Carl Sagan's Very Bad Day

We've found a slightly different draft of Carl Sagan's Pale Blue Dot speech.

We've found a slightly different draft of Carl Sagan's Pale Blue Dot speech.

Carl Sagan: Shitty Blue Dot of Disappointment
Look at it. Fucking look at it. Look at it again. Look at that fucking dot. That's here. That's home. That's it. All of us dumbfucks. Everyone you hate, everyone you didn't get to know, everyone you ever pretended to hear of when you were trying to impress someone, every asshole human being who ever fucked shit up till they died. That dead ball of useless salt water and rock isn't just the aggregate of four billion years of death and feces, it's also the only source we've ever had for suffering, save those few lucky bastards who died horribly in space.
Thousands of pointlessly confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines – all wrong, all equally wrong and murdering each other for it, every manhunter and cannibal, everyone who ever stupidly ate shit and died, every armadillo-fucking forager, every dumbass and coward, every liar and destroyer of civilization, every inbred king who thought he was the shit, and peasant who waded in it, every young couple who thought they were in love, every cheating mother and abusive father, every useless child brought screaming into a world without purpose or care, every inventor of dildos and guns, every explorer of depravity and servitude, every teacher of shitty morals, every corrupt politician, every dead "superstar," every dead "supreme leader" in the history of our species lived there--on a mote of shit suspended in cosmic hellfire.
The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of this urine-soaked dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds.
Oh, sure, we posture, in some fake self-importance, forever indulging the suicidal delusion that we matter in the Universe any more than the parasites that live in the assholes of parasites that live in the assholes of vultures, and that's the only reason our tiny malfunctioning brains can be challenged by this point of pale, piss-in-the-stars blue light. Our planet is lonely for no reason, just like all of us, an insignificant speck in the insignificant cosmic dark that serves as a fitting metaphor for our mortality. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no help that can come from anywhere to save us from ourselves.
The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life, and it does not give a shit if we live or die. There is nowhere else to go. We're stuck on this shithole rock. We don't even visit. We're too dumb to figure out how to settle elsewhere. Earth is where we make our stand, where we can choose to inflict our horrors on an unsuspecting cosmos in the future.
It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. But that's a pile of horseshit. We know the truth. Nothing matters. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores how none of this shit matters, and that even if we do preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, it will be for all the wrong reasons, in order to trap future generations in the only home we've ever known, out of fear.

HOLY SHIT, I SEE WHY HE WENT WITH THE ORIGINAL VERSION

-FPJEROME

Interview with Neil deGrasse Tyson

Underneath the Actuality Shield: 

Underneath the Actuality Shield:

 

Pearl River Flow:  “We’re interviewing world-famous astronomer Neil deGrasse Tyson today, it’s certainly the biggest interview we’ve been able to do so far, and we’re honored to have him on the show.”

Neil DeGrasse Tyson: “Well, you know, you say ‘we’ but, actually, there’s only one of you.”

PRF: “Okay, good point, Neil, I was using the editorial ‘we,’ so let’s…”

NDT: “Also, while you are in fact, interviewing me today, by the time people read this interview, the day that they read it won’t be today. They’ll become time travellers, simply by…”

PRF: “Okay, right, but it’ll be ‘today’ to them, or they can look at the date stamp and…”

NDT: “And while you say it’s the ‘biggest’ interview you’ve ever done, the mass of all the interviews is negligible, so you could perhaps say it’s going to be your most popular interview, or I am your largest guest, if that’s true.”

PRF: “That’s true. Our other interviews were mostly small woodland creatures and Phil Bryant. I think you're larger than him.”

NDT: “That must have smelled awful. Did you know our sense of smell is actually a sense of chemical touch? The molecules in the air directly touch our olfactory nerves, creating impulses that the brain references with memories, allowing us to identify what we mistakenly call ‘smells.’ Also, did you know that hate, being a chemical interaction inside the neurons of the brain, has a weight, or more technically, a mass?"


