You can’t check your mail in a vacuum.

“You know how when planes crash, everybody frantically dons hip-waders and jumps into the swamp in search of the little black box that was stored beneath the pilot’s seat?  The little box that recorded the whoosh.

Well, I was kind of thinking that, that is what comets are…you know… black boxes from planets that dissipated.  And the folk over at NASA are really just interstellar-genocide scene investigators.”