A Tale of the Extinguished Moon

Mad scientist and Laurie Anderson impersonator Professor Stephen Hawking has warned that there are aliens out there, and they may be less welcoming than the inhabitants of Llanfrothen.

When it comes to astronauts Hawking knows what he's talking about, so for once I agree with him: we need to be careful not to provoke these deranged space bugs.

It's only a matter of time before the triphallic crab pupae of Queequeg IV intercept a live broadcast of a U2 concert and naturally launch a battery of intergalactic sulphuric spunk missiles at the general Isle of Man area.

I'm aware that I may not measure up to Guardian or BBC standards in terms of celebrating the vibrant diversity of cultural responses to encounters with The Other, but on this occasion I simply don't want to be drowned and fried in flying space spoff because some interdimensional star-spawn blames me for Bono.

And further two-handed research on the Intern Net has established that we will only have ourselves to blame for our imminent obliteration.

You see, at some point in the otherwise excellent 1970s, Mankind sent the Voyager 1 spaceship into the cosmic ether with a message of greeting for any bored xenomorphs out there.

What NASA hurled skywards was a vinyl 33" containing a "Hooked on Bach" record, Da Vinci's drawing of a man with six limbs, and a porn flick. A 1970s porn flick, with bad hair, wicka-wacka plastic funk soundtrack and lots of lobstering. Oh, and it was narrated by Jimmy Carter.

It would be harder to imagine a more irritating communication without involving George Galloway and Jive Bunny. Moreover, it gave an inaccurate impression of the human race, shower of bastards though we may be.

I think we need to correct these mistakes fast, and send a new cosmopod beyond Pluto with a fair representation of what we have to offer our distant neighbours.

The vessel should contain a pair of Manolo Blahniks, a recording of a man breaking wind, and a Benny Hill DVD. The shoes and gastric eruption tell you all there is to know about the respective sexes, and Benny Hill sums up modern civilisation in an unflinching yet digestible manner.

The 1970s mission also lacked a crucial contribution from our Soviet co-planetarians. From the mid-1950s onwards the Russians liked nothing better than to fire small animals at Saturn, hence all the monkey skeletons in decaying orbits around the Earth and that little dog who's probably now worshipped as a demiurge on Neptune.

This Great Coalition of Ours is trying to improve relations with the Kremlin on the basis of a shared interest in evil, so I propose that we honour the Reds' previous space endeavours by packing Limahl out of Kajagoogoo into the cone of the craft.

He would give the aliens a fair idea of what pets Paris Hilton likes. And an affordable supply of Ryvita, hair gel and Embassy Number 1s ought to keep him going, given his slender build and necessarily restricted movements.

The Betelgeusians would be impressed by our level of development and obviously benign intent, especially the concern we show to the bald, Irish and underdressed in the work of Hill, and would request a meeting of envoys.

The obvious choice would be a delegation from the United Nations General Assembly, but I'm not sure that alien life is as convinced that the problematic emissions in the Horseshoe Nebula are all the fault of Israel. So I'd suggest a small mission of the sagest groovers we have to offer.

There is an emerging consensus that the acme of all human achievement - cultural, intellectual, acrobatic and erotic - was reached in the British popular music scene in 1980-1994.

From this Golden Bough I would pluck the first and finest fruits to establish contact with the carnivorous kelp of Alpha Centauri, namely Shakin' Stevens, Pete Wylie, and Bez out of The Happy Mondays.

Shaky combines hip-gyration with deserved modesty, Wylie has the righteous, random wrath of Jeremiah, and Bez adds something of Zen as well as pharmacology. They will be universally respected in the Heavens as they are on Earth.

The reply from the Venusians is easy to predict. "We thank you for the welcome afforded by Ambassador Shaky and the warning about the Sony Corporation provided by Special Envoy Wylie. We shall endeavour to seek out and neutralise this threat with our scrotal infibulator beam.

"Soon we shall send our own leading scholars to share their starry wisdom with your elders, those who are learnèd in your science of hydroponics, that which they call "Gabba", and the Belgian House.

"As for Counsellor Bez, we ask that he tarry a while with us. We have so much to learn from him. Oh, and Limahl is doing splendidly in our maritime breeding programme."

The Midrash Rabbah to Genesis 3:9 posits that God created and destroyed many worlds before He allowed this one to dangle harmlessly just beneath the Moon for a few thousand years.

Let us not give Him good cause to destroy the Earth again for all our sins.

But above all let us not irk the alkaloid rhombuses of Cnychbant Felix into doing the same, just because we wouldn't frogmarch Simply Red and Edwina Currie onto a leaky coracle off the North Korean coast and let international geo-politics take its course.