PRF: “Is that a mistake? That doesn’t feel like a mistake. Also, the woodland creatures smelled fine.”

NDT: "Woodland creatures smell wonderful. I know that. They smell of starstuff. We're all made of starstuff. Even Phil Bryant."

PRF: "Are you telling me that the 'hatestar' is real?"

NDT: *Chuckling merrily* "No comment. But, hate does have a smell."

PRF: "Alright, can we get to the first question?"

NDT: *Chuckling a little more merrily* "You mean the second question?"

PRF: "Goddamnit, Neil, don't do this to me."

NDT: "When you say you're honored to have me 'on the show,' are you suggesting that I am, somehow, standing on top of it? Given four dimensions of space, the only one that I can be said to reside 'above' your readers is in the 'time' dimension, where if we arbitrarily - because all directions are arbitrary - designate 'before' as 'above,' then I am in fact 'above' or 'on' your 'show,' even though it's not what is traditionally understood as a 'show,' it's a written interview."

PRF: "I must confess to a certain amount of inexactitude in my English, Neil. I like a little poetry, leaving things open to interpretation."

NDT: "So I am forced to translate from 'muddled idiot' into 'science english.' After having seen Prometheus, I am up to the task."

PRF: "Did you really see Prometheus, or was it just photons..."

NDT: "Hey, no. I do that. Not you. Cut that out."

PRF: "Alright the..."

NDT: *Waiting expectantly*

PRF: *Sighs, counts on fingers* "Uh, mistake, Hatestar, first question.. Okay, alright, the forth question. 

NDT: "Excellent!"

PRF: "Do you think that aliens would purposefully contact human, or post-human civilizations?"

NDT: "What do you know about the squirrel plan?!"

PRF: "I'm with the beavers, Tyson. It's okay."

NDT: "We get Mars, flat-tail."

PRF: "Okay, okay, chill out."

NDT: "Did you know that most liquids contract, rather than expand, when they freeze? Water's an exception, it's crystalline structure causes it to take up more space than it's liquid form. So on a world where water was not the main liquid, thinking creatures might say 'chill in,' because their liquids would contract when frozen."

PRF: "That's actually kind of.... cool."

NDT: *Laughs giddily like a schoolgirl*

PRF: "So, if we lived on a world with a different non-water liquid, it would shrink when it froze, and wouldn't float to the top of the lake or ocean or whatever? It would sink to the bottom?"

NDT: "Yes, retaining it's cold, not being thawed out by the lifegiving sun." *At the mention of 'life-giving sun' Tyson kneels, touches the floor with his right knuckle, then raises his left fist to the sky before mouthing a word I cannot hear* "Therefore, oceans made of a non-water liquid would freeze an Earthlike planet, turning it into a lifeless snowball."

PRF: "Whoa. Did you cover that on Cosmos?"

NDT: "I didn't want to terrify you all into sleepless nights."

PRF: "But you did that whole thing on 'The Great Dying.' I couldn't sleep for a week, knowing that we're basically doing the same thing to the ocean now."

NDT: "Ah, the Great Dying. Hail Satan."

PRF: "What?"

NDT: "Good friend of mine. Let's carry on."

PRF: "I'd really like to come back to what you just said..."

NDT: "The Great Dying wasn't that great, but there was a hell of a lot of dying. Like, everything dead. *There is a bit of a glimmer in his eye here, but I cannot tell if it is sadness or joy* Most everything in the oceans died as it became an anoxic pit of poison, spewing clouds of toxic methane gases out over the continents. Even the trilobites, who had survived on the Earth for most of the history of multicellular life, enduring meteors, comets, volcanoes, the appearance of predators, diseases, parasites - even they were wiped from the book of life, swept by the cold hand of the Death Ocean into the Halls of Extinction."

PRF: "So I was searching the phrase 'Death Ocean' to come up with a pithy clip of a Death Metal band playing the song, but every time I typed it in, all these articles were about how we're actually killing the oceans."

NDT: "You mean 'that thing that's most of the Planet?"

PRF: "We're fucked, aren't we?"

