Captain’s Blog…
Captain’s Blog Stardate 07.12.202009
Our ten Quabble mission to explore the distant Sol system is drawing to a close and we will soon be heading home to Kizotrix IV. The exobilogists and archaeologists are beaming back on board with their last few samples and our databanks are brimming with gigaQuimms of information. But what lessons have we learned from our study of this system, and its remarkable third planet?
> Planet Sol 3 from geostationary orbit
The only planet in the system capable of sustaining life is a beautiful place, green/blue with majestic mountains and sparkling seas, much like Kizotrix used to be, before the Great Exodus, rich with vegetation, abundant with a myriad of lifeforms. But it is the archaeological record that interests me most and our scientists have done a great job in piecing together the story of the civilization which used to live there. They were an amazing people, these inhabitants of Sol-3, with beautiful architecture, a network of transportation systems and social communities.
> Crude data pod
Much like the aracnians on Gat’nk Delta, it seems they relied heavily on a web structure, which, by the height of their civilization, had spread to cover most of the planet. It’s all gone now, of course, beyond the ruins that our scanners have mapped and the few trinkets we collected. Nature soon wipes out her mistakes and leaves little for us to study, but I have a good team on board and we were lucky to stumble upon a set of files on one of their primitive data storage pods, which at first we overlooked. Mr Wallik, my chief of Sciences, recognised its significance and developed a method to extract the information.
They named their planet ‘Earth’ and organised themselves into hive-groups which they called ‘cities’. Their social structure seemed to align with the hive mentality too, with individuals designated workers, soldiers, builders, farmers or breeders. Huge farms, or ‘Tescos’ supplied them with food. Each hive had at least one of these Tescii. They enjoyed art, music, poetry and had many recreational activities – something called soccerball which involved chasing a sphere around a rectangular playing area, much akin to our game of Pong, and they worshipped a God they called Cowell to whom they prayed every seven-rotation cycle. A favourite pastime was ‘clubbing’ which apparently involved baby seals. All of this was underpinned by a crude bartering system, where they exchanged their produce or services for plastic credit tokens.
> Example of typical meal
Their favourite food was a type of bovine meat, pressed and formed into a disk shape which they ate between two ‘buns’ – similar to our Sarg-cakes but made with crushed seed powder. These were called ‘Kentucky Fried Mac Pizzas’. This meal was often accompanied by something called ‘Coke’ which was either drunk or sniffed, depending on the requirements of the social gathering. They had at least one queen, although the record shows an increasing number of queens as their civilization grew. Within the hives, social structure was dominated by factors such as hide-colour. These strange little people came in four colours: White was the dominant class, followed by yellow and then black. The Reds, it seems, were hunted to extinction in their indigenous super-hive, called The Untidied Stains of America, although their history books suggest that some survived and moved to the area they called Russia where they set up a red army.
> Evidence that humans ate their young
Our studies show that they reached level 4 on the Jitrov Civilization Scale, which is remarkable for a species that still ate its own young. We see proof of this infanticide in digital advertising of the time, for such products as ‘Jellied babies’ , ‘Jelly tots’ and ‘kid’s mix’. Similar promotional material that Mr Wallik has been able to decipher, provides key insight into the biology of this species, as we have been able to glean that they must have had a cobalt-based circulatory system; we know for certain, from audio-visual ‘advertisements’, that females had blue blood which they collected every 28 solar cycles in winged pads and we assume they used this to make a local delicacy, ‘black pudding’. Allegedly somewhere called ‘Britain’ had talent. For reasons our meteorologists have yet to understand, there was a predisposition for canine and feline precipitation.
To their credit, there is evidence that they had developed rudimentary nuclear technologies and had embarked upon the early stages of space travel, although we are unable to detect more than speculative evidence to suggest that they made it as far as their closest moon. Nevertheless, they showed a great deal of promise, and had they not made some fundamental mistakes their people could have developed to be equal to our own great race.
> Polution from a single domestic stove could be seen from miles around
It seems that the indigenous mammalian bipods ran into difficulty towards the end of their First Industrial Revolution, as so many other civilizations we have met on our travels have done. This all happened about 200,000 Quabbles ago by our time standards. Mr Wallik has pieced together a tale of how these ‘humans’ (as they called themselves) were little more than highly developed apes who based their technology on hard-fuel-burning engines, and combustion. Now of course, our scientists know the folly of such action, but these were an underdeveloped people for whom science was little more than guesswork and magic. They still had Religion, for FarcQ’s sake, and could only travel in four dimensions. They took the apparent abundance of carbon-based compounds for granted; never thinking these would run out. They thought ‘fire’ to be their greatest discovery, and then spent the remainder of their time on the planet finding different ways to burn things! There is evidence that they ritually burned their own people in annual sacrificial rituals – especially anyone designated with the name ‘Guy’. They used liquid ‘oil’ for everything, based their whole civilization on it, turning it into fuel, and plastics, medicines, cosmetics and something they called ‘sticky-back-plastic’, from which they could make almost anything. But like a Gippol beetle in a dwang fruit, they had no thought for what would happen when there was nothing left to use as raw materials and their obsession with burning things for power, heat and light was their biggest mistake. Maybe a few more Quabbles and they could have amounted to something special. They were barely starting to investigate the basics of quantum mechanics, which we take for granted, and were too busy burning things to really study photonics. Black matter was little more than a theory for them, although there are a few traces of recorded evidence to suggest that they were on the brink of unravelling some of its basic properties; they might have even discovered the Higgs-Bosun Drive, had they not messed up the science.
