If I was an alien life form who had somehow managed to make its way to Earth, perhaps from the far side of Alpha Centauri using a parallel form of physics that we are yet to understand and I was to land in the high street of an average British town, what would I think?
Clearly I would have a lot to do. I would follow my instructions, get out my tools and scientific measuring equipment and start to realise the mission for which I had trained for many years. Perhaps I would be encumbered in a space suit to combat the effects of the highly toxic oxidising atmosphere, perhaps I would float in some aqueous suspension or perhaps I wouldn’t be recognisable as any life form at all.
I may have been in suspended animation and be feeling out of sorts. I may have been reconstituted from my atomic components and be feeling a bit queasy. Who knows?
No doubt I would have a look around, make sure that everything was safe and secure and that there was little threat from the natives. I would then start to gather information and beam the data back to my home location as I fought back the inevitable pangs of homesickness.
After a while, a long while, perhaps seventy of our earth years later, the bits and bytes would flow into the ground station of the operation and alien scientists would whoop in glee at the rich vein of information that was becoming available from this most exciting of adventures.
They would gather round their interface devices, a screen or a globe or a hologram and try to be the first to interpret the story while the evening news would crackle with the unfolding tales of life on our distant and insignificant blue dot.
But the terrestrial crew had only twenty hours to grab as much information before the alignment of the sun and the earth allowed them to take off and make their way back home and what they hadn’t realised was that by some quirk of fate they had landed in a shoe shop on Easter Sunday when no one was about.
Back home this is how the story was unfolding:
We cannot verify this until we have fully analysed the data but it seems that Zard (which is what they called Earth) is populated by two species of hominid both walking upright and wearing protection on their rudimentary feet which they refer to as shoes. One hominid is drab and uninteresting and is coloured brown or black or perhaps grey. The other meanwhile is far more colourful and has shoes in every colour of the known visible spectrum. There are far more of the colourful life form than the drab variety as their shoes have a ratio of twenty to one. A possible alternative explanation however is that the colourful variety has many more feet than the drab variety but the pictures on the walls would suggest that this is unlikely to be true. The ‘drabs’ are all the same height but the ‘colourful’ are varied as their shoes have different size heels to compensate for their stature. Their feet come in different sizes and are numbered. The smallest number is a three and the largest a twelve and so we deduce that their comprehension of arithmetic is very limited as there are only ten integers to play with. This is reinforced by the range of shoes available for the immature life form of both types which also come in the same number range but are clearly of a smaller size. Their feet are handed. Whilst this is at the cutting edge of our knowledge we need to be careful so as to not get carried away as all of this information should be taken in context.
How exciting! How informative! It’s amazing what you can glean from a few simple facts.
Thoughts from a Guerrilla Worker 