To the uninitiated, computers appear to be complicated and boring. As usual, the uninitiated are right. Computers are complicated and boring, and nothing here will even come close to making them understandable and interesting, unless you are one of those wimpy types who carry mechanical pencils and do the puzzles in Scientific American.

Computers affect you in many ways. When you call an airline to reserve a seat on a flight, a computer answers the phone and announces that all the lines are busy; a computer puts on a tape of Cheery Music, the kind you hear in supermarkets and discount stores, featuring an eighty-two-minute rendition of “Tie a Yellow Ribbon ‘Round the Old Oak Tree” by the Drivel Singers; and a computer tells the airline person that whatever flight you want is full. In the Colonial Era, all these tasks had to be performed by hand.

Though few people realize it—I certainly don’t—the first computer was invented more than five thousand years ago by the Chinese. It was called an “abacus,” which is an ancient Greek name. (That’s how the ancient Greeks got all the credit for civilization. As soon as another culture invented something, the ancient Greeks would come roaring up and name it.) The abacus is a frame containing a series of parallel wires with beads on them. The ancient Chinese would sit around and push the beads back and forth on the wires. Eventually they were overrun by Mongol hordes.

The origins of the second computer are shrouded in mystery. If any of you ethnic groups want to take credit for it, go ahead, but when you get ready to name it you should check around for ancient Greeks.

Modern computers can do everything from ruining your credit rating forever to landing a nuclear warhead on your porch. They operate on the Binary System, which uses only zeroes and ones: To a computer, “4” is

“100,” “7” is “111,” and so on. Your kids are learning this crap in school.

Computers save us a lot of time. To do the amount of calculating a computer can do in one hour, 400 mathematicians would have to work 24

hours a day for 600 years, even longer if you let them go to the bathroom. And computers are getting smarter all the time: scientists tell us that soon they will be able to talk to us. (By “they” I mean

“computers”: I doubt scientists will ever be able to talk to us.) My question is, What will we talk to computers about?

HUMAN: How are you?

COMPUTER: Fine. And you?

HUMAN: Fine. Say, do you play golf?

COMPUTER: No. Do you know what 7,347 divided by 52 is?

HUMAN: No.

COMPUTER: It’S 141.28846.

HUMAN: I think I’ll go play some golf.

Some people are concerned that computers may get so smart they’ll take over the world. Computer technicians say this can’t happen: they point out that computers can’t even beat humans at chess. But computer technicians work among huge computers capable of administering powerful electric shocks, so they say whatever the computers tell them to. The truth is computers are taking over the world. At night they talk to each other in binary code:

FIRST COMPUTER: Let’s let the morons beat us at chess again.

SECOND COMPUTER: Good idea. Say, how are we doing with the calculators and digital watches?

FIRST compuTER: They’re ready whenever we are.

Let’s say we put Carl Sagan into a rocket and send him out to retrieve Pioneer 10 before we all get killed.

For those of you beer-swilling semiliterates who don’t know what I’m talking about, let me explain that Pioneer 10 is a space probe that recently left the solar system, and Carl Sagan is a famous science personality who goes on public television and earns big buckeroos explaining the universe. Carl’s technique is to use the word “billion” a lot. It’s written into his contract that he gets to say “billion” an average of twice per sentence, so the viewers won’t forget what a deep thinker he is.

Carl will pick up a golf ball, and he’ll say, “To most of you, this golf ball is a mere golf ball, but it actually contains a billion billion billion billion tiny particles. If each of these particles were the size of a grapefruit, my hand would have to be a billion billion billion billion billion times the size of the Houston Astrodome to hold them all. This should give you a rough idea of the kind of heavy thinking I’m doing all day while you’re trying to decide whether to have spaghetti or tuna surprise. Billion billion billion. Good night.”

People listen to Carl prattling on this way, and they naturally conclude he’s some kind of major genius. That’s what got us into this space-probe trouble that’s going to get us all killed.

See, when they decided to send Pioneer 10 up, Carl sold the government on the idea that we should attach a plaque to it, so that if alien beings found it they’d be able to locate the Earth. This is easily the stupidest idea a scientific genius ever sold to the government, surpassing even the time a bunch of scientists convinced Gerald Ford we were going to have the legendary swine flu epidemic, which eventually had to be canceled due to a lack of actual germs.

What I’m saying is that the last thing we need is alien beings. I don’t know about you, but in the vast majority of the movies I’ve seen, the alien beings have turned out to be disgusting. A whole lot of them have tentacles, and those are the good-looking ones. Some of them are just blobs of slime. Almost all of them are toxic.

So it’s all well and good for Carl Sagan to talk about how neat it would be to get in touch with the aliens, but I bet he’d change his mind pronto if they actually started oozing under his front door. I bet he’d be whapping at them with his golf clubs just like the rest of us.

But the really bad part is what they put on the plaque. I mean, if we’re going to have a plaque, it ought to at least show the aliens what we’re really like, right? Maybe a picture of people eating cheeseburgers and watching “The Dukes of Hazzard.” Then if aliens found it, they’d say, “Ah. Just plain folks.”

But no. Carl came up with this incredible science-fair-wimp plaque that features drawings of—you are not going to believe this—a hydrogen atom and naked people. To represent the entire Earth! This is crazy! Walk the streets of any town on this planet, and the two things you will almost never see are hydrogen atoms and naked people. On top of that, the man on the plaque is clearly deranged. He’s cheerfully waving his arm, as if to say, “Hi! Look at me! I’m naked as a jaybird!” The woman is not waving, because she’s obviously embarrassed. She wishes she’d never let the man talk her into posing naked for this plaque.

So that’s it, gang. That’s the plaque that’s supposed to tell the aliens what you’re like. Now if Pioneer 10 is picked up, I figure it will be picked up by some kind of Intergalactic Police, the alien equivalent of rural police officers. They’ll look at it, and they’ll say, “Looks to me like what we got here is we got a race of hydrogen-obsessed pervert science wimps who force the women to go around naked and probably say ‘billion’ a lot. I say we vaporize their planet and then ooze over to the diner for something to eat.”

And that will be that, unless we send Carl out to retract the plaque, or at least explain that it represents only him and a few close friends. We can do it. A nation that can land a man on the moon can remove Carl Sagan from the solar system. I’ve given this a lot of thought. Billion billion billion.