The US space agency NASA has a pair of their Voyagers whizzing through the cosmos carrying some discs with messages from us earthlings for any aliens they might encounter.
Delivery was scheduled for after Voyagers 1 and 2 completed their primary tasks of snooping round Jupiter and Saturn.
The discs contain mundane stuff such as train and tractor noises, pictures of people licking ice-creams and munching pizzas, and a recording of Johnny B. Goode.
Images of big events like the mushroom cloud over Hiroshima were avoided because we don’t want the aliens to think we are homicidal monsters.
Better to give them the impression the human race is a train-travelling, tractor-driving, ice-cream and pizza loving collection of Chuck Berry fans.
But as the spaceships took off in 1977, before CDs were available, the only things to store this material on were 12-inch LPs, and in case ET doesn’t have an old-fashioned record player with stylus to hand some illustrated instructions how to make one and use it were helpfully included.
Astronomer Carl Sagan, who masterminded the project, called it “a bottle launched into the cosmic ocean.” But we should not expect a return bottle with a note in it to be thrown back anytime soon.
It will take the Voyagers 40,000 years to reach a star system likely to have any planets with intelligent life.
Voyager could reach aliens in 40,000 years - we’ll still be arguing about Brexit - Nigel Nelson
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Perhaps we will have forgotten about Brexit by then. Or possibly not. But it’s a pity the Voyagers could not have waited another 48 years before blasting off.
Instead of ice-cream and pizza the aliens could have been treated to the faces of Kemi Badenoch and Nigel Farage contorted in fury over Keir Starmer’s Brexit reset, assuming they could translate “surrender summit’ and “Brexit betrayal” into whatever interstellar language they speak. .
Let’s put this into perspective for them. The PM talks it up as if it's our greatest European victory since Agincourt while the Tories and Reform seem to think it’s the start of Armageddon. It’s neither.
This is a good deal, but its real value is in sensibly tidying up loose ends left behind by Boris Johnson’s raggedy EU withdrawal agreement.
Take fish. Brexit gave British fisher folk 25 per cent more of their catch than they previously had but that arrangement was due to run out next year. The quota hasn’t changed, though it’ll now be 12 years before foreign access to British waters next comes up for discussion.
That was the trade off for easing border checks on the £14billion of food we send to the EU annually, 57 per cent of our total exports.
The Scottish salmon industry is delighted because it means their fish won’t rot on the docks waiting for an EU customs officer to poke their nose in. Tavish Scott of Salmon Scotland said: “This breakthrough will ease the burden on our farmers, processors and the communities they support.”
And the National Pig Association were like, well, pigs in clover at being able to sell their sausages in Europe again.
OPINION: NASA sent peace and pizza to the stars - Britain’s still serving up Brexit rows at home, says Nigel Nelson.
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Fewer trade barriers will ease border tensions between the north and south of Ireland which went down well with Northern Ireland’s First Minister Michelle O’Neill. She said: “Anything that maximises our access to both markets... we very much welcome.”
The outstanding ticklish issue is the 18-30 youth mobility scheme repackaged less contentiously as a youth experience scheme and if the PM gets his way, and time limits it to 12 months, he would be able to call a gap year.
Any longer and that means young EU visitors would count in the immigration figures adding more unwelcome statistical strangers to Sir Keir's island. But realistically, any less than the three years we give the youth of 11 other countries including 9,600 Australians would be pointless.
This new deal, like Brexit itself, is neither triumph nor disaster. It’ll add 0.3 per cent to GDP which does not make up for the four points Brexit knocked off it.
But firms doing business with Europe will be pleased and food prices are likely to rise less steeply - food inflation over the last five years was 25 per cent and 8 per cent of that was down to Brexit.
That Brexit element cost the average family £250 a year more and spending £250 less is not to be sniffed at.
If the Voyagers are not intercepted by some inquisitive extraterrestrials they will drift through the universe for eternity.
Which at this rate is how long we're going to keep banging on about Brexit.
