The telephone system in this country is currently worse than it was during the time of farm telephone lines. You don’t know what a farm telephone line is? (Or don’t know what a telephone or, indeed, what a farm is?)

It was like this: a group of farms in a district were fitted with telephone handsets. There was no dial on the phone (O! Silly me! You don’t know what a dial is. It is a sort of circular keypad.) So, all the phone had was a handset and a small silver crank handle. To make a call, you would pick up the handset and put it to your ear. You then cranked the handle. This caused the phone at the operator (some kilometres away) to ring. The operator answers the phone and says: “Sentraal.” This is Afrikaans for “exchange”. Sort of. You then said what number you wanted (for example, Rooihuiskraal 2235) and the operator would put you through, having alerted the receiver with a series of coded rings.

The process worked. All the time. Unless there was no line available, in which case the operator would tell you the connection was not possible. These days, it’s not like that. Dropped calls, calls which don’t go through, calls which leave you saying, “Hello? Hello?” like an annoying parrot. WhatsApp calls which fade in and out . . . oh, it is so frustrating. One wants to scream: “All the brilliance in the world and the phone system has gone backwards!”

But we say nothing. We know that all the billionaires in the world want is to squeeze the last cent out of consumers so as to get higher up the dung pile and, one presumes, closer to the Almighty. A reliable service costs money. So wah?

So much for telephones. I started writing this column because I was musing about SpaceX, which is almost ready to start building a permanent human settlement on Mars with its massive Starship rocket. The private spaceflight company is on track to launch its first uncrewed mission to Mars in as little as four years from now, says Elon Musk. Now, those of you who watch these things will note that a few SpaceX rockets have crashed and blown up – most recently, SN9 and SN8. Thus, sending a rocket to Mars may well be possible but risky. It may be fairly said that the queue to be a Mars astronaut is not as long as it could be had no crashes happened. There are also some other considerations: Mars is about 60-million kilometres away, give or take. This means that it will take months to get there. It will take months to get back, if indeed there is a “back”.

What sort of volunteer will step forward to be a passenger to Mars? Clearly, a person who has no attachment to Earth and no fear of being fried in a SpaceX fireball. In addition, the person will be quite comfortable living in the confines of a space rocket for a few months and then living in a weatherproof accommodation on the surface of Mars (where the temperature varies from 30 ºC to a temperature so cold it would freeze a blast furnace). There are no trees on Mars, no running water, nothing to look at. So, the person or persons who do fly off will be like putting a large group of deranged lunatics who believe themselves to be immortal in orbit where they: (a) will become famous, and (b) their existence is scary. Sort of like the Donner Party in the Rockies without the wagons. Ah yes, telephones. When Mars is close, it will take 16 seconds for spoken phrases on a phone on Earth to reach Mars. But Mars can go to up to 200-million kilometres away, so this will increase to 64 seconds. So, yes, ET can phone home. But the phone, just like today, really won’t work well at all.