[net.tv] V: The Final Discussion

andrew@orca.UUCP (06/07/84)

I only just saw "V: The Final Foobar" last night.  Through the magic of
videotape, I saw it in four hours instead of six by skipping
commercials.  This technique is recommended.

	"It takes millions of years for things like the amount of water
	to change significantly. The only example we have of a planet
	that has dried out is mars. Is used to have more water
	(pictures show unmistakable erosion features) but it never had
	seas or oceans. At best there was enough water to dig some
	large canyons. It took literally hundreds of millions of years
	for even this small (compared to the earth) amount to be lost
	to space. The length of time necessary for a water world to dry
	out is large even by geological standards."

No need to restrict our consideration to natural attrition of water.
The visitors' planet has lots of intelligent life to screw it up.  My
theory is that some disgruntled lizard dropped a speck of Ice-9 into an
ocean.  Poof, no more drinking water.

There has been some scrabbling, but no resolution, to recall the pun in
Damon Knight's short story "To Serve Man".  In a nutshell, the story is
that advanced aliens arrive on Earth, profess great admiration for
humanity, and begin doing Nice Things.  They have a book, entitled "To
Serve Man", which expresses their philosophy and forms the basis for
their visit.  It's written in Alien, so we can't understand it, but a
human linguist begins trying to crack it.  In the meantime, the aliens
offer to take a shipload of humans on a sightseeing cruise.  Just as
the ship lifts off, the linguist rushes onto the field, screaming that
she just finished the translation, and it's not a philosophy, "It's a
cookbook."

(It's much funnier if you didn't know it was coming.)

  -- Andrew Klossner   (decvax!tektronix!orca!andrew)      [UUCP]
                       (orca!andrew.tektronix@rand-relay)  [ARPA]

burt@axiom.UUCP (Burt Janz) (06/11/84)

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Re: the comment about the story about the aliens who arrive on earth
with a book titled "To Serve Man".

Wasn't that story turned into a Twilight Zone episode?  (Think I saw
it recently on the boob)

		Burt Janz