Nina In New York: Holiday Tidings From Outer Space

A lighthearted look at news, events, culture and everyday life in New York. The opinions expressed are solely those of the writer.
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By Nina Pajak

Boy, yesterday was tough, right? It was, like, really cold for a few minutes! I mean not just a little cold. It was hat and coat and gloves cold. I hated it. It almost felt like we live in New York and it's December, which we all know is completely untrue. The truth, as we all know, is that we flipped hemispheres and the Earth reversed its rotation and now we share weather patterns with California. Don't overthink it—you need to be extremely smart and a scientific expert to understand this sort of thing.

Here's another weird thing that happened, just in time for the holidays (everything sounds better when you place it in that context): scientists found more evidence of previous life on Mars! That zany Mars rover, Curiosity, has been roving around for the last three years picking up rocks and kicking up dirt. Ever the consummate prankster, it's also been drawing runes in the dust and arranging boulders to look like animal forms just to freak out the bros at NASA. But now it's finally buckled down and done something good: he found a chemical called silica, which on Earth is only known to exist as the result of having been deposited by water. Well, then.

But the plot thickens. Curiosity, living up to name, has also discovered a specific type of silica known as "Buckskin." It's quite rare on our planet, generally seen in rocks which have been expelled from volcanoes. So, scientists are all like "we don't know anything yet, just everyone let's relax." But you know how the government can be. I think all of us regular folk can quickly surmise what happened here: Mars was a once-thriving planet filled with diverse forms of life and running water and little green woodland creatures and flowers that eat birds and all sorts of cool, weird stuff. Then one day a giant volcano erupted and coated the entire place in molten lava, which eventually cooled and gave us the boring, uninhabitable rock we know today. This theory, of course, is based on the common knowledge that Mars is small enough for Marvin the Martian to walk all the way around its circumference in under a minute without falling off.

NASA obviously won't be confirming this, but I'm going to go out on a limb and say that by this time next year, when America has been renamed Trumplandia and we're all forced into reprogramming camps where the uniform is a Trump-brand suit and a bad hairpiece . . . well, it's going to be pretty awful. But perhaps not long after that, we could be packing our bags to relocate to sunny Mars. Otherwise known as New Earth. We may have to do a whole Noah's Ark thing with some of our own woodland creatures, but it'll be great. Dibs on the spaceship that doesn't contain any live raccoons.

Nina Pajak is a writer living with her husband, daughter and dog in Queens. Connect with Nina on Twitter!