Sensible Economic Decision

“The universe is probably littered with the one-planet graves of cultures which made the sensible economic decision that there’s no good reason to go into space - each discovered, studied, and remembered by the ones who made the irrational decision.“ - Randall Munroe

[AN: I know I’ve done this twice before. Let’s see if the third is a stretch. Also, my laptop is still dead and all my progress on KFZ is in limbo. I’m using Beloved’s lappy and seriously praying I can at least recover what I’ve written in KFZ T_T]

(#00750 - B019)

They had made buildings to be almost indestructible. Yet the plants were still taking over. The animals were still moving in. Highly adaptable omnivores, all of them.

Tier hated finding graveworlds. There was an intense sense of coming there just a little too late. Even when the evidence indicated that they had arrived more or less a century too late. Whatever had happened here, the ecology had taken some significant time to reach the city hearts.

This planet’s answer to goats faced off in what was once a city square. Posturing and butting at each other.

There was no cogniscent life left on this world. They’d run all the possible scans. Even people regressed back to the stone age would have shown a sign of their existence.

Now it was up to Tier and her crew to unearth this planet’s cause of death.

Data centres, once revived by judicial jiggery-pokery, showed plethoras of information about environmental impact and how profits were more important than the planet’s wellbeing. Lots of arguments along the lines of, "When the last plant dies, we will realise that we can’t eat money.” But of course the profit-making organisations ignored the naysayers, cancelled all efforts to set up colonies elsewhere, and continued on their path to inevitable destruction.

Poorly-researched artificial foods also contributed, causing disease and metabolic failure in the surviving citizens. Monocultures were wiped out by one plague, and the people starved.

Cause of death: Combination trophic cascade disaster, climate change, and disease. Tier wanted to write: Corporate greed into her report… but the Galactic alliance frowned on that ever since they regulated how far bodies corporate could actually go.

They didn’t want the corporations who were doing it right to feel bad about themselves.

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