NDT: "Fucking would imply some sort of coitus. When we've killed the oceans, we will simply cease to exist, after centuries of hopeless torment."

PRF: "I think we're going to end on that note."

NDT: "Actually, the note we end on will be the strangled cry of the infant in the crib as clouds of methane flow over what's left of the straggling, starving dregs of humanity, torn down in the peak of their civilization from their gleaming cities and hopeful concrete temples, to choke and bleed in the streets as they fight over the last few grains of corn that were harvested years ago from poisoned fields of blood..."

PRF: "Cut off the mic. Cut it all off. End the transmission, damnit! Why is he smiling?! WHY IS HE SMILING!?

NDT: "...actually, when you say 'hope,' as in 'there's hope for the future,' what you really mean is 'I want the future to be this way' but the Universe doesn't care, it..."

*STATIC*

We regret losing another Pearl River Flow intern team. We are now hiring. We do not, as it is, 'pay,' though the 'exposure' is great, so bring weather-appropriate gear. You will be expected to fight raccoons for your daily snack allowance.

Deeper Into the Cubes

The cube has reproduced. There are more of them now. They are changing, evolving.

Center For Cube Studies: Pearl River Flow HQ

Time and date unknown

Following the incident evidenced after our original research, we have delved deeper into the question of THE CUBE. The existence of these artifacts, or, perhaps, artifact, has been dealt with by the paranormal research team at PRF. 

[END TRANSMISSION]

Date Unknown

HEAD RESEARCHER: Garry Blatherskite.

It's possible that I was brought back from the dead just for this.  But that doesn't seem right. I was only ten years old. I AM only ten years old, but the cubes change time. I have been doing this for decades. I am yet to begin.

Everyone thought the cube was just one entity, eternal, forever, unchanging, a Platonic form left to weather in the swamp of the Real. We did not think it could be broken. We did not know how many there were, how many there are, how many there will be.

Wrong, wrong wrong! We knew we were wrong, but we - I - just now discovered we were wrong. They don't even know yet. I haven't read the words I am about to type, I have not written them yet, but I have read them on an ancient terminal after the end of the world. They are written in the language of the cubes long after we are all gone.

They change. They multiply. Or divide. It depends on how you view the cubes, or how time views them while you view time.

Back to their mundane substance. Mineralogy escapes us, laser beams and chromatographs spout nonsense, give lines for nonexistent compounds. Hardness seems off the charts, but yet when the time comes for them to... reproduce...

There cannot be another word for it, for what these hexahedrons accomplish with the split shards, cracking along lines only visible in ancient photographs. They reproduce, like bacteria or yeast, each one a multitude dividing, and like these invisible architects, the sole actors on the stage of life for three of the four billion year history of the world, they have a way to... exchange information, a crystalline genetics unhinged by time, alien to the teeming forms of life on earth.

None of life is like them. All of life is like them. Was like them. We changed, became algae and mushrooms and ants and trees and plankton. They did not change. They waited.

Reports have come in. We can see inside the cubes, if we wish to go mad. Many members of the research team did just that, willingly peered into the stone stomata. In an instant born before they were, something was transferred into them, plasmid bridges bringing unfolding sheets and shapes. They saw inside, and they told me of vestigial things, symbiotic organs, impossible matter.

Their words turned into a song of screams, each one desired to have inorganic bones, they argued, not knowing if they always had crystalline fibers for hairs, if the iridescent colors of their skin were becoming more or less pronounced as the cubes rebuilt them, each geometric parasitic egg as flawed and alive as the human beings they had replaced.

I know the cubes will hatch. I know they have hatched. I am not old enough to have seen them in every backyard, appearing next to barbeque grills and water tanks, I know I have never watched curious children point to them at the zoo next to the stained glass panda, eating twitching leaves from the trough formed on top.

I am just a child. I lived and died and came back and I have died again, I see the statues of my coworkers frozen in delight, the joy overwhelming, and yet I see them wish for their crystalline fate. They want to be glass.

They are so beautiful, and I am transfixed by what they will become.

