NASA scientists were stunned to discover that Curiosity, the new rover recently landed on Mars, made contact of a kind they never could have expected.
“It was pretty much a typical post-landing rager,” Bill Ingall, one of the Curiosity team leaders, said. “A few guys doing blow off a hooker’s stomach rolls, that kind of thing, you know basic NASA stuff. I was showing this chick the landing footage again when I first saw it: a kind of black shape, right under the rover before it landed.”
He called over Jim Carroll, the mission beer pong whiz, to help him decipher the unidentified object. “Now, Bill was about 12 shots of Patron down at this point, so I was skeptical when he called me over, but when I saw it there was no doubt about it: Curiosity landed on a moving object,” he said.
A painfully sober review of the footage the next morning by the whole team was assembled to determine exactly what they were seeing. Shocking as it may seem, the Curiosity team was unanimous in its findings: the rover had landed on a Martian life form stunningly similar to the average Earth-bound cat.
“Our initial thought was, ‘We took that LSD 12 hours ago, and we’re still seeing things?’” Ingall said. “But no — this is real. Curiosity killed the cat.”
The truly frustrating part, according to team members, is that both peers in the field and the public at large are struggling to take the discovery and its implications seriously due to the quasi-prophetic children’s axiom involved.
“Yes, Curiosity killed the cat. I get it. So goddamn funny,” Ingall lamented. “People realize this means that advanced life exists on Mars, right? And that essentially re-writes every existing theory about life in our solar system and our understanding of the universe. WE ARE NOT ALONE! Are we the only ones who actually care about that part?”
The answer seems to be yes. The incident, which is being referred to as “God’s shitty sense of humor” by the bitter scientific team, is causing more stunned chuckles than feverish discussions about aliens. Also getting some play is the Wizard of Oz element to the story.
“Was that the Wicked Cat of Eastern Mars? Ha ha ha,” renowned theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking chuckled through his computer voice box.
Perhaps in the future, humanity will be able to overcome the awful pun and look to the wider implications of the discovery. “But don’t count on it,” Ingall cautioned.
“People are really goddamn stupid,” he concluded.
