Spliff’s Riffs: WTF!?!

Exciting, I get to introduce a new partner:

I was fooling around on my Dad’s old Ham Radio set, and not knowing a capacitor from a split antenna, stumbled upon some weird upper atmosphere bandwidth chatter that somehow became lucid. Turns out I was tuning into Spliff Parsec, galactic ranger from a different multiverse whose civilization has figured out how to utilize quantum entanglement travel (QET) to travel in singularities that open portals at precise locations in other universes. Spliff can then experience time and the environment as it is experienced locally, but with a compacted, think Readers Digest, knowledge of the history of any particular locale. This, of course, presumes that the locale doesn’t have the technical capacity to block QET, or other multi-verse travelers, and of course, has zero clue that Spliff is present (Spliff finds this particularly hilarious). Of course, as an au courant entity, Spliff is a quarkcaster: Spliffs Riffs. As Spliff will attest, to make it to a level 10 advanced civilization, a robust, if sometimes dark, sense of humor is an absolute necessity. Obviously, I take no responsibility (or credit) for Spliff’s views on our lovely blue planet, or its human inhabitants.

Greetings Spliff Fans. I just did a drop in on Section QX10, an outer arm of Galaxy Prime 223 (colloquially known as the Milky Way). This region has 183 planets capable of sustaining Carbon-based life. The planet QX10.87, the locals refer to it as Earth, is a smallish pretty blue marble that is at a fascinating inflection point. It’s hosted carbon-based life for 3.8 billion Earth years, consistently at a boring <1.0 level, until reaching level 1, 500 hundred million years ago. Recently a transcendent species, Homo sapiens evolved and pushed it to level 2, and then in the last 150 Earth years the planet has progressed rapidly and is closing in on level 4 as humans gained a rudimentary grasp of nuclear physics, figured out the basics of their biology, and recently developed some simple digital communications. They have sent some primitive craft out into their solar system. They consider one of their biggest achievements has been landing a ‘Man on the Moon’, seriously, I can’t make this stuff up!

Most of this progress is driven by their recognition that over 500,000,000 Earth years, the planet stored a large amount of organic carbon underground that can be extracted, and with some basic processing turned into high density liquid fuels that are cheap and easy to use in internal combustion engines (hahaha, you’ll need to visit the Museum Before Time to learn about what an internal combustion engines is), and also used to make electricity. Of course, the problem with these cheap, and easy to use organic fuels is that when burned they produce carbon dioxide or generate methane. Earthling scientists did figure out pretty quickly that burning these fuels produced greenhouse gases that accumulate in the atmosphere and trap excess heat, causing the planet to warm up. Seriously though, who listens to a bunch of wacky scientists! Okay, okay, our scientists did recently figure out how to make hyper-QET work, but none of them are super sexy Galactic Rangers! Alright, sorry for that aside, back to my story. The effects of this global warming on Earth are now ramping up quickly. This is going to lead to all kinds of Earthly chaos, and it will be fascinating to see how humans adapt, or if they can actually succeed in making a runaway greenhouse gas scenario that makes the planet uninhabitable for most multicellular life.

Sorry to bore you with all this background, so here’s the Beauty Thing. Like I said, one of their recent big discoveries was atomic physics, and this naturally led to development of nuclear weapons. Their ‘conventional weapons’ are truly primitive, so they think nukes are a big deal, and like most primitive races they spend a lot of time trying to kill each other. They have the luxury of never having encountered the Throgs or Zfftts, or any other civilization that could atomize Earth with the equivalent of a hand grenade (okay, seriously the Throgs, Zfftts or even the Bofouties wouldn’t consider wasting a hand grenade on such a pedestrian place). So now the United States, the Earth’s most powerful nation (and responsible for putting a “Man on the Moon”) is spending $1,700,000,000,000 of its dollars to upgrade its nuclear arsenal over 20 Earth years. They already have plenty of nuclear weapons, and some other Earth nations do too, and these are ‘adversaries’, so they are all pointed at each other, but they are worried the old weapons won’t work!

Obviously, as the Ecticot Conjecture showed many parsecs ago, spending this kind of money to annihilate your fellow beings is a losing economic proposition. It’s just not in most being’s heart and soul to devote all their effort to kill others of their kind, especially when the justification is that if you don’t have as good or better capacity to kill them, they might kill you. Not to mention when there are this many zeros behind the dollar sign, the BigWigs (no surprise that BigWigs exist on Earth too!) will find more and more creative ways to recycle the money among themselves. So now spending the $1,700,000,000,000 is already 10 years behind schedule and projected to cost closer to $3,000,000,000,000.

The really hilarious thing about this, is that these same US earthlings are fighting over whether they should spend any money on stopping global warming. Spending even a $1,000,000,000 of their dollars on doing something about climate change creates lots of heated discussion and very little action. Once again, the BigWigs, many of the same ones who are getting rich on the ‘nuclear cycle’ have plenty to say, not mention money at play in keeping the quo static.  Meanwhile, hardly anyone else on Earth knows about, or much less even seems to care about the trillions of dollars being spent to upgrade their nuclear weapons, instead of using it for lots of other more useful things.

Of course, in developing more efficient and usable nuclear weapons these Earthlings may be able to find an internal solution to climate change by reducing their current civilization to ashes. Not the most efficient way of stopping global warming, but definitely effective! If they manage to pull that off, I’ll definitely feature Earth on ‘Spliff’s Epic Fails’, and if they don’t blow themselves up, but still don’t get climate change under control it will earn an episode on ‘Spliff’s Stupidest Fails’. Of course, I am rooting for them to get past this current foolishness and move to level 5, or even on to level 6, that’s where the Bofouties actually might start paying attention to Earth. A Boufoutie Booty Call will sure get these Earthlings attention!! Stay tuned fans!