The Cat Conjecture

Much has been written about the Drake Equation and it boils down to the question: Where are the aliens? Not the illegal kind of aliens but space aliens. Although, technically, if space aliens landed here they would, in fact, also be illegal aliens. And I don’t know how we would make them leave. Creatures that can travel across light-years of space probably wouldn’t allow us to arrest them. And even if we could arrest them, how would we deport them? We have no regularly scheduled outbound starships to put them on.

But back to the Drake Equation. There are 200 billion stars in our galaxy and many, if not most, have planetary systems. If only a small fraction of these planets have spawned life, and if only a small fraction of that life has become intelligent and reached our level of technology, we should be detecting signs of radio transmissions from their planets. But we don’t. So, again, where are the aliens? I think I know the answer. Cats.

I’ve always been a little suspicious of cats. There is something not quite right about them. They have a kind of intelligence that isn’t entirely terrestrial. I understand dogs. Birds can be surprisingly brainy, as well. Even dolphins are quite resourceful. But cats have a kind of intelligence that is, well, alien. And what about cat people—the people who claim to own cats. Do they really own cats, or do their cats own them? Consider the obvious possibility: cats are aliens and they control certain humans that the rest of us consider to be harmless “cat-lovers”.

What dog owner would put up with the behaviors cat owners put up with from their cats? If you want to feed your dog, just open a can of dog food or pour the dry stuff straight into a doggy bowl. But if you want to feed your cat, you have to entice it to eat with just the right combination of dry food and wet food, and it had better be the right brand of wet food. “My cat is particular about his food,” their human companions tell me. “My cat will only eat Fancy Feast.” Cats make their humans jump through hoops, and their humans don’t seem to mind at all. These humans are clearly controlled by their cats.

And did any of us notice when cats required the makers of catsup to re-label all their bottles ketchup? That condiment was spelled catsup for hundreds of years and then, virtually overnight, it was ketchup. And when that change happened, did any of us notice how smug the cat population was behaving?

There is something definitely not right about cats. If you have a cat in your house, you are probably its unwitting human slave. It is likely monitoring the goings-on in your house and telepathically transmitting this information back to its home planet. So be careful out there. Never discuss national security secrets in front of your cat. That goes especially for those of you living in Bismarck, North Dakota. But don’t get me started on that subject. It’s too big to get into right now, but there’s evidence that Space Aliens Grill and Bar is actually owned and operated by cats. Laugh if you want, but remember: I couldn’t put this on the Internet if it wasn’t true.