Sorry, Wrong Planet

Did you hear about the plane that landed at the wrong airport?

Sounds like a joke, doesn't it? Nope.

A few days ago a passenger plane landed at the wrong airport. The runway at this airport was less than half the proper length. Consequently, the plane almost ran off the short runway into a valley.

Fun, eh?

You would think GPS 101 is every pilot's speciality. Or maybe the pilots were relying too much on the GPS technology.

Either way, they got it wrong. And that got me thinking.

Thinking about aliens. I've always wondered that if aliens really do exist, why do they come to earth?

The closest planet to us (outside of our solar system) is trillions upon trillions upon trillions of kilometres away. It takes incredibly advanced technology, huge amounts of time and very patient aliens to travel anywhere of import in this universe.

If there's one truth about our universe, it's that the size is larger than you can really imagine.

For example, you probably think our solar system ends at Pluto. Not even close. That is only a fraction of its size. You would have to travel many more billions upon billions of kilometres to get to the Oort cloud, the true end. It would take us 37,000 years using current technology to reach the end.

In short, it's no easy task to go visiting other planets. You probably want a good reason to go, like you have going to Acton.

And they pick Earth to visit? The earth with Rob Ford, Kim Jong Un and the Ice Capades? The planet that spent $400 million dollars in 2013 on Duck Dynasty merchandise?

Then it all made sense to me. These visiting aliens have landed at the wrong airport, so to speak. Taking a page from those "wayward" pilot's manual, they accidentally landed on earth when they meant to visit a much more distinguished and intelligent planet.

It must be. There's no earthly reason aliens would visit earth.

This is why UFOs travel so fast. Suffering from embarrassment, the aliens quickly realize their mistake and high tail it out of here.

I wonder if these aliens get in trouble for making such a dreadful error. Are they put on paid leave, like the pilots have been? Can you really call it paid leave when you're 5 light years away from home?

I wonder if the aliens bring passengers. Maybe to repopulate the planet. Imagine travelling trillions of kilometres eating space ship food and timing your washroom visits with the food cart, only to arrive at the astral-equivalent of Middelfart, Denmark (yes, a real place).

With such advanced technology, how could a mistake like this be made? It probably comes down to alien nature. This means the captain was banging the stewardess…sorry…flight attendant. In spaceflight terms, his needle was in the wrong compass.

The cockpit conversation might have gone something like this: "I expressly told you, Beeplob, to make a left at Uranus, but no, you go right down the anus, through the colon to the bowel called Earth. Bulbous heads will roll".

On the other hand, I can kind of understand the alien's tough position. The airport that the pilots landed at was 7 miles from the proper airport. Not that far, really.

Imagine trying to pick the correct planet from many that are millions or billions of miles apart. Mistakes have gotta happen often.

But no one ever concedes that aliens might get it wrong.

Isn't it nice to know even advanced civilizations make mistakes?