Last 2 versions of stupidity

We'd found another two low-tech worlds of stability and had even been able to divert an asteroid for one so they'd have a little more time. Their asteroid belt was larger and denser than our own and we had some of our ship fabrication specialists salivating over the opportunity to build ships there- since we didn't think the people on the planet in that system would be looking outward for a long time. That last was on our 21st stop, then there was a completely dead world- the kind that still glows in the dark.

Calling the planet "NiteLight" seemed an appropriate irony. Despite our inability to visit the planet's surface ourselves we were able to land robots to sift through the remains. There wasn't much to find. Our visit there was fairly short. It wasn't very heartening given the other nuked worlds we'd visited.

Their infrastructure showed they'd had radio astronomy, but, had they heard us? Their own satellites and space probes taught us only a little bit about these people who'd not merely extinguished their own existence, but had destroyed their knowledge and the whole range of biology across their world.

When a planet can be seen to "glow" from space this is not a good sign. We didn't know what kind of weapons they could use that would leave a radioactive planetary crust. Mind you, we weren't sure we wanted to know, either. This took talent.

Obviously someone wanted to ensure a "Scorched Nitelight" policy.

We did find an indication of deep bunkers under various mountains but didn't have to tools necessary to mount a study of what could be hidden there. We'd need to wait another couple of hundred years for the radioactivity to die down enough for our robots to be reliable enough to follow orders.

We didn't have much sympathy for these people. If any remained alive even now we weren't sure we wanted to know them.

It was quite a relief to depart for our next survey target.

[Visit 23: Survey Mission 1] "Death By Stupidity"

We'd arrived at our twenty-third stop, another world where they were gone but recently enough for us to noodle through the remains to get a good picture of them a biological entities.

This world was recovering from an asteroidal impact; From some of the surviving technology they should've been able to figure out how to avoid an impact. Again our detectives went to work, trying to ferret out how another technological civilization had managed to kill themselves off. This was such a repetitive discovery.

They had to have seen this one coming; They had the tech base to find it and their basic technological level would have supported their ability to address the threat. They didn't even TRY. How'd they screw this one up?

It was a case of finding their educational infrastructure and finding their own documentation of the omni-lingual (We look for mathematical or physical constants first, like pi; on one world it was almost straight out of Piper's story, from a table of the elements) that would allow us to work out their language in a context we could most easily map.

None of my quad are real good at that, so we worked on the mapping of the asteroid strike that took them down. I was involved in the analysis of their industrial plants, my 1stWife was shuttling people to and fro, my 2ndWife was working on the bio-compatibility index while my 3rdWife was stuck as grunt labor going through the minimal libraries this world had.

About libraries: You can tell a lot about a civilization from it's libraries. On our own world, Benjamin Franklin encouraged the establishment of free public libraries for the fledgling United States, and this wasn't an uncommon attitude on many of the worlds which we'd visited (so far). It seems the wealth of a culture is so closely tied to how well all of the people can access information - regardless of "licensing". Knowledge begets knowledge. Knowledge in the greatest number of hands creates wealth. On that scale, this civilization was poor. Very poor. The material scanned in was limited in range; Once we were able to translate this material it wouldn't take long to read it.

Worse yet was our discovery that the impact shouldn't have killed them off. Nobody on the mission could figure out how they could all die off like that; The rest of the planet wasn't in bad shape and the biology, while alien enough to not make us easy marks for the fauna (and flora) was close enough to make the vegetation non-toxic for us. We picked up some nice grains and even roots. We planted some of our own seeds to see how well they'd grow (knowing that we wouldn't be bringing any of the final products back on board). Our plants grew well here and we were comfortable.

We studied their farms and farming machinery, their transport systems (the trucks, buses and trains were quite primitive, far behind their "state of the art" as seen in some isolated area) so we were already wondering why there was such a great dichotomy in technology.

Industrial facilities and the "company towns" around them seemed to support the dichotomy- the largest factories seemed to produce low-end primitive products but some plants, often as a wing to the larger facility, produced much higher technology versions of the main-line product- though in much lower quantity. This was weird.

Even to us geezers this made no sense, adding yet more mysteries to this world's passing.

Another mystery appeared but got some of us worried. A "walled" village was visited and, despite the residue of their dead (the sun-bleached rags were about all that was left of their dead; It looked like a riot had been fought off) we were able to discover this enclave had buildings containing examples of much more advanced technology, both electrical devices and transportation.

So the economic dichotomy fed two sets of consumers and, if our suspicions were even half-true, this was a very sick world indeed.

The educational facility first chosen by the linguistic archaeologists turned out to be a bit of a waste; The educational levels were pathetic. With what we'd just learned we started looking at the environment for each of these higher educational facilities and tried to find a school for the "upper class".

