyOT ByE HyAPPyENyING, THyEY CyOULDN’T DyROP US A NyOTE OR SyOMETHyING?”

We leave ’em stewing for about twelve hours with the message repeating over and over and over and over and over. This is plenty of time to stew a Russian, but you really must stir him every hour and a half if you want the meat to be tender.

We leave them twelve hours because no lights anywhere is going to be a bit inconvenient for us down here. Then, after twelve hours, all of a sudden, we turn on ALL the lights in the world at once, and we get the Bedouin nomadic tribes of the Sahara to make a huge sign with their campfires that spells out…

and the ISS be like

“PHEW!”
“But that was a good one eh Andy?
Andy?
Oi, Ollie where’s your bloody Soyuz gone?
Ollie?

ANDY?? OLLIE?? Where TF ARE YOU? IS THIS A PRANK?

She’s crappin’ it now.

See? We can only do this specific prank now because of the circumstances we find ourselves in, so shouldn’t we carpe diem the shit out of it?

A bit cruel you say. A bit inappropriate given the circumstances, you wonder. You feel I may have let my imagination get the best of me.

In my defence, there’s nothing to do because we are all locked in, and I’M BORED!

It does make you think though, doesn’t it?

I mean, I wonder what other specific things one might be able to do now, in these new circumstances, that we couldn’t, or wouldn’t, do before?

How often do you speak to your family? Especially if they live far away? I know I don’t do it very often, yet there is absolutely nothing to stop me. I have the time, and I am both a witty and interesting conversationalist. Who wouldn’t be delighted to hear from me? Who knows how much joy and light I might bring into their sad and mediocre lives!

Dunno why he keeps waking me up at 4 am…what the hell is wrong with him?

“Hey Google. Set reminder to call my sisters at 4 am every day”

I’m up with Bob at that time anyway so I’m sure they won’t mind.

Wasn’t it Reagan that said

“…. I couldn’t help but say to him [Gorbachev] , just think how easy his task and mine might be in these meetings that we held if suddenly there was a threat to this world from some other species, from another planet, outside in the universe. We’d forget all the little local differences that we have between our countries, and we would find out once and for all that we really are all human beings here on this Earth together. Well, I don’t suppose we can wait for some alien race to come down and threaten us, but I think that between us we can bring about that realization.”

Prophetic words. Nobody said the Aliens needed to be big, ugly, drooling, energy weapon totin’ human hunters. Turns out our Alien is a tiny little thing with pretty flowers sticking out like Shrek-ears, but look at how it’s affecting us. Our whole society is changing in a matter of days or a few short weeks. We have been confined to our homes and are unable to walk the streets without drones carrying megaphones telling us to get back indoors. Not here in the UK yet obviously, because we are made of sterner stuff and are impenetrable to the virus, but everywhere else.

Tangentially, the whole drone thing is just amazing out-of-the box lateral thinking and technology application. I cant wait to see ’em buzzing down our streets here in the UK blaring out….

“If you wouldn’t mind terribly returning to your home, it’s nearly tea time after all”

The most striking aspect of this crisis though is that we are all witnessing some very unusual human behaviours. On the one hand, you have the Moron Brigade hoovering up store loads of paper products, whilst on the other, we have whole streets of Italians standing on apartment balconies singing Bitch better have my money by Rihanna. This latter is just one example of how people are coming together, as confined, physical or online communities, to help practically or just to make people feel a bit better about what is going on.

People on Facebook and Twitter are circulating little leaflets to push through the doors of elderly or vulnerable people, offering help and support. Shop windows advertise local community support groups that are being set up to provide people in isolation with the aid they need.

Surely this is what Reagan was talking about. In our normal virus-free lives, altruism begins at home and rarely makes it out of the front door. We might donate a few quid to our favourite well-digging, child-caring, orphan-adopting charity every month, but bottom line? If you’re not a blood descendant, then you’re basically on your own.

Of course there are exceptions. That Irish chap did ever so well with Do they know it’s Christmas, Feed the Wooorld and Live-Aid. Then there’s Comic Relief that does a sterling job of raising money for good causes every year.

Over the past few years though we have increasingly seen less and less societal cohesion and more and more division. Urbanisation, Globalism, populist politics and careless thinking have all contributed to a society that more and more people are finding ruthless and unfulfilling.

Here’s the thing. I believe that the more we behave as though we live in a village the more we see the best of humanity.

I grew up in a village in the North of England. We left the doors open. People would just walk in and make themselves a brew. Simon, the milkman would come swooping around the corner on his bike, like a knight in shining armour, to defend the young kids on the street from any local bullies. We did visit ‘Lizbeth at the end of the road when she got dementia, and we sat with her as she asked “What time is it?” for the hundredth time in an hour. We all knew each other’s business and it was a good thing because it meant we were not only nosy enough but cared enough, to find out all about you before we went spreading rumours about you.

I lived in London for 23 years and barely knew who my next-door neighbour was.

So when I see village behaviours coming to the fore, when I see people giving a damn about not just their own family but everyone else’s, I become hopeful. How weird is it that all it takes is a little germ, admittedly capable of killing us, for us to change completely and be concerned for everyone.

I suppose the real question is, can we capture that and keep it safe? can we keep it up after we have expunged the little buggers? We live in interesting times. I’m hopeful.

Oh and Jess, Andy and Ollie. Don’t worry, we wouldn’t do that to you. After all, you’re the only ones who can see us all from up there.

But I could though.

Until next time, Stay well. Creasy signing off.

Shouldn't We?

Tag Archives: Aliens

Shouldn’t We push the big red button?

Shouldn’t you leave my GoPro alone?

Shouldn’t we play a prank on the ISS?

A place to come and have a think