Being the Barbarian.

I was reading earlier that the people from S.E.T.I. have been telling the delegates at the American Association for the Advancement of Science Conference that more effort needs to be put into the search. Some of the delegates disagreed, suggesting that it might be dangerous (presumably because the inhabitants of some star called D730/421X might be the interstellar version of Vikings and we don’t want any more of that sort of thing, thank you very much!)

Well, I’m not so sure. I noticed a couple of nights ago that Venus has become an evening star again, and she set me on course for a theory:

What I think is that all the planets in our solar system are teeming with intelligent, sophisticated life, and that they’ve all been here and taken a look at how earthlings conduct their affairs. They were so appalled that they constructed a cloaking device which makes their planets appear uninhabitable so we won’t go there. To them, planet earth is like one of those particularly nasty neighbourhoods we have down here – bad enough even for the people who are used to living there, and certainly not the sort of place you’d ever want to make subject to an exchange arrangement. And I expect they noticed that humans and chimpanzees are very closely related.