Sorry, SETI, I already deleted it all. Maybe Google can recover it?
I do kind of wonder why so many aliens want to sell me insurance, and others are sending me photos of weird aliens without any clothes on.
Pharyngula
Evolution, development, and random biological ejaculations from a godless liberal
The mildly deranged penguin claims it’s probably not “weird aliens without any clothes on” insomuchas “weird alien clothing” or, in some cases, “weird clothing designed / modeled by aliens”, with some examples of “weird clothing acting as aliens”. There are also, she asserts, examples of “aliens acting as clothing” (insert any necessary or desirable “weird”s), but that was a cosplay genre which never caught on, even on Earth (a weird fact which has spawned many academic studies, Earth being considered one of the most gullible rarely-sentient quasi-societies in the known multiverses).
It was probably all spam anyway, advertising tentacle enlargement (or reduction), opportunities to be paid 500 quadrillion galactic credits for the temporary use of your bank account by a Sqzzytfggyarbolian archquerdle, cheap insurance against your local star going supernova…
Stanislaw Lem suggested somewhere that the search for extrasolar intelligent civilizations should concentrate on looking for three succesive signs of high technology: trash, noise, and spots. Trash being a ring of junk surrounding a planet, noise being the chatter of discarded AIs once the latter make up much of the trash, and spots on the local star as a result of the planet-dwellers getting sick of the noise and reprogramming the redundant AIs to plunge into it.
It’s true! A lot of my spam was specifically about tentacle enlargement!
Aliens already walk among us. Nothing else could explain this:
https://www.irisvanherpen.com/collections/capriole
Admittedly, I’m mean enough to want to watch somebody try and walk through a NYC turnstile in any of those… creations. Or whatever they are. I mean, they’re being worn but I’m not sure they’re actually clothes? Maybe alien symbiotes? It’s hard to tell.
PZ — You get spam of aliens without clothes? The spam I get is much more mundane than that…mostly subscription offers, appeals for political donations, and oddly named links to obscure locations…perhaps those are the aliens without clothes but I don’t click them.
silvrhalide @ #4 — I’m fairly sure that haute couture is not intended to be worn through turnstiles. It’s more like limo from door to door with an escort.
@5 I’m still laughing crying over the shoes with teeth.
Can you actually make a grand entrance if you kind of have to shimmy through doors sideways? Some of those halo-y things look like they would be problematic even getting through double doors. But I bet they get great FM/Wi-Fi/cell connectivity. :P
Were the messages about ‘naked singularities’?
KG @2
“Star Diaries”. Another chapter was about a world where extreme body modification is the norm (we seem headed that way).
I like the chapter where the protagonist quarreled with different instances of himself in a time loop.
-And Britain has fallen under the influence of Master Oh.
Reminds me of Charlie Stross’s “MAXO Signals,” which appeared in Nature, of all things. Its conclusion is much more horrifying, though: https://www.nature.com/articles/4361206a
How do you know those messages from extraterrestrials weren’t actually spam?