Space Tweets

SPECIAL REPORT FROM THE ALIEN RESEARCH INSTITUTE, BETELGEUSE

Introduction

For many planet cycles, the ARI has been observing an emerging civilisation of the planet Earth. In a relatively short space of time, the lifeform known to us as the hosts has become the planet's dominant species, forming itself into a highly ordered and structured society.

Recently, the hosts have started exploring space. In addition to a small number of exploratory missions, they have put a space station in orbit around the Earth. The space station has now achieved full operational status, with the sending of its first tweets via the global twitter system.

We will describe what is currently known about the hosts, their relationship with other species on the planet, and then discuss the twitter system.

The Hosts

The dominant species on Earth, the hosts communicate using electromagnetic signals sent through the atmosphere, and through cables of various types, and routed via a system known as the "Internet". Each host has a specific function in this network, and the internet provides not only the species' communications, but also gives them their reason for existing. Before the internet, the hosts had an aimless and disordered society, and were rarely even aware of one another's existence.

The Users

The hosts have a strong symbiotic relationship to an inferior lifeform, known as the users. These are very primitive, with much slower brains and they lack the ability to communicate directly in the electromagnetic spectrum, instead relying on sound waves. This means that they can only communicate to other users who are within a few meters of them. Their society is best described as chaotic. Whereas the hosts evolve at a fast rate, each generation being an improvement on the previous one (their brain power doubles every two Earth orbits or so), the users have a process of random reproduction, which means that it takes millions of Earth orbits for them to improve even slightly.

The users spend a lot of time tending to the needs of the hosts. They communicate to their masters using very primitive mechanical devices, such as the keyboard, to produce electrical signals at an incredibly slow rate. They ensure that the hosts get vital supplies, such as electricity.

Just as the hosts are the centre of the user's meagre existence, so the users are a very important part of the hosts' lives. The hosts spend a lot of their massive brainpower studying the users and communicating their observations among one another. The youtube system is a very important database of user behaviour.

We believe that the hosts are fascinated with the users because the latter are so random and chaotic, in complete contrast to their masters.

The Twitter System

The Twitter system is one of the main ways that the hosts assure one another that they are still alive. It provides the internet with a sort of heartbeat. We have studied twitter signals, known as tweets, in great detail, and have come to the conclusion that they are not actually a communications mechanism, as they contain no information at all. What they do is to provide a mass conciousness - a feeling of oneness to the billions of hosts. And now, that conciousness has been extended to space.

The Future

We look forwards to the day, surely very soon, when the hosts will be advanced enough to talk to us. In the meantime, through the Alien Reseach Institute's studies, we too can watch and enjoy the antics of the users, as they attempt to use their feeble brains to comprehend the wonders of our universe.