One day I read one too many postings by Waffle, and a vision came to me. Actually, I'd thought about this many times before, but this time I was inspired to write about it in my home page. You're reading it.
The invasion of Earth by aliens, using vending machines, was predicted by Philip K. Dick. Obviously, he must have also had this vision! What a brilliant mind he must have had. Anyway, I can't remember the name of the story, but the machine was vending gum. The gum could reproduce itself, so that eventually, the entire surface of the planet would be covered by...gum. And it wouldn't end there!
Now imagine a ring of gum orbiting the Sun, at 90M miles. Now imagine it growing and engulfing the Sun. The gum would melt, and flow around the star, eventually producing a Dyson sphere of...gum.
In time, it would stretch out to swallow other stars. Now imagine a Dyson sphere of gum around the galaxy, and in the space between the stars. All space slowly but inexorably being filled...with gum.
Damned clever, those aliens! Who would suspect vending machines?
Now, how to identify an alien vending machine. Nothing on the exterior would give it away, so you'd have to look inside it. If you find only one piece of food, or a small number of pieces, and yet the machine never appears to need refilling, then it's probably that the food inside it can reproduce itself.
Where are these aliens from? Either they're not worried about the remote future, say thousands of years from now, or they're not from any nearby stars. We should also ask what the rate of reproduction might be, but even if the number of gumballs were to double once every year, all that would mean is that the volume of space occupied by them would double, and there's a lot of space between us and the nearest star. It would be years before it gum was even visible from another star, never mind a threat. The gum wouldn't be expanding only in their direction, but in all directions, outward from the Sun.
We should remember that mass can fall inward, creating a black hole. Would the sphere of gum have enough mass to implode like this? I think it would, eventually. So, it might actually never become a threat to the aliens' home world, if it isn't in our own solar system. I think that might be the case, considering the dangers when using a weapon such as this.
What can you do about it? Well, let's ask ourselves what happens when someone eats this gum. If they leave it in their mouth for long enough, it would reproduce itself in their mouth, so we can assume that it the rate of reproduction must be slow, whilst being eaten. This suggests that we can slow the reproduction of the gum by eating it. That usually means just chewing it, rather than chewing and then swallowing it. However, have we heard of anyone's stomach being filled with gum? I haven't, so I must assume that the reproduction ceases, once the gum has been swallowed.
We may even find that it also stops after being chewed for a while! If so, then all we have to do to stop this invasion is to chew gum, and lots of it. That should be easy! So, get started right now.
Fight the alien invasion...by chewing gum! Save the planet, by chewing gum! Save the whales. Chew gum!
Other places to visit:
A monthly graphic Internet novel, E-boy
Pavement Terror, a very unusual photographic exhibition.
Cyber Surfer's home page.
"You can never chew gum enough!"