I will look inside. The statues that were my friends, the eggs that were my family, they tell me that I already have looked, I have heard the song of the cubes and it is beautiful. I have always heard it, in my mind, in those quiet moments at 3 AM when the noises of the world are all that is left. My mind is wind over broken time, carving canyons formed by our obsolescence. The cubes have always been here. The cubes will always be here. The only way forward is in stone.

The first cube was in the swamp. We are the last cube.

I am coming home. We all become.

[BEGIN TRANSMISSION]

- This strange transmission was found on a disused IBM 5100 in the PRF facility basement. It should be noted that Pearl River Flow has no "Paranormal Research Team," nor a "Center for Cube Studies." The owner of the computer, one "John Titor," was unavailable for comment, though one of the interns swears he was a reporter here. Whatever the case, we are on the lookout for any further developments of THE CUBE.

-FPJEROME


Failed Produce Advertising Campaign

We stumble across many failures in our meanderings. This was one such failure. Perhaps it was some first-draft effort of the company that eventually did the "dead child insurance" Super Bowl commercial. Or perhaps it is yet another run in of our staff with Werner Herzog.

All we can determine is that this was an attempt to sell produce with Existential Philosophy. Many marketeers are high-minded, pretending that their work is not intellectual murder. Often they turn to philosophy in some maddened grasp at something retaining a glint of the purity denied forever to them.

They should stick to pretty pictures and recipes.

Tangerines - the lazy man's orange.

The copy for this quarter-page newspaper ad, set to run in fifty major markets simultaneously: We all must die. In the meantime, enjoy a tangerine. Struggle with meaning, not peeling.

Did you know that Malic Acid makes green apples and wine tart? Yeah, it's a super-boring fact.

Huge billboards featuring this photograph were going to appear along interstates in rural areas across the midwest and southeast. A smaller roll-out, in Arizona, was also planned. The accompanying text was in large block print. It said, simply: An apple a day keeps the doctor away. Alas, she was the only one who could cure your fatal disease.

Intelligent people can disagree on the virtues of grapefruit.

Intelligent people can disagree on the virtues of grapefruit.

The grapefruit ad convinced our reporter that this was the work of the Allstate agency. This still is all that survives, but the video ad featured a pair of bustling grapefruit, once of which fell in half at the end. The voiceover was concise. "Eat grapefruit for your health. Live long enough to see your loved ones die."

This ad was to feature in-store samplings of strawberries, in which a box was to be featured in the produce department with a carefully chosen assortment of berries. A placard behind the box said, in large text across a blank background:

"The immeasurable magnitude of suffering is caused by the cruelty of others and an unjust cosmos. Only your actions can alleviate this pain. Therefore, you should try a strawberry."

Kale: White people love it so much they created a seed shortage.

Full page newspaper ad. TIME magazine. NEWSWEEK. Kale: Eat it in the hopes that you will stave off aging and you will wither away with the taste of dirty spinach on your tongue.

It is a shame, but no surprise, that these ads did not come to light.

Until now.

FPJEROME

Paws of the Terror Squirrel

...Our hero, on the shores of the distant planet Thetan....

....while most of the flotsam and jetsam that wash ashore for us here at Pearl River Flow is from the Past, it is not unheard of for things to arrive from more ambiguous timelines....

IN THE YEAR 2014!

Though the fears of men might be turned from thing to thing, in the ancient days of the future past, in that neon-and-chrome future of the movie (and year) 2001 - in that decade, one truth held sway over the hearts and minds of men.

That which they feared most would certainly never harm them.

This truth was first postulated by an ancient human philosopher, the infamous FPJerome, who called it "Jerome's first law." To wit: "The less important information is, the more likely it is to be transmitted."

This was certainly true of old Earth human culture, and at a glance might be taken as a harmless potshot - not all information can be important, and frivolity might be frequently sought in the trying times of that distant past, the late 1990s and early "aughts."

