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Message-ID: <39003asstr$1035882603@assm.asstr-mirror.org>
From: Jack C Lipton <liptonsoup1951@yahoo.com>
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Subject: {ASSM} Seeds of Extinctions (scifi, implied mffff)
Date: Tue, 29 Oct 2002 04:10:03 -0500
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Newsgroups: alt.sex.stories.moderated,alt.sex.stories
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Author: Jack C Lipton <liptonsoup1951@yahoo.com>
Title: Seeds of Extinction
Part: 1 of 1
Universe: n/a
Summary: why are so many alien species so dead?
Keywords: scifi, mfff implied
Revision: $Revision: 1.8 $


		   Seeds of Extinction

		     by Jack C Lipton


We were visiting another world in our list, one where life
had risen, gained in intelligence, and died out.  This was
too common a sight, now:  We'd seen enough to know the most
likely reason for their end, for the same pattern of
extinction had played itself out many times;  Only the
details tended to vary.

It was, from my human viewpoint, a terrible thing to do to
a pretty planet;  It had been quite earth-like before it
was turned gray by various pollutants and the massive
die-off of the intelligent tenants.  We now know how to
clean up such an ecological nightmare and make it ready
for habitation, though these things took time.  We had
plenty of time now.  We could wait.

We didn't always have time.  We barely missed our own
opportunity at self-destruction, though it wasn't war or
pollution itself that'd've killed us off.  On every dead
world where we'd done our archaeology we'd found that the
root cause so close and innoculous as our own curse had
been.  In our case, though, someone's double-edged bio-
weapon misfired but had paid off in strange ways;  a
symbiotic organism intended to kill off males had actually
conferred an extended lifespan to the survivors, both male
and female, changing fertility and making a long list of
psychoactive drugs quite toxic.  This agent also skewed
the gender balance so girls outnumbered boys by just over
3 to 1.  This "bug" spread like wildfire across the
planet and, afterwards, few of the survivors were
willing to wish it hadn't.

So many years ago, back before our racial salvation, SETI
research had coughed up the "Drake