Guess Why We Can't Find ET

Dead.

That's what the extraterrestrials all were when we found them, huddled together and burned till they were dry and chewy like pork chops that had sat too long in a grocery store deli case.

I stuck an e-cigarette between my teeth and let out a cloud of noxious Froot Loops-smelling vapor that covered everything to a radius of a city block.

"Any witnesses?" I asked my partner.

"Nah, they're all dead," said my partner in a thick New York accent.

I switched off my e-cig out of respect and put it in my pocket. "Climate change," I growled.

All right, maybe that's a bit melodramatic, but according to Discovery News, it's not unreasonable.

Astronomers from Australian National University recently published a study in the journal Astrobiology that concludes that the reason we have not discovered extraterrestrial life despite the apparent abundance of habitable worlds is that climate change got 'em.

It sounded a little more scientific when they said it, but that's the gist.

Oddly, the study's authors conclude, the lack of alien life may indicate that life forms on other worlds didn't cause enough climate change. "Most early planetary environments are unstable. To produce a habitable planet, lifeforms need to regulate greenhouse gases such as water and carbon dioxide to keep surface temperatures stable," said lead author Aditya Chopra.

Wow. Climate change caused by lifeforms actually may be crucial to survival. Someone point that out to Al Gore.

According to the authors' theory, most worlds never develop life fast enough or for long enough to become sustainable.

Climate change is already blamed for rising sea levels (aka "erosion"), killer storms (because no one ever died in a storm before the 1970s), massive crop failures (famine's a new thing, too), mass extinction of species (like polar bears, which don't know how to swim at all), increased immigration, low sex drive and terrorism.

Add "kills aliens" to the list.

Although that could be a good thing, depending on the aliens in question.

I wouldn't want to be an alien. Most of them, even the seemingly tough ones, are downright fragile.

Think about it. Except for Superman and Martian Manhunter, virtually every alien that's ever tried to invade America (the only country besides Japan that people who've traveled millions of light years ever deem worthy of invasion) has been driven back by the common cold, a drunken pilot with a broken missile or the Avengers.

Not to mention all the weird appendages and protuberances aliens seem to have. Like Klingons. I've seen trains with less prominent cowcatchers. Good luck finding a hat to fit your Klingon-sized head.

All things considered, it's probably for the best that all those extraterrestrials that could have been out there in space croaked. We would have just signed them up as Democrats and taxed them to death anyway.

The weird thing about the recent study is that it points to the virtual inevitability of climate change, theoretically across the entire galaxy.

It's truly a peculiar thing that it's only on Earth that climate change is caused by conservative "deniers" and their SUVs.