Ozymandias, or whatever

[u/Divayth--Fyr]

Fun Trope Friday: Invisible Aliens & Sci-Fi!

I stand in a vast gray desert, flat and endless. There is no wind. Before me stands a squat, dark building, chunks of its formidable walls crumbled into dust. No other structures remain, assuming there were others.

I have officially made 327th contact, assuming no one else has done any while I was on the way here. They can sort that out back home. Priority mixed with relativistic travel gives me a headache.

The probe wasn’t wrong, there is life here, but I haven’t traveled two thousand light years to chat with microbes. There are relatively few of those, anyhow.

More accurate tests can be done back aboard the ship, but first estimates put it at three to six hundred thousand years since whoever lived here, stopped living here.

There are markings on the black stone. Something profound, perhaps, or maybe just some alien version of ‘Fred’s Grocery Store’.

There are traces of advanced technology. The more advanced it gets, the less likely it is to leave traces. Great piles of stone last for-fucking-ever, where microcircuitry turns to dust in a week. Still, some bits of crumbled rust here were probably electronic.

Whatever became of this ancient stupid boring civilization of mysterious whoever the hell they were? Oh, what a thrill it is to explore, to speculate, to sift through the dust for evidence. Maybe, after years of study, I can announce to the galaxy my brilliant conclusion that these people died the same way and for the same reasons as numbers one-to-326 did.

I bang my helmeted head on the stone wall, disturbing dust that may have sat there since before we humans invented the wheel.

In three cases so far we have found some records, at least partially comprehensible, that describe the final years of those civilizations. These are debated, of course—there is no Rosetta stone for such things—but the conclusions are inescapable.

They just… stop. They stop trying, stop caring, stop working. Some seem to have established vast empires. Some never went much of anywhere. Regardless, after something between ten thousand and one hundred thousand years of technological civilization, they all just quit. No further exploration, science ignored, even basic survival discarded.

I stomp into the building, going through the door for some reason. It’s dim, dry, dusty. Oh, look, a table or shelf. No chairs that I can see. Maybe they didn’t need to sit. Maybe they ate all the chairs just for something to do.

Not one time have we found a world dead from pollution, nuclear war, or alien invasion. We have barely scratched the surface, of course. There are millions of worlds left to find in the galaxy. Maybe one of them had the wild urge to blow themselves up.

No one wants to admit what this all means. Human exceptionalism has some really determined devotees. Not us, they say. Life is glorious and fascinating, for us! Lots of wild hypotheses have gained traction, but in their desperation to avoid the truth, they manage to avoid noticing that our urge to explore seems to be waning. There were more than a thousand manned missions in the decade before I left earth orbit. There were six that year, and none planned for the next.

Why haven’t the aliens visited earth? It's obvious. They just don’t care. Who cares about 327th contact, or the ten millionth?

There is a hydrogen atom spinning happily away, four billion light years thataway. There's another one at the tip of my nose. No one in their right mind would get very excited about going to visit either one. They are essentially identical. Whoopity-doo.

Perhaps the most damning, bizarre aspect is that we have yet to find any traces of a repository, a deliberate attempt to store anything of the history and culture of these peoples. No one seems to have had any urge to preserve such things for future visitors.

My sample cart is loaded, but I just leave it. I’ll just go back to the ship. Or maybe I’ll just stay here.