IT WAS MID-AFTERNOON OUTSIDE, though Rick was nominally aware of the time of day. He had been reading old material he authored on optical parametric pulse amplification lasers when a perimeter alarm sounded.

Scanning his cameras, he saw nothing outside to cause the alarm. Then he rolled back the video recordings and noticed a mini-drone passing by the solar array. Though he had seen such drones occasionally at higher elevations, this one was lower to the ground and obviously scoping the array.

“Damn, I know what this means,” he voiced. “Too bad Sofia is away right now, because I’d want her to check the area, particularly the barn.”

He reran the videos from the five cameras monitoring the barn but saw nothing.

“Whew!” he exclaimed. “Bastards, snooping on our stuff. I’m sure their AI is assessing right now why Sofia requires such a large solar array if she only has the gardens and house. The answer is, of course,” he confided to Pete and Molli, “that they are needed to charge my underground battery systems for the transmissions.”

Rick breathed deeply, trying to calm his nerves. “Another unwelcome sign of interest in what we’re doing; what she’s doing. I swear she responded earlier to them that most of these arrays are old and inefficient, and that’s why so many are needed. They must have reassessed her response. Maybe it was that an AI captured an uncertain wavering in her voice. God knows, they have so many ways to analyze things, given their freaking predictive models. Either way, it’s another message to redouble my efforts and pound these thoughts out.”

* * *

Given this new, unwelcome sign from the oligarchs, he pressed forward.

“The topic of planetary abuse is so wide, so pervasive, that I don’t know where to start. We live on a planet, as I assume you do. We evolved on the planet. As we grew in intelligence, we found ways to manipulate the planet to our own benefit.”

“Once we evolved from the hunter-gatherer stage to latter cycles of humankind, we became efficiency-oriented beasts. We could beat the Earth to a pulp and care relatively little that it was our sustaining mother. Just look at our mining operations where we extracted precious minerals and metals from the Earth. No longer did we need to stand in freezing mountain waters or search the ground to locate them. We developed a much more efficient means for doing so. At the same time, we let the tailings from these mines run into our rivers, where people drank the poisonous byproducts downstream.”

“This little analogy applies to virtually every area of commerce as our industries grew. Trade out precious metals for plastics, wood products, fisheries and food production, electronics, rubber tires, petroleum extraction, transportation. The list is endless. Did we try to recycle? Sure, with some success. But the locomotion of industry moved much faster than the crawl of responsive measures to restore the planet.”

“I suppose our most visible example of planetary abuse was with climate change, where we failed miserably. Earlier in this century, scientific analysis concluded that our industrial, transport, and farming activities were warming the planet. Given the lack of an agreed upon ethic for our species, conveniently opposing viewpoints immediately developed.”

“Indeed, the old United States was very much the leader in creating that opposing viewpoint. We elected and installed a series of mentally corpulent politicians who were utterly incompetent in making decisions for the good of the country, much less the world. Instead, their focus was on themselves and those who paid their fare, typically comprised of those who were the biggest polluters on Earth.”

“You can guess what happened. By the late 2020’s, ambient temperatures began to noticeably rise. The polar ice caps started to melt significantly, causing flooding coastal cities around the globe. Temperature changes disrupted every aspect of society, and growing crops became far less predictable. Wars over water rights broke out.”

“I shake my head remembering, as I was only in my twenties at the time and still so impressionable. The idiot politicians even rationalized this ice melt as a positive, a way for shipping to traverse the northern and southern passages unhindered. Simpletons and pathetic rationalizers. The scum.”

“In our country’s haste to find a fall-guy for the economic turmoil and dislocations it caused, we strung-up a number of politicians who were climate change naysayers and stripped them of their possessions. In some countries, those most affected by the changes, these politicians were tortured or killed. It was knee-jerk recompense of our global disgust as we watched many millions die in famines and floods around the globe. It was a sight, a terrible sight.”

“You can blame the politicians, but I say blame humanity. We were too short-sighted to understand the impacts of a society based on burning carbon-centric products, a society that farmed protein-rich animals for us to eat. These and many other factors were contributing to an unsustainable global carbon load. It’s water under the bridge now, and it became far less of an issue once the mass destruction of life occurred in the Great Debacle.”

“We engendered a society of creators and consumers. Our consumption habits were amplified by the value we placed in things, in contrast to the value we assigned on ourselves as human beings. So many people wanting so much, so quickly, and feeling they weren’t wholly embodied, fulfilled, or satiated unless they obtained more. We had an endless addiction of worshipping transitory things of manufacture and pleasure.”

“The Debacle highlighted the unrestrained mess our species had created for itself, the mess we inflicted upon our planetary mother. Jesus, never were there more abusive children. And the Debacle itself created massive issues. How do you manage the burial or other destruction of four billion human bodies? Burning, mostly, creating more carbon footprint.”

“But this little phage went far beyond humans. It affected many animal species, further exacerbating the burden. To their credit, the less social animals were safely tucked away in their holes somewhere, but animals like canines and similar social species were devastated worldwide.”

“Back to the mess, though. A few countries used the Debacle to unleash their atomic stores, resulting in hundreds of millions of deaths and lasting impacts on every aspect of life on Earth. I don’t recall the number of nuclear plants that went into meltdown and ruined vast tracts of land, many of them near the cities already devastated.”

“Industrial operations around the globe languished for some time, and the poisonous byproducts of their manufacture became spread throughout. It was tough enough that plastics were already everywhere in the oceans as microparticles. Multiply that little issue times hundreds of leaking offshore oil rigs, forest fires sparked by God knows what, raw materials exposed to the elements. It was a bad time to be human. A bad time to be Earth. To a great degree, things haven’t changed.”

“What could we have done differently? Shunned the idiot politicians with the biased backing of their godhead philanthropists? I’m sure they’d have preferred shunning to what happened to many of them. I know we made efforts, nominal strides, with climate change agreements from which my country at the time had bouts of certainty, much depending on who was paying and who was buying in the roiling graft that was and still is politics.”

“I have no suggestions on how to prevent this beyond what I’ll cover later. You cannot fail to agree upon a few simple, understandable species ethics. You must train your citizenry on those ethics and their importance. If you allow your species to be swayed by the trend or fear or emotional tug of the moment or the beauty and stench of the famous and infamous, you’ll proceed unwittingly on the same dark paths of planetary and species abuse that we did. Eventually, your planet will extricate itself from you, its pernicious and poisonous inhabitants, if you don’t do that first to yourselves."