> Relase of toxic gasses
We have seen news-pods recorded at the time that tell how the emissions from their industry and the smoke from their obsession with burning things, became trapped in the atmosphere and started raising the planet’s surface temperature through the greenhouse effect – it is the same process that our terraformers use when they want to raise the ambient temperature of a seed planet.
On the Earth, ocean temperatures started to rise and this caused changes in climate, melting the polar ice caps, turning fertile rainforests to desert and raining on the bonfires. Of course, we understand oceanic flow and its correlation to weather systems – it seems almost unimaginable for us that these humans never built weather farms, and never developed oceo-engineering to control their seas. Perhaps, given a few more decades, they may have started to realise the relationships between sea and sky, but their focus was on other things, like burning their resources, territorial fighting and the development of ever-more barbaric ways to kill each other. Our doctors say that even today some of the mammalian life on the planet carries antibodies to a type of influenza that we believe the humans used in a form of biological warfare against each other.
> Severe flooding in many capital hives - this 'city' was known as 'the big smoke'
Of course, with all the burning, they suffered terrible climatic disasters as a result of their short-sightedness, with whole communities being flooded, crops wiped out, their city hives in coastal areas or near rivers under constant bombardment by storms and tornadoes – our civil engineers know the folly of building on flood plains but the humans were blind to the risks. Our geologists tell me that there is evidence that they tore down vast swathes of forest and polluted their seas. They showed scant regard for the other forms of life which lived among them and those creatures which were not slaughtered for food were kept as pets or exhibited in massive stadiums to be ridiculed by their masters. We read a report of a conjoined entity (perhaps even a genetic mutation of their own species) which was ritualistically made to perform terrifying feats of endurance on a regular basis, while they watched and listened to its pitiful, tortured, wailing; the ‘humans’ then had a form of mass election process whereby they decided if the creature should live another week or be slaughtered to the God Cowell. We can only assume that this poor being, a biological rarity by all accounts (having four legs, two heads but only one brain) was hunted to extinction and wiped from the face of the planet, as we found no evidence to suggest the ongoing survival of the Jedward.
At one point, near the end of their reign on the Earth, it looked as though there might have been hope. The hive leaders all came together on the summit of a hill in a place called Copenhagen, in an attempt to address the ecological problems facing their species. We have seen pod-pics and read reports of a growing realisation that relying on fossil fuels was causing immeasurable damage to their environment, but their culture was based on a theology of economics over ecology. How strange that they rewarded their economists and financiers far more than their healers, their teachers or their scientists. Being a “banker” was the most respected and highly paid of all professions, although we see little evidence that these individuals contributed at all to society. For a hive species they seemed to exhibit a disproportionate level of individual greed. Our ice core samples tell the story in terrible detail. By the time the human race realised the problems it was causing, they were too late, doomed. Their fossil fuels lasted only about another 20 solar cycles, despite rationing, and their futile attempts to develop ‘clean fuels’ failed due to a lack of global cooperation. They simply ran out of things to burn and by that time the bankers had made off with all the money so their economic infrastructure collapsed.
> Location of nuclear waste dumps
They played with other options; hydrogen extraction, geo-thermals, bio fuels and power harnessed from radio waves, but investment in the development of these technologies was obviously not seen as a priority as we can find little proof that these were ever adopted on a global scale.
If they had realised their dependency on fossil fuels sooner, they might indeed have ploughed resources into developing other options, but a growing population is a hungry beast and they had only one viable route when the oil ran out and so we can see the evidence of a brief increase in the use of nuclear power. We have found a number of radioactive dumps, some deep underground, and we believe that in a twist of irony they used the empty mines as repositories for spent nuclear rods. When the mines were full the ‘humans’ must have jettisoned their waste into orbit. Much has since fallen back down to the surface, but some remains, circling the planet where it still poses a danger to space traffic. Mr Wallik has recommended we leave a warning buoy. We calculate though, that even after the move from fossil fuels to nuclear energy, the planet’s supply of radioactive compounds lasted only a couple of generations – and within one hundred solar revolutions, their industry and civilization had collapsed. When they had nothing left to burn, they just ended up burning each other.
> Solar farm in Stockholm
I have seen images from the planet’s surface which show the arid, sandy ‘Ikea Desert’ of the region they called “Scandinavia” where, even today, there is evidence of huge solar farms, which we believe may have been a last-ditch attempt to move to renewable sources. There is no doubt that this would have been a woefully inadequate solution when compared to the population explosion which remained unchecked. Giant dams still remain in other (now) tropical regions – the Gamburtsev dams show proof that hydroelectric power was at least considered, and this may have been viable for the few decades that the ice cap, which once covered the mountain range, was melting. But climate change soon evaporated the lakes and the power plants fell silent.
> Sahara ice plain wind farm
The Ice Flats of Africa are peppered with the ruins of what our archaeologists think were wind turbines. Our simulations support the theory that these would have had to be adopted on a global scale to have any impact, and now they stand rusting and decaying as a sorry testament to what must have seemed like a valiant attempt by the humans to survive. But this was all too little, too late. The tipping point had been reached and there was no way this once promising race could save itself.
Whenever we set out on these missions of exploration, we always hope to find evidence of intelligent life. Sadly it seems that Sol has little to offer on her eleven planets (we are pleased to have discovered the hitherto undetected outer gas giant, now labelled Sol 11). Most of these planets are too distant to support life, and even the one designated ‘Earth’ is now of little interest beyond an historical curiosity. On our travels we have encountered evidence of many species who have died out through natural disaster, planetary collision, even the devastation caused by an untamed spacial wormhole, but no tale of mass extinction has touched me quite as much as the one of the humans of Earth. Of course, the planet has now fully recovered and is flourishing with an abundance of vegetation and wildlife. But nothing that shows the potential of its once so promising human inhabitants.