However, in that benighted future, this held true of even life-or-death threats. The amplification of useless information left people terrified of vaccines against deadly diseases, and fearful of viruses they would never catch. They cowered in pants-shitting terror because bearded men had guns half a world away, while being entirely uncertain and uncaring in the face of extinction.

Certainly, men were excoriated for horrible reasons, and wretched truths let slide. But in the distant future, in that year two thousand and fourteen, ONE MAN realized that there was a foe far more expensive and dangerous than any terrorist.

SQUIRRELS.

ONE MAN. Goode McRatatoskr. Interstellar squirrel hunter. This day he was waiting on a hoverskip transport in the swamps of the Planet Thetan. Long after everyone left Earth in 2001, it had been discovered that, unlike the planet of mankind's birth, most other planets in the Milky Way had only one defining ecosystem. There were swamp planets, ocean planets, desert planets, lava planets, sure - but too see them all combined into one functional whole was the work of nothing but High Fantasy.

McRatatoskr rode the roiling repulsors into a roaring wakeless summer sunset. He really wished that the hovercraft would leave a glinting wake, but the hunting of mankind's greatest remaining foe could brook no such breach of the squirrel-stealth protocol McRatatoskr had himself developed in his decades spent hunting the wiley Sciuridae, the species of which he had dubbed "the scurrying plague."

His guns were at the ready. The season was open. The limit was reasonable - for reasonable men. McRatatoskr was no such man. He was driven. Driven by the reported death of a family, from some guy, ranting in a storeroom. Squirrels had killed a family. Someone's family. By throwing themselves into the electricity. Like squirrels do.

McRatatoskr knew his all too well. Sure, on Ancient Earth people ate squirrels. But here - here he'd heard the opposite. He'd have to either kill more than eight squirrels or stop listening to random ranting people at the store where he bought all his squirrel hunting gear.

The gear. His high tech hope against the scurrying menace. A man unarmed would face little chance of defeating the bucktoothed terrorists. But McRatatorskr was as armed as the Planet Texas, and as prepared and aggressive as Planet Roosevelt. No squirrel would escape him this day.

"Not this day." He muttered to the robo-driver, who was actually just a guy wearing some foil to fool people into treating him like a human being.

He looked to the scent-cancelling vapor-trans. Ran a calloused trigger finger over the wick-strips of his squirrel-pheromone biobait grenades. Set the adjustable stubble on his Iron Jaw to 5 o'clock, even though it was hardly dawn.

But the jewel in his Squirrel-Murder arsenal was the rifle he called "The Squirrel Sweeper." The high-tech Nitro Piston would propel a 926.6 milligrams of fine alloy at 335 meters per second, and there was no squirrel that could survive an accurate shot from his wrath.

"It's 2014." He told the gun. "The year these squirrels learn to fear man, instead of the other way around."




Satan's Guide to Watching Cosmos

Pictured: The abandoned shack in which I found this document by Satan the Deceiver, Adversary of Mankind, the Light-Bringer, Drinker of Pepsi.

Satan's Episode Guide for Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey

A rare curated find for the staff (me) of the PRF. This document was found in an abandoned hut from which fossils were clearly being buried. The ancient runic text was decipherable thanks to a Dungeon Masters Guide.

 

FORWARD:

I want to apologize to my many fans for not getting around to writing this episode guide earlier. Normally I'd host this on all the websites of the liberal media for instant worldwide traction, but since Mammon sold off most of my operation to Goldman Sachs in the Lehman Brothers collapse back in '08, I've had to downside, and this FP JEROME fellow seems mostly trustworthy. He tells me I should consider demanding some small tax on my followers, in the 10% "Finders Fee" range, but I'm a free market man through and through. "Without taxation, or regulation," that's my motto!

Anyway, I was really disappointed with the ratings of Cosmos. Turns out, most nights, it got beat handily by some shitty shows called "Resurrection" and "Believe," which is probably just Yaw-Who fucking with me. Anyone who thinks I run the airwaves should take note.

