BRAYNIAK, VIRGINIA. A team of NASA scientists admitted this morning that outer space “probably doesn’t exist”, and confirmed that all related sciences were in fact “the result of a night of moderate drinking, some phenomenal weed, and masses of soft-core porn”. Asked to speculate on what lay beyond Earth’s atmosphere, one researcher guessed, “Maybe dust and monsters?”
Dr Adam Zinn-Quarks, the 84 year-old project coordinator of the facility’s basement-level Complicated Answers To Simple Questions Directorate, explained that the concept of an ever-expanding, infinite, pan-galactic universe was originally the work of a group of Berkeley undergrads during the 1951-1952 semester.
“The guys working on the Bomb had produced this enormously big bang,” he recalled.
“We needed to come up with a bigger bang. The biggest bang, in fact. The Big Bang kind of emerged over a bunch of ciders, some weed and back-issues of Filthy Wenches magazine in Hymie Liebestein’s dorm room.”
With the origin of the Universe safely accounted far, and a decision made on whether Miss Madeleine Marigold of Montana had bigger breasts than Miss Prunella Rutt of Kansas City, it was “time to start confirming other stuff”, he said.
“We were kind of sitting there, dragging on our reefers and looking out of the window at the mysterious night-time skyfires, and somebody said, ‘Hey, wouldn’t it be a gas if the skyfires were actually distant, massive bodies of luminescent plasma!’
“Somebody else said, ‘A noble gas or just a normal gas?’
“We fell around shrieking for a while, and I think during that time, the theory of interstellar space was born.”
He said that “whacko hophead inventions” such as dark matter, electromagnetic radiation, quantum field electrodynamics, relativity and planets had all “just kinda tumbled out”.
From there, he said it was a simple matter of convincing the university’s drug-addled Humanities students to invent “a bunch of important people” to back it up.
“Copernicus, Albert Einstein, Isaac Newton, Edwin Hubble – some pretty good stuff,” he said. “They might not wash, but those English Lit majors can come up with some seriously legit-sounding characters.”
Zinn-Quarks said that the department’s greatest accomplishment was persuading the Vatican to apologise in 1992 for persecuting fictional 17th century astronomer Galileo.
“Luckily the cardinals were pretty stoned as well,” he recalled. “I mean, they’ve been making up theories of the universe for a thousand years, and you need to be well high to sustain that kind of hoax.”
Asked if current scientific theory could explain what lies outside of the Earth’s atmosphere, Zinn-Quarks conceded that he “hasn’t got a clue”, but suggested dust and monsters.
“Or maybe rainbows,” he added. “I mean, where do those things go, anyway? I know enough about physics to know nothing just stops existing. I think. Is that right? I can’t remember how much of physics is made up.”
