Speech by Senior scientist Hrukn ‘Preliminary report on XK-426; local designation: “Earth”’
“Esteemed members of the Contact Council, I present to you my findings on the bipedal beings located by one of our survey vessels two cycles ago. You may —
Yes, I understand that you wish to confirm the rumours relating to my early return. It will be addressed within this report. No, I won’t go into it now.
You may have heard the reports, that these “humans” do not possess any of the abilities that define our union of races. They are true. They lack the power of the Ysk, the focus of the Jarl, and the unity of the Zirconian hive mind.
As you can see from the images copied across to your data-slate they are around 15 units in height on average, according to the specimens that we were able to collect before the recall order.
Humans seem to be a singularly uninteresting race at first — the only reason that I was dispatched to study them was the lack of notable characteristics. It seems a paradox that the only intriguing quality that the humans possess is the lack of anything that would otherwise be considered interesting.
Upon initial examination, these humans seem ridiculously fragile. Experiments have shown that a human hide can be pierced quite easily by even sharpened stone; bones can be broken by —
What? You don’t know what bones are? Why were you sent as a representative to the Contact Council if you don’t even know basic xenoanatomy? Anyway, bones are components of the internal support structure of soft-skinned beings.
Yes, I know that you wouldn’t have any personal experience. Haven’t you ever wondered how those of us not floating around filled with hydrogen can support our own weight?
As I was saying, their bones can easily be broken by as little as a fall under their normal gravity. With a hide this thin and such brittle bones it’s easy to see why they only live to 67 stellar revolutions (“years”) on average — that’s about half a cycle. Short-lived, fragile, and of average intelligence. They are not the strongest creature on their planet, nor the fastest, but somehow they rose to become the apex predator of their environment.
I recall that after a few segments working out how to decode, and another octet spent recording and analysing their transmissions and cracking their information networks, one of my staff, an avianoid, came running to find me shouting “Insane, they’re all completely insane!” getting feathers everywhere. After calming the poor avianoid down, it was explained to me that the humans somehow have not formed a homogenous power bloc, but rather remain fractured along ideological, racial, linguistic, and even religious lines within their own species.
According to their records humans are, and have always been fractured socially. I mentioned before that they lack the unity of the Zicornians, but even our most deviant cultures had managed to reduce themselves to, at most three geopolitical entities by the time they had achieved basic spaceflight. The humans still have over one hundred and ninety nation-states!
As little sense as this made, all the data we could syphon from their networks seemed to corroborate this. In quarter cycle we spent in the system before sending a surface expedition we observed several conflicts between nation states, as well as the emergence of a self-declared nation state, attempting to annex territory from several neighbouring states undergoing significant internal turmoil. The ferocity of these conflicts continues to astound me, over 200,000 deaths to a single conflict in a few of their short years.
Yes, two hundred thousand. I did not misspeak. They killed more of their own in that conflict than my species had births in all the time I was assigned there.
Humans are born killers. While they lack the power of the Ysk, you must not underestimate their ferocity. I worry about what would happen if they found us meddling in their affairs.
Once a small surface outpost had been established we continued watching them for the remainder of our half-cycle, rotating specialists between the ship and outpost as needed. After a quarter-cycle on the ship almost everyone was aching to do some actual fieldwork.
It was on one of these rotations that my Jarl subcommander provided a critical piece of information, the one that got us recalled in fact. These humans have only been civilised for about 10,000 of their years. In the last 200 alone they have harnessed electricity, developed radio and heavier than air flight. Within a single short lifetime they harnessed nuclear fission, developed rudimentary computers, and achieved spaceflight.
How did they do this? While they lack in individual focus, there are over 7 billion humans. I didn’t believe it at first either, but after watching them kill 200,000 of their own people their sheer numbers become undeniable. They are able to devote many resources to studying different methods of doing things, and they can’t stay attached to bad ideas for whole cycles as we do. They just don’t have the time.
Ideas constantly churn and come in and out of fashion. They make breakthroughs at a startling pace. Councilmembers, I was recalled to get a consensus from you. It took my species 10 cycles to achieve spaceflight from heavier than air flight. It took some of you longer. We can not afford to deliberate for another few cycles on the human question.
Do we ignore these short-lived, fragile creatures and hope that they exterminate themselves in the near-constant conflict in which they seem to revel?
Do we isolate and study them? Many of my colleagues argue that we will be unable to study civilisation at this rate of development again. Within one of our lifetimes we might be able to conduct social experiments on a grand scale, and actually see the results in near real time.
Do we exterminate them? I can see some of you even now arguing that we can prevent them from spreading the sheer chaos that seems to infect their world.
Or do we embrace them? Can we successfully contact the humans and turn their energy away from destruction? It is up to you to decide the future of this species, but before that I will leave you with one final thought:
By the time I was recalled the humans had begun to explore and spread throughout their system. If we decide to exterminate them, could we really ever be sure that got them all? Do you want to risk angering a race that could, given enough time, outnumber us all? I don’t.”