- Satan

Episode 1: Standing Up in the Milky Way

People ask me why I like this episode, and usually they think it's because of the whole Giordano Bruno animated bit. I mean, I do like animation. but really what gets me about this episode is that some profoundly ignorant people freaked out – and I do love a good moral panic more than anyone else out there, I really do – over the fact that my good friend Carl Sagan said “The Cosmos is all that ever is, or ever was, or ever will be.”

“It doesn't allow for the supernatural!” They shout. But they're not listening to me, or Carl, or Neil. I'm a big fan of Neil, by the way. Just bring some evidence for the supernatural, and that there means that it was, and there you go. Part of the Cosmos. I mean, sure, I wish I had imps and cults that would abduct the evidence or destroy it or belittle the people who discovered it, but I just don't have the time to do that sort of anything anymore. Gotta play World of Warcraft, you know? And those NFL public relations gigs. Those guys! They are monsters, I tell you.

Did you know I was behind the fact that my buddy Barack Obama did the intro to this episode? It's true!

Episode 2: The Things that Molecules Do

Part of the reason I got kicked out of Heaven was because I was always asking the Big Guy to just tell the humans what was up. Boy, was I misguided. I thought “we'll get some supernatural stuff going on in a lab, like in Ghostbusters!” I love Ghostbusters, by the way. It gives kids the wrong idea about the afterlife, and that's fine by me. See, there is no afterlife.

Not for humans, anyway. I know, humans think Earth is all for them, but Neil and I wanted to get across a simple fact: It's not for you. It's just not. This place, Earth and the nearbouts, is for the Tardigrades. That's what we're trying to do in this Episode: Get across the idea that Planet Earth is for Tardigrades, not humanity. And I do mean we, do you really think Seth MacFarlane is a real person?

But let's face facts, humanity - facing facts is what I'm best at - most of Earth is entirely uninhabitable to you all - radiation, heat, cold, salt, acid, alkalinity - it's a nightmare. For you, that is. Not so for the tardigrades! This Earth is their oyster, whereas living in an oyster would be fatal to human beings!

Neil, as usual, made it a little more accessible and said that the revelations would "blow people's minds," so I gave him a pass.

Episode 3: When Knowledge Conquered Fear

I love books - that should come as no surprise. Some of my favorites include Neal Stephenson's The Baroque Cycle, and of course Newton's Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica. I couldn't convince the Cosmos guys to talk about The Baroque Cycle, so this is the episode you all got instead - intrigue and animation of Newton, Hooke (he was actually quite handsome) Halley and company. The reason I like Principia is that, before this, people actually believed that god had to get in there and nudge stuff constantly, to keep it in order. Newton showed them that it wasn't so, and I liked that, so it went into the episode. Fortunately for us, almost 400 years later, nobody thinks Newton's wrong anymore!

Episode 4: A Sky Full of Ghosts

You know what else I love? Other than books, experiments, Neal and Neil, telling humans the truth, and hanging out with my good friend Charles Darwin? Patrick Stewart, that's who! So I was thrilled when he voiced the most righteous astronomer William Herschel in this episode. There's other stuff, of course, like the Big Bang. I'm more of a Gnab Gib man, myself, one of the few times in which I must confess that I don't let the available evidence overly influence me. But hey, I know stuff you don't - stuff that hides in Black Holes. Neil goes and visits me there, so we threw up some of the video on the episode.

Episode 5: Hiding in the Light

Muslims. I'm not big on them, being Satan and all. But back when I was younger, I gave them a pretty sweet idea. Experiments. See, I'm BIG on experiments. Experiments done properly, too, none of this "let's throw some people in a garden naked and see what happens," you'd never get that shit past an IRB. I'm talking about real science, here. That whole bit with Job was just me trying to get YooHoo to correct for socioeconomic factors in his "Job's a good guy" hypothesis. Didn't think he'd take it so damn literally.

