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.