h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Well I'm up for it! As for $50 billion, well I can probably scape about forty quid together. Any chance of a cut price mission?

I'll pitch in another £40, so that's doubled the amount of funding in just one post. If we can keep up that rate, then we only need a few more posts to get to the £50000000000.

(I think in another 30 posts we'll get to £86 billion... that should give us enough to spruce up Mars a bit when we get there; maybe a few plants, a lick of paint, some new furniture...)

Actually, I'm a member of the Mars Society (link on my homepage), so maybe I can wrangle a staff discount!

Make sure you bring plenty of weapons. It's a known fact among certain circles that the "mysterious" pattern of Mars surface probes aren't so mysterious at all. They bravely put forth the ludicrous stories about inch-metric conversions and light from Venus being reflected off swamp gas, but the real truth is that aliens have destroyed most of the probes we have sent to the surface in the hopes of keeping their civilization a secret. Viking and Pathfinder landed in the middle of nowhere, so they were left alone, but Surveyr managed to transmit an image before its destruction... the image was that of a pseudopod wielding what appeared to be a pointed stick, but analysis is still underway.

Computer enhancement shows that the pseudopod is in fact holding a hammer. Which is far more logical to destroy Mars probes with than a pointy stick!

There is a strongly held theory that all of the so-called Mars pictures were in fact of a cat-litter tray. If you look closely at some of them you can see parts of the cat's shadow.

Hm.....I bet I can spare like $4 American, all I got left till I get a job, but this seems like a noble endeavor

Maybe we should just confuse the Martians by throwing sometims pink and fuzzy at them. We could just decorate probes like the Easter Bunny or somethings.

No no no..what if they like fuzzy things?

Of course they don't like fuzzy things - they're _aliens_! Everybody (at least, everybody who has seen too many weird films) knows that aliens only like spiky things, like guns with all kinds of useless spikes and things. As aliens never wear clothes, the spikes won't tangle and hamper them.
On the other hand, if they do like fuzzy things, they're probably civilized enough not to eat us raw...

Right. They might like us well done, served on a silver plate decorated with fuzzy things....

I'm a bit concerned about the assumptions that any alien who likes fuzzy things must therefore be civilized. I know of a species who adores fuzzy things, such as fluffy pink dice, and am not yet convinced that said species is intelligent!

Who ever said anyone owning fluffy dice was intelligent?