All the many ends

I can’t tell you how instantaneous travel from, and to, any point in the universe works exactly. It’s pretty complex and has to do with quantum entanglement, blah blah blah.

That’s not my job.

My job is investigator, of sorts…

Have you ever wondered why in all the universe we appear to be utterly alone?

In the vastness of space, how is it, we are the only intelligent life?

The answer is simple. To be short, it is the nature of intelligent life to destroy its self.

Daily, we build the engine of our own destruction.

We invented radio, what? Less than a hundred and fifty years ago? That’s the length of time we’ve been sending out the message that we exist to the universe. A universe that is close to fourteen billion years in age. Compared to that second number the first number is incredibly small. Nothing more than the briefest blip. And in that time we already hold in our hands the power to destroy ourselves.

It seems, that’s all it takes. One or two hundred years from the birth of tech to possible destruction.

Bluntly, there’s no one out there because they’re all dead.

Dead, by their own hand, countless ways.

But we have a chance. In learning how others achieved their end, we can hopefully avoid our own. Thanks to the invention of instantaneous interstellar travel, we can visit those many corpse worlds. Learn all the ways they destroyed themselves and then, make a concerted effort not to go that way.

More often than not it’s war.

My first job was investigating the end of a species that destroyed themselves through war.

The Salacs of the planet Oxellia.

Even from orbit, we saw that large areas of Oxellia were pockmarked with the telltale craters left by explosions that we’re so sadly acquainted with on our own planet. Only these were much bigger than I’d ever seen. Craters you could fit a city in.

They’d used nuclear devices on themselves. But it seems that, on this world, their atmosphere had a little more oxygen in it than ours, and one day they dropped the big one, the chain reaction didn’t stop, that ignited the atmosphere and on that day, they all died.

The hardest part of that job was surveying the regions not ravaged by war.

Like on so many other worlds, we found that their streets and buildings bore a striking, and worrying, similarity to our own. Except, in this case, in scale.

The Salacs, were small in stature. A third the height of you or I.

Carefully picking our way through their widest streets, it felt, for all the world, like we were children walking amongst toys. All drained of colour by the covering of dust left by the eon between the day their clocks stopped and the day we arrived. They were perfectly preserved by the vacuum of space for the near million years since their destruction. The Salacs who had asphyxiated in the street lay covered in dust but those sat in there toy apartments, or in their toy cars were protected from the dust and sat as they did so long ago. The true horror was, they were… cute. Funny looking fuzzy, colourful, creatures. Long dead toys in a long dead toy world. Adorable, if it weren’t for their hollow eye sockets that haunt me still to this day.

The Hanosh of the planet Paraull were a war like species but profligate too. Reading their history books and watching their dramas, kept on a magnetic ribbon that was somehow impervious to time, we learnt that, for many generations, the birth rate kept pace with the death rate and an equilibrium was held.

Eventually, and sadly though, great advancements in the field of robotics were made. The Hanosh being the Hanosh, they built robots to fight, what proved to be, their final war. The robots were so efficient, all Hanosh everywhere were killed within six of their years.

The robot factories were automated though, so continued to produce robot soldiers for a number of years after that. Across their globe a lifeless war raged without rage. A new equilibrium was held, with the factories producing robots as fast as the robots could, mindlessly, destroy each other.

Eventually, fifty two years after the last Hanosh died, the last robot stood in victory but not victorious. It was not triumphant. It felt nothing at all. No joy at winning. Not even relief at conflict ending. For it was just a robot set with a task that was now done. Its task complete, it simply stopped and stood waiting for a new command, for the hundred years it took for its battery to loose charge.

In all that world, it was easy enough to find. It was the only thing standing.

War is very much the favourite way for civilisations to bring about their own ends, but there are other ways…

Our closest neighbour, just five short light years away, winked out of existence barely a hundred thousand years ago.

Odd to think that if our primitive ancestors had built a radio instead of a spear they might have heard the last transmissions of the Pennals of the planet Bacurn as they lamented the passing of their once great culture.

Their end came about through great advancements in medicine

A cure for all ills, their ultimate undoing.

A universal panacea was discovered. A simple pill to cure every known sickness, both physical and mental. Often a Pennal would take the cure for a common virus only to find it curing undiagnosed mental conditions too. In a generation they became uniformly happy and well. In another generation there were no doctors, as the cure healed too, even the most grievous injury.

Then by the third generation, when doctors were but a memory in the idilic utopia they’d made, a new virus rose that the cure could not kill. Historically it took four of their years to train as a doctor.

Every Pennal was dead in two.

We have the universal cure now. It sits in a fridge in a secure location back home. From time to time it’s used to save a great leader or a leader of industry from certain death. It’s administered without their knowledge though. Lest the secret get out and lead to another world without doctors. 

The Jayhans knew full well their destruction was at hand and did nothing to stop it.

They were a race without emotion. No hate or love ran between any of them. Only cold logic. They cared only for themselves. Young were abandoned at birth to fend for themselves. Which they did well. As their industries rose it became clear that pollution from those industries would one day make life on their world impossible. They did not care. The end was generations away. By which time they would be dead. Having no love for their offspring they continued to pollute. What was best for the individual was worst for the group. But the Jayhans were only individuals. They didn’t even have countries. Though murder was common place and even legal, they’d never had a single war, as no Jayhan could rally another to any cause. Eventually they consumed or spoiled every resource available to them, and as the last Jahan died they lamented nothing.

The pursuit of a perceived perfection was the undoing of the Chaluns. They abhorred aberration. Among them were the six gills. Chaluns with gills split into six rather than the normal five. The day came when their kind were expunged from the race. But then a new aberration became apparent. The blue backs. They’d always been there. The blue backs themselves had helped eradicate the six gills. It was only once the six gills were gone that the hideous nature of the blue back became apparent. Then, once the blue backs were no more, the Chaluns saw how lazy and mistrustful the ridge browed in their midst were. After that, the filthy light eyed. Then the twelve toothed, and so on and so on. It was only ever after an aberration was rubbed clean from the race that another aberration, that had always been there, became obvious. It took hundreds of years to perfect the race. Made possible in the end with advancements in medical science that made it possible engineer deadly viruses that would attack only the aberrant amongst them.

Finally the Chaluns were perfect and uniform, but also they only numbered nine and all of them were male.

Tomorrow we investigate a new dead world.

Unlike the more common tripedal, like ourselves, this species is bipedal.

The humans. Of the planet, Earth.

We’ve yet to know what proved to be the cause of their ultimate end, but early indications show that they may have tried a host of ways.