Trouser Farming

                One of the more appealing sights to be seen in the universe would be a farm. Not just any old farm to be found in the outskirts of Northampton or Windsor but a really quite incredible farm to be found in the in-skirts Sol. With so many solar systems cluttering up the galaxy and so many galaxies cluttering up the universe it is difficult not to call anyone who thinks that Earth is the only life sustaining planet in all of existence a bit arrogant. They probably think everyone else is selfish for being ahead of them in the queue at the checkout or for wanting to sit down on the same crowded bus that they want to sit down on. When you get a get a reasonably priced bag of apples from the supermarket and one of them is rotten you must suspect the others to be suffering the same fate, and likewise with a discounted bag of planets like the Milky Way, you've got to be a bit worried that there may be something similar to our own carbon based monkey rot going on in some of them. Steps should likely then be taken to purge these samples from the bag and perhaps even encourage the storage of unaffected specimens in a refrigerator to preserve freshness. Thankfully empty space is pretty chilly, noticeably more so than a commercially available personal fridge, so one may be forgiven for thinking this advice can be disregarded by any exoplanet not currently invading the personal space of a star. However, it takes a packet of meat roughly a day to fully freeze in the freezer at minus 20 degrees Celsius or thereabouts whereas Earth has been a planet in a cold sink of about minus 270 degrees Celsius for about 4.5 billion years and most of it is still pretty cosy, as evidenced by the existence of humanity, the oceans and reasonably priced beach holidays in Majorca.

                In the face of this monumental sanitation crisis, we gather up the various residents (or plagues) from the affected planets and stick them in a farm within our own solar system because we're a) lazy, b) incapable of reliable space travel over large distances and c) probably the nicest hosts who would cater for various differing dietary requirements with a minimum of snide comments. We would be given a window into the nature of life if we could witness its other forms which have evolved under conditions entirely separate to and different from our own. Would they have overcome issues like situational awareness with absorption of electromagnetic emissions and reflections in the same narrow band and detection of longitudinal air vibrations with their ears in the same range as us or make the same unforgivable mistake of adopting pebble dashing as an appropriate method of decorating a homestead exterior? Would they have also suffered mass extinctions and resurgences of life like we did? Space dinosaurs are unquestionably an appealing prospect so I for one hope so. It would be best not to tell any survivors that I hoped for their mass extinction however, it's exactly that kind of thing that causes first impressions to go badly.

                Why a farm and not a zoo or a lab then? Well, when your daughter's dog catches a serious case of "got into the cupboard and subsequently full of bleach" you tell them that he's gone to live on a farm. It comes across like the disappearance of the dog (and stark reduction in the cleanliness of the toilet) is less traumatic because a farm is a wonderful place for the dog to be, with lots of space to run around in, lots of affection from the proprietors of said farm and so much food that trying to eat cleaning supplies is barely an afterthought. Nobody ever tells the little girl that the dog has gone to be gawped at in a zoo and they certainly don't elucidate the child to the lack of canine companionship by telling her it's gone to a lab to be experimented on, tortured a little bit and ultimately dissected by the kind of man who thinks sliding a scalpel through a puppy is an acceptable afternoon occupation. Likewise then if we were to tell the owners of the other worlds we're taking their wildlife (and possibly them too) to a farm just outside Mars then they'll take it far better. The gawping and dissection can happen in the barn -  anything goes when you're in a barn.