You wake up one morning to find an absolutely massive spaceship hovering above your city. A ridiculously large metal device drops down, scoops up an entire neighborhood, and drops 10,000 people into a huge oven. They're burned to a crisp, and the carbon embers trigger a sensor that beams back information to some barely intelligent aliens remotely operating the spaceship half way across the galaxy.
"Nnnzzzzhhh dwaanbattt" they say, which loosely translated means, "Nope, no life there", for in their experience life is all uranium based.
At least, that's what it looks like from our end.
Scientists are racing to use the remaining four of Phoenix's eight tiny test ovens before the lander dies. The ovens are designed to sniff for traces of organic, or carbon-based compounds, that are considered the building blocks of life. Experiments so far has failed to turn up definitive evidence of organics.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/...
What if they're super small? Like the Whos down in Whoville?
What if they're highly intelligent microscopic organisms?
Or even mildly stupid ones?
Isn't it possible?
No? Neither was a Martian snowstorm, until today.
A laser aboard the Phoenix recently detected snow falling from clouds more than two miles above its home in the northern arctic plains. The snow disappeared before reaching the ground.
Surely, there's a better way to meet the unknown.
Surely there's a better way to greet our first alien neighbors than by roasting hundreds or thousands of them alive.
Or is that just our human nature?