by Thomas Keister

Many is the time I have said the future was some bullshit. For all the marvelous advances we have made, how often it does it seem like you can boil it all down to three things: medicine has been effectively priced out of reason, the cell phones are smaller, and way too many fucking people find the cheezburger cats funny.

Think I'm wrong? Look at Paris Hilton. That is not to say directly look at her, because I would not recommend that to anyone, but I think you know what I mean. Had she been born twenty years earlier, she never would have been famous, at least not to the mind-boggling extent she is at present. That picture of her airing out the meat drapes climbing from the car? Yeah, that shit would never have happened. Sure, there would maybe have been a bidding war between Hustler and Penthouse, but the Hilton family would have been right there with the high bid to prevent any such picture from ever seeing the light of day. Then, a little "spa time" for Paris, some deft cosmetic surgery to hide the lobotomy scar, and life's such a dream, sweetheart.

Unfortunately, there was no way to stop Spencer Pratt and Heidi Montag from inexplicably becoming famous somehow, as that travesty happened due to television. That just remains a damn shame.

Part of the future is always keeping an eye on the past. It's the fiftieth anniversary of the beginning of the hunt for life in the stars, notably the beaming of radio waves and other shit out into the cosmos. I have always thought that was pretty damn cool, even if the alien invasion that enslaves us all was triggered by them picking up Jersey Shore a thousand years from now. I have had blogs and my radio show transmitted into never-ending blackness of space in the past, and it's a neat feeling to know that at some level, a piece of me is trasping through the universe, helping to teach advanced races the word fuck.

You could imagine my surprise, then, upon learning of a project at Massachusetts Institute of Technology that involved beaming the sounds of vaginal contractions into space. Why would this seem like a good idea to anyone? Turns out that Joe Davis, an artist and research affiliate at MIT, was concerned that no data regarding human genitals or reproduction. So Davis went with the sounds of summer, as it were. What is that going to do the aliens? They know what it sounds like, but not what it looks...now they are on the same level as half of those who play Magic: The Gathering. Lord know when then vast alien armada lands, we do not need confusion over where to jam the probes.

And to whom, I wondered, would one turn to obtain recordings of vaginal contractions? I mean, that microphone has got to be uncomfortable as hell. Do you post a help wanted flier with tabs down at the student union, or do you come the Internet looking for someone whose talent relies on ping pong ball and drunken bachelor parties? Neither. You go get some ballerinas, and you...wait. Ballerinas? Okay, now this guy is losing me somewhere in the mix.

As history would have it (although no record exists as to whether or not history would have it from behind), only a few minutes of...ahem...footage was broadcast before the U.S. Air Force used its jurisdiction over the project to shut it down. Yes, ladies and gentlemen, your United States Air Force was managing a project at MIT that at one point transmitted the sounds of moist schoochie into outer space. Now we are all unwitting accomplices to the intergalactic porn racket. You have to figure, if we have a marketplace here on Earth where a used panty vending machine is mainstream, then you can't even begin to imagine what lay in wait in the deepest regions of space. Never let it be said your defense dollars were going to waste.

Me personally? I'm anxiously awaiting first contact, and then the first cultural misunderstanding then they ask why we are trying to cram cell phones into our va-jay-jays.

Some of the information for this article came from this article at NewScientist.com