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CARNAVON. Local scientists say that if South Africa wins the race to host the Square Kilometer Array space telescope, their first project will be to try to locate intelligent life in South African politics. According to a spokesman, organic life had been found in Parliament, but it lacked certain basic attributes of intelligence. “It was just algae in Armani and bacteria in Beemers,” he explained.
The giant array of radio telescopes, which will be built by a multinational group in the Karoo if South Africa’s hosting bid is successful, detects radio waves instead of light, and can peer into spaces so distant from humanity and so devoid of warmth that scientists hope it may be able to see all the way into the inner workings of government.
“With current technology we can only see large globs of biological matter in Parliament, but no intelligent life,” explained lead researcher Professor Carl Sago-Pudding.
“The last probe beamed back images of life-forms engaged in largely parasitic activities, much like the flatulent swamp leeches of the Alpha Centauri system,” said Sago-Pudding. “In fact they were amazingly similar, except that they wore suits instead of slime-tubes. As far as we could tell they too had found slow-moving passive hosts, although where the swamp leeches prey on the Undulating Highland Vole, these creatures feast on a rather anaemic little endangered species called a ‘taxpayer’.”
Sago-Pudding said that the Square Kilometer Array would be able to solve many of the mysteries that remain in the cosmos, including the whereabouts of the Arms Deal report, and how many billions of years it would take for South African politicians to become accountable.
“We’re also getting an endless rhythmical droning sound coming from somewhere extremely far away,” he added. “At first we thought it might be a transmission of prime numbers like in ‘Contact’, but we’re now theorizing that it might in fact be a monologue by Thabo Mbeki, who, at last sighting, was orbiting Neptune out in the cold deep space of political isolation.”
But, he said, current telescopes were more than enough to see the current orbit of the Malema Cluster, an endlessly imploding young star-system characterized by emissions of very hot gas.
“It always looks on the point of breaking up and disappearing, but at the last minute it gets fired up again and goes around for another pass,” he said. “It gets a bit boring after a while, but the kids seem to like it.”
