Dellis makes the world better: #2 - Moths

I can’t say it’s such a problem in Singapore, but back in Australia at night you’d always end up with moths flying around the light bulbs, casting ghastly shadows around the room and setting up this tiny orchestra of *tink* *tink* *tink* noises as they futilely bashed their little heads against the light’s bulb.

I always thought that was a silly thing to do considering the white-hot nature of light bulbs, but oh no, not for the stupid moth with its stupid pre-programmed biological imperative to invade my lounge room while I’m trying to watch TV. Stoopid moths.

Years later I read somewhere that moths astronavigate using the moon as a focal point, along the lines of keep the moon to the left and keep going ahead.

This obviously worked wonders for millions of years, that is until the electric light bulb was invented. Now moths have billions of little moons to astronavigate by and it’s truly killed any and all sense of direction the little blighters might have had. This also explains why you see clouds of moths around street lamps at night, and why you see them endlessly circumnavigating single bulbs -- they're keeping the "moon" to the left.

Now, you'd best sit down because here’s the genius part of my plan:

One night, when the moon is full and bright, everyone everywhere turns off all lights, and the moths fly to the moon.

Brilliant, huh?

Now, before you start to argue I’ll have you know that my Science Kung-Fu is strong.

Consider the following:

For millions of years moths never flew to the moon. Why, you might ask? Well, because they never bothered to. Sure some early Neolithic moth tried, and failed, and no moth ever tried again. But since the invention of the electric light (the moth’s moon) it has been shown that moths can indeed reach that celestial goal. They do it all the time when I’m watching TV, and they’ve been doing it for successive generations now.

It’s been inculcated in them by the experience of hitting light bulbs that the moon is attainable.

Now, you and I know that moths will never actually reach the moon, but the moths don’t know that. Of course their little wings can’t get them that far, but I reckon they might be able to get so high up that they’ll just orbit the Earth.

This plan is foolproof and simply cannot fail. In fact the only problem I can foresee is that the Space Shuttles will need windscreen wipers as they orbit through the moth-thickened mesosphere layer.

I’m a genius.

That's the spirit!