War of the Worlds
So the earthlings intend to discover our secrets, eh? They think they're on the cutting edge because they're about to discover water on Mars, eh?
Well, you earthlings can have all the Martian water you want! In fact, here's a fair, even trade - our water for your stock of Diet Lemon Coke. In fact, let's really get interplanetary trade up and running; you take rocks, we'll take MP3 players; you take craters, we'll take Mounds. And so on. If you think that camping out in a Martian canal is fun, we'll be happy to do that body switcheroo thing we saw on Star Trek; and we'll throw in our tentacles as an extra-added bonus!
Hey there earthlings! Glad to know ya! As you can see, the Martian race is alive and kicking, but we're not the bad guys you think we are. Don't believe everything you see on the X Files! We're really a nice bunch of guys, as your exploration vessels are going to discover one day. In fact, we are actually a very cultured group, and we love cooking, among other things. One day we hope to host humans on our planet; we would love to have you as a guest! We've even got a special cookbook, which we can use to prepare your favorite dishes. It's called, "To Serve Man!"
Ha! Gotcha again! That one was from the Twilight Zone, right? To quote a fellow wisecracking real-life alien, Alf, "I kill me!" Seriously, it's a laugh a minute up here. Obviously, we're big TV fans. The truth is that our civilization is far advanced, and we could, if we wanted, vaporize the lot of you in about five minutes. But don't worry - just keep churning out stuff like "Everybody Loves Raymond" and "The Beverly Hillbillies," and you've got nothing to worry about!
we've got a few satellites surrounding earth that beam TV signals back to us, and, in honor of cordial relations between civilizations, we've returned the favor. You can now see exactly what's going on over on our side of the Van Allen Belt, in full color, by pointing your Web browser to http://www.mars.tv. This site has got all the latest pictures and images that your landers, the Spirit and Opportunity, are supposedly taking pictures of. If you're a Mars aficionado (highly recommended, seeing as we know all about you folks), you can find videos of the launches, information about experiments, and details about the spacecraft NASA has sent over here. Among the things you won't see, of course, are pictures of our houses and offices. It's not that you're "not ready" or "inferior" or any of those other alien cliches - it's just that NASA is strapped for cash and can't afford the license fees we want for the really good pictures. But we are letting NASA broadcast the freebie shots of the surface, some of the canals, etc. It's not as good as say, Sunday nights on Fox, but Mars TV is just going to have to do for now.
In fact, you earthlings should be thanking us for not being as nasty as the Moon Maids, who completely messed with your heads on those moon shots. Farbeit from us to meddle in Earth politics, but there is a whole school of thought that says that the moon shots, starting from 1969's Apollo 11 and onwards, never really happened; the pictures were beamed from a soundstage somewhere in Nevada! The whole sordid story can be found at http://mrbasheer.tripod.com/moonwalk.htm or http://www.forteantimes.com/articles/094_moon.shtml, which has photos and links "proving" the conspiracy theorists' claims about the phony moon landings. The counterargument - that the moonwalks were on the level - can be seen at http://www.redzero.demon.co.uk/moonhoax/index.html, which analyzes and refutes the skeptics' claims. The whole hullabaloo is taken quite seriously by many people - in fact, Apollo 11 astronaut Buzz Aldrin got REALLY mad a couple of years ago, and took a swing at one of the more well-known naysayers, who loudly insists that the whole thing is a fairy tale (you can see a video of this at http://www.csicop.org/articles/20021018-aldrin/). We, of course, know the truth, but we've promised NASA and the Moon Maids that we'll never tell. Let's just, say, though, that you wouldn't want to meet the Moon's TV rights attorneys in a dark crater at night!
No, we Martians are a lot more easygoing than some of these other space races, including, I might add, you earthlings. we've gotten past warfare and nasty litigation long ago, and besides watching TV, we, of course, spend our time playing computer games - with humans! Now, you all realize that when you contact a stranger on-line, whether in a game or a chat room, you have to take everything they say with a grain of salt, right? Think about it for a second; can there really be that many 15-year-old good for nothings who are spending their days and nights on-line? Don't their parents make them go to school? How are they up on the latest movies if they're always on-line? They can't be both at the computer and Mcdonald's at the same time, can they? Lots of the alleged teenagers playing on-line games during school or sleep hours are really bored Martians, looking for fun and friendship. Most Martians, naturally, prefer a good alien shoot-em-up game, and our favorite by far is Cosmic Encounter Online (http://www.cosmicencounter.com). There's a free and pay version, and basically you need to set up colonies on worlds around the galaxy and take over (this is a game we never lose!).
We also like the Alien Clones shoot 'em up (http://www.miniclip.com/clones.htm) and Alien Abduction game (http://www.miniclip.com/alienabduction/alienabduction.htm) at the MiniClip site, which also has lots of other games, like terrestrial Miniature Golf (http://www.miniclip.com). Another noteworthy free download can be found at http://www.curridori.it/page8.html, where you can get A-Yopulus, The Next Moon, which has stunning graphics and a nice action interface - as good-looking and exciting as you're going to find in a free game. (Windows 95 and better). The Website reads like a bad English translation of Martian, which it is, since the author (one of ours, of course), like the rest of us, is pretty laid back about attending school.
It may all sound like fun and games up here, but Mars does have its serious side - not! Seriously, Mars is the home of the original Milky Way Hippie movement. The only thing we bother with these days is getting to know the solar system, and another excellent Martian software product, called Home Planet, does all that information gathering for us. Home Planet has all sorts of data on the position, charts, star maps (the stellar kind, not the Hollywood kind), and all sorts of interesting data on the revolutions of the planets and their relationships to each other. The earth version of the program is available for free from http://www.fourmilab.ch/homeplanet/homeplanet.html (Windows 95 and better), and it comes in a full free or Lite version (the full version has a database of 256,000 stars and over 5,000 asteroids that can be computed and displayed on the star map). As you can see, we believe in doing things right up here, and doing them for free. It's like a non-stop party up here, but don't try to hitch a ride on the next shuttle up here - you're just not ready for the wild life on Mars. Imagine little green men seeing pink elephants day and night - it's enough to boggle the human imagination!
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