Are there intelligent life forms out there in the universe?
Well yeah. No one’s visited us yet.

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If the history of the Earth were a year, life would not appear until March, multi-cellular organisms not until November. Dinosaurs would show up on December 13, and mammals on December 15. On December 31, we’d show up. By late evening, we’d have well-developed brains.

And then it’d take us 60 seconds to thoroughly trash the place.

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We put tons of carcinogens into our food, water, and air.

And then spend millions of dollars looking for the cure for cancer.

Oh where oh where could it be.

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The thing about cause and effect is that unless it’s immediate and visual, we just don’t get it. We just don’t connect.

Consider CFCs and the ozone: it took us 10 years to figure that one out. It took us another 20 to do something about it, and it’ll probably take another 20 to do something effective!

(Wear sunscreen. Good one.)

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We sentenced Socrates to death and let a number of serial killers live.

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We’re still trying to get our whites whiter.

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We distinguish males from females. Before we do anything else. And before we do everything else. For example, ‘Mr. Smith’ really means ‘Penis-Person Smith’. The use of such sex-identifying prefixes is considered polite. The use of ‘Penis-Person’ — or ‘Dickhead’ — is not.

Apparently.

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Heard this guy say the other day that women can’t do jobs that involve heavy machinery.

You don’t have to lift it, you just have to operate it!

Besides — forklift.

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Most men generally don’t think much of most women.

And yet, they continue to prohibit them from joining the military, where they could easily get killed.

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This is our defence policy: I’ll hit you so you can’t hit me so I can’t hit you so you can’t hit me ...

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Our foreign aid policy goes something like this: the adults are too weak to do much of anything and the kids are so malnutritioned they’re mentally retarded, but hey, let’s give them just enough food (and no contraception) so they can keep on reproducing, a million new kids every three weeks.

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A contraceptive pill designed for men was rejected because of the negative side-effect of reducing their sex drive.

Given the reason for taking the pill, wouldn’t that have been a positive side-effect?

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We live in a world in which countries routinely sell weapons to their enemies: “Hey you. Yeah you. I’m gonna blow your face off. Yeah. What? You got nothin’ to fight with? Hey Vinny, sell the man one of your bazookas. No, not that one, the other one. Yeah. Well he can pay us later. Put him on our don’t-pay-till-May plan. Okay? You all set now? Okay then. Now I’m gonna blow your face off.”

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The Training Center for Subversive Warfare teaches that “Torture must be kept clean, it must not be carried out in the presence of those with sadistic tendencies, it must be carried out by some responsible person, and above all, it must be humane.”

Otherwise, it would be, what, wrong?

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McMaster University initiated a research project to study the health effects of war.

Perhaps some genius hypothesized that it causes death.

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In a recent experiment involving monkeys, 13% pulled a chain electroshocking an unrelated monkey whose agony was in plain view. In a similar experiment conducted with humans, 65% administered the shock, to the point of fatality.

Much to do was subsequently made about the ethics — of the experimenters.

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Many of us are too unimaginative — or too lazy — or both — to make our lives worthwhile. So we have kids. That’s our contribution to society. Genetic replications of our deficiency.

This inability to find fulfillment in the here and now is shared by those who set their sights on some heaven. No surprise, they’re the ones with the most kids.

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A worker, no doubt somebody’s kid, accidentally dropped a socket wrench down a silo. It hit a missile causing an explosion that launched a nine megaton hydrogen bomb into a field several hundred yards away. Oops.

Because of naval mishaps, there are now nine nuclear reactors and fifty nuclear warheads on the ocean floor. Mishaps.

A nuclear bomb fell out of a U.S. bomber and landed in a Carolina swamp. It has not yet been found. Perhaps the localized proliferation of two-headed alligators should be considered a clue.

The U.S. dropped four plutonium bombs on Spain by mistake. I have to ask: four at once or on four separate occasions?

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The Annual Turing Test Competition is an event in which a panel of experts asks questions from a remote location of a bunch of computers and a bunch of people. If they can’t tell that a computer is a computer, it passes the Turing Test: it is deemed able to think.

In a recent competition, some of the people failed the test.