We are a mostly very social lot,
it's just our way to love to share with peers;
and so the invitations have gone out
for easily more than a hundred years.
It's likely that these aerograms we've sent
have reached a hundred thousand worlds out there;
but should some neighbours care to look us up,
are we at all for such a thing prepared?
Do we suppose they'll be our new best friends,
providing answers for our troubled race?
Our knights in shining armour dashing in
to save us, from the very depths of space?
Or could it be they're not such friendly folk?
They might drop by here just to pick and browse.
Perhaps they'll simply think of us as lunch,
and we could be the galaxy's new cows.
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Author Notes
aerogram (n.) a message sent by radio.
Most of us (of a certain age at least) probably think of an aerogram as a letter sent by air-mail; but before that the word meant a message transmitted by air waves.
It's estimated that there are around 15,000 stars within a 100 light-year radius of our sun, and on that basis I made a guesstimate of maybe around 100,000 other planets that our broadcast transmissions could have reached so far. I wonder if, on any of those worlds, someone is sitting there thinking to themselves, "Oh how wonderful, a lunch invitation!"
The photo is the Parkes radio telescope, which is about a 90 minute drive from my house, was commissioned in the year I was born, and played a huge role in (among other things) relaying live images of the first moon landing. Of course, its job is to listen for messages from space, not send them, but I couldn't resist such a great image.
My much-treasured Christmas present for 2017 is a book by Paul Anthony Jones: "The cabinet of linguistic curiosities". Each page contains a descriptive story about some obscure or archaic word. It occurred to me it would be a fun exercise to try and write, each day, a poem featuring the "word of the day" from the book.
Thanks for reading.
Image credit:
CSIRO [CC BY 3.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons
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