There’d be a zerogravity pool, some widescreen tvs, a holodeck, a badminton court, a huge farm and garden (maintained by robots), an array of five-star restaurants, a large pub with billiards tables, a debating society, an extraordinary laboratory, sexbots, a library with no late-fees, clones of great artists and filmmakers and a private school system (at least two schools for every grade level).

It wouldn’t be so much about the destination as the journey. We’d have so much fun in the holodeck!

Yes, Pat, we’d bring the NFL, the best-ever Saints team and the best-ever Patriots team… we’d be the coaches.

Yes, Hallie, public shmeckling would be encouraged! Sure wouldn’t be any laws against it. (-:

I really think there’s no substitute for a face-to-face meeting with aliens. If we encountered intelligent life, we’d watch A Room With a View and play some Wii games together to establish rapport, and then we’d eat dinner. Wouldn’t take long to figure out whether we’d want to spend much time with them or get back to our journey.

Ha. Ha. I kid.

We don’t want to pollute space with our trash.

But seriously, I think the kind of stuff we send up is more important than the specific content. I suppose I’m mostly stuck in imagining Alien anthropologists. Scientists would be interested in seeing snapshots of what we’re like: what drives our culture, how we interact with each other, what our biological processes are, etc….

I think the manner we encode the data is probably largely irrelevant. Put it all on DVD’s. (Of course, they’ll need to download access rights to bypass the DRM…) Include a little “Rosetta Key” to help them download and decode our little digital glyphs. If we went digital we could include massive amounts of literature and art.

I’m not really concerned about bundling a “representative” sample of all Earth’s glory, though. We might think the differences between _The Office_ and the _Bhagavad Gita_ are really super important, but I’m guessing that to an alien consciousness, they’d be pretty darn similar. I’d also be sure to include a bunch of physiology and anatomy textbooks.

But again, for all practical purposes, we’ve already sent all that stuff out there. Any object we shoot into space travels too slowly to be of much practical use. We already broadcast tons of info into space via television and radio. We should probably just flip a DirecTV satellite to face outward.

No doubt any “first contact” would be fraught with misunderstandings and mistakes, even if the intent was benevolent and not a mission to repopulate/enslave/consume resources/gobble us up for a snack.

What would you send into space today as the new “Veeger” to be representative of life on earth?

Hope you made your early flight without too much pain. Must have been rough after all that rejoicing last night!!!