By Carol Van Sturm
Dear Penpal, elephant
Thank you for your Ign message. I was so excited to receive it and at the next power outage when I can see the stars again I will look past Arcturus just to think of you out there somewhere. Now I will try to answer some of your questions.
Iвm sorry to say I have never seen an elephant. Not alive, that is. I have seen a preserved elephant in a museum. I will send you a picture from the time when there were live elephants, and also a picture of something called a bird that flew without a motor. I’m not sure I believe in birds. I wish I could have seen one fly.
My grandmother saw the last living elephant on our planet. It was in a pen called a zoo. My grandmother said it looked very sad and lonely with no others of its kind left. I don’t know which would be worse, to be the only one of your kind left, or to be crowded among billions of your kind with no space to get away. What do you think?
As you guessed, we have a different way of reproducing from yours, because we have two separate body forms, a male and a female. This is like the flower forms your probes observed on our Mars agriculture plantations, except in humans the male and female are completely separate bodies. The male inserts his genetic material into the female by a process called sex, which is very pleasurable to both male and female forms. It is so pleasurable that our species has completely over-run the planet, which is why there are no more birds or elephants and we have to grow our food on Mars.
Your way of reproducing may not be any fun but I think it is probably more sensible, especially the suspended development phase that prevents overpopulation, which is still a major problem on our planet. The more intelligent our species became and the more technology we devised to increase our survival rate, the more rapidly our numbers outgrew the planet’s food-producing capacity. This might have been a limiting factor, until the technology was developed to teleport vegetable matter between planets. At the same time it was discovered that plants grow faster and retain more of their nutrients on certain other planetary bodies like Mars and some of the moons of Saturn and Jupiter, perhaps due to their gravitational positions. Mars, the planet explored by your probes, was the first to be developed into plantations of organically grown food plants. Thousands of Martian acres are now greenhoused, all their produce teleported directly to earth upon harvest.
The first Martian crops were dedicated solely to continents like Africa that had the greatest numbers of starving people. I was one of them, and such abundance of fruits and nuts and grains was truly a miracle to me and my family. The experiment worked so well that humans reproduced themselves more rapidly than ever before, and the entire planet is now fed by t-foods – teleport foods — from Mars and other satellites, where carbon dioxide teleported from earth nourishes excellent crops and even vintage wineries.
I do not think you would enjoy visiting here. As you can see, the planet is no more than a rather boring housing development. Your own planet sounds much more varied and interesting! I hope you will send some pictures of your wooly friend and other creatures that you see every day. Long ago humans also had other species as friends and pets, but they became extinct along with the elephants and birds. I look forward to hearing from you again soon.
Your friend and penpal,
Fred TAGP