It took months of sifting through various ruins before we found reasonably intact facilities collocated with a walled enclave; This turned out to contain pay-dirt since it was located in a relatively dry area (though it would've been pretty damp post-impact) and we were able to work with the books that survived. Having died out over 500 years ago, the fact that anything survived did seem miraculous.

An omni-lingual was found in this place- this time, it was mechanical engineering. The linguists were in nirvana and it wasn't more than a year before we were able to read their previously scanned libraries (romance novels?) and the histories at the university.

Our suspicions of sickness in this culture didn't go far enough; This had been a very sick world indeed. We were walking around in the remains of a civilization against which even the old class-conscious British would look incredibly egalitarian. They didn't have multiple caste levels as we'd seen in China and India; You'd be either a master or a worker. We were upset that their word for "worker" seemed like a euphemism.

The higher technologies (which were never really all that high, compared to the mainstream level) were reserved for the upper class- upper class, hell, these people were more like slave owners. High tech that would have enabled growth was completely contained. Progress had been slowed because technical education was only allowed to them- and few of them felt motivated to do any of the development.

They'd operated in that mode, at the same technical level, for at least a thousand years before they got finished off, all because they didn't care for the future. The upper class saw no reason to introduce destabilizing technology into the world and figured that the asteroid that obliterated them would miss- since computations needed to be done by hand and their motivation to do them was limited. From histories, even when the necessary math work was done it was criticized as inaccurate and prone to error. If they had been able to whistle, they'd've been whistling in the dark.

They got complacent. Their families had power, each had a factory and control over their workers. Mobility was not valued so very little was done to handle long distance trading. The workers couldn't afford the fruit of the factories which was reserved for the masters' own trade; Factories sold products to each other for their infrastructure. Services for the workers was nonexistent (not that the medical care the upper crust could get was worth anything).

This world was so sick- and it sounded like one of the paths we ourselves had been headed towards, averted only by the big economic crash and the symbiote we now all carried. Many of Earth's own "Upper Crust" suffered from the double whammy of the economic crash- which ripped their fortunes apart- and the symbiote killed many of the rest (due to their drug habits). The globalization effort on earth had been undermining each worker's expectation of being able to enjoy the products they made as third-world and Asian factories were employed to produce expensive goods with cheap labor, undoing the work Henry Ford's only real innovation had brought to us, the expectation of being paid reasonably well for our work. We had been on this path ourselves ... and it hurt us now to recognize that such greed extends to enslavement. We wanted to believe that humanity had a soul and wouldn't go back to making people themselves into property. It hurt for us to learn better.

So we'd escaped this- despite our own historians drawing parallels between the dawn of the 21st century and this world's social and economic structure.

In all of our stops so far we'd managed to learn that the human race had been lucky at so many different turns- and we worried that our luck would run out soon. Despite the "efficiencies" to be gained by "globalization" and having a single government, we'd turned away from monolithic structures in economics and government, all in order to maintain some kind of "healthy" competition; The value of heteromemetic economies couldn't be understated. From the remains of this culture we learned more about competition- and uncontrolled greed- than we ever wanted to know, for the human psyche could harbor ugliness like this.

Each owner family had thousands of workers; These workers got little compensation for their work- they weren't allowed to own property, had no political voice and any acts of initiative- even in their master's favor- seems to have been put down aggressively. Their social order was also destined for ultimate failure anyway since the ruling families had an exceptionally limited gene pool. This stagnant pool run by pond scum hadn't had a chance to survive a simple impact since any resiliency had long been bred out of the race.

An ugly whisper on the ship had been spreading over meal time discussions; A concensus formed. If we ever faced this kind of system still in operation anywhere, even at home, we'd do our damndest to break it. This was such a serious wrong. It was a form of ugliness so terrible that even fashion couldn't compete. We'd seen so much death, it almost seemed like sacrilege to _want_ to destroy. A survey ship is woefully under-equipped with weapons in hand but given time in a system we could build up quite an arsenal- which we didn't really want to contemplate.

With an empty world with good Bio-Compatibility, we finished the local maintenance/manufacturing yard in the local asteroid belt. A permanent hyperspace beacon was set up to accommodate the expected influx of immigrants. This world was ready.

We humans were accumulating worlds to grow into at an incredible rate; This one could be settled immediately without further Terra-forming so we dispatched a message drone for Earth and coincidentally a drone arrived for us- but not from earth. (It was policy that we'd have our beacon up for the length of our visit so that any incoming messages could get to us.)

Now with another world to check - a living world, with a technological base- it was time to refurbish this drone and pack ourselves up to go. This was done with enthusiasm; The prospect of leaving such a sad story behind us was quite reassuring to those of us with the imagination to consider how it would be at the bottom of their pecking order.

Looking forward we still worried over what we'd find- but this was a chance to see a race still living and breathing- and who we could talk to.