Episode 6: Deeper, Deeper, Deeper Still

I won't make a "that's what she said" joke here. I'm Satan, not a frat boy. I have standards and you'll never catch me running a college because I have some morals. I was really pushing Neil to get across the "Planet of the Tardigrades" meme here, but he chose to show off some of my favorite people. Thales, who got my memo on "Math," and Democritus, who I like because Plato hated him, and Plato-Socrates have been my arch-nemeses for far too long. Plus, the quote "Which then, of these impressions are true and which are false is not obvious" is kind of my philosophy.

Episode 7: The Clean Room

Lead out of the oil and into the air and water is a perfectly natural phenomenon in which I am trying to get all of that cleaned out of Hell before Y'all's-Way sends us all there. You'd have to be a complete toe-brained fool to not worry about lead in the air, or too much carbon dioxide. Anyway, Neil also gets across the actual age of the Earth in a way that only totally oblivious doofuses could ignore.  Did you know that this episode lagged in ratings behind In My Dreams? Seriously! A movie about a goddamn magic fountain forcing people to get married no matter how they feel about one another, and that's what people decided to watch that night?

Episode 8: Sisters of the Sun

I know it sounds like a cult. But I don't do the cult thing anymore. Never did go in for the abuse thing, either. I'm a fallen angel, which makes me a good bit more moral and upstanding than most people, you understand? Including people who'd make up tripe like that for a living. Anyway - where was I? Oh, right, I wanted Neil to call this one "Astronomy Harem Revealed" but he doesn't quite have the flair for public relations that I do. Long story short, the Universe is OLD, and the people who think otherwise have the intellectual arguments of a cold scrotum.

Episode 9: The Lost Worlds of Planet Earth

Plate tectonics. When big Yay-Dub included it in his original Earth-plan, I freaked out a little bit. It's not a good thing for a stable planet. But hey, this sphere's for the tardigrades, so a little bit of climate change, oceanic disruption, and asteroid impact only bothers his non-chosen species - everything else.

Episode 10: The Electric Boy

I just wish this episode had more viewers than the miniseries of Rosemary's Baby. The kid ain't mine! Electricity was one of the better things you hairless apes have done! How could people watch some scandalous retelling of scurrious lies about people I promise I've never even met?! All of MY children are proudly claimed, thank you, and each of them only brings about the end of the world in that way in which they slightly contribute to entropy! The nerve!

Episode 11: The Immortals

Okay, so I had some misgivings about this episode. I had wanted a full-blown rundown of all the varied and sordid gods and mini-gods of history. Neil said "that's what we have the history channel for," which shut me up because it was witty. Anyway, by acting as a skin-walker for the demonic entity known as "Seth MacFarlane" I was able to convince Neil to trash-talk the story of Noah. That's one of my better selling points, that story. I mean, small children understand it's nonsense.

Episode 12: The World Set Free

It's a title I can get behind, just as climate change is something I fight against. I mean, everyone should, right? A lot of people call me "Master of Reality," which I guess is kind of misleading, as I'm not a tardigrade, but I happen to like the Earth, all the stuff I faked the evolution of, and the whole 4.5 billion year history of this rock, the overwhelming majority of which is incredibly BORING if the whole shebang doesn't start happening until 6 thousand years ago.

Who's the bad guy here? Me? I don't think so!

Episode 13: Unafraid of the Dark

I had high hopes for this episode. I talked at length to the crew about my darkest moment: The destruction of the Library of Alexandria. I used all of my dark connections to attain the best available technology to give some sense of the cosmic scale of Carl's "Pale Blue Dot" photograph.

That's everything you've ever known, in the rightmost orange-ish beam of light, 'bout midway up.

They wrote poetry heroic across the cosmos, closing this grand series with the most proper of sentiments, something that Carl said, not just to me, Satan, but to everyone:

“From this distant vantage point, the Earth might not seem of any particular interest. But for us, it’s different. Consider again that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every “superstar,” every “supreme leader,” every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there – on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that in glory and triumph they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner. How frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity – in all this vastness – there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.

The Earth is the only world known, so far, to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment, the Earth is where we make our stand. It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known.”
— Carl Sagan

The episode was far less popular than "Two and a Half Men," and "The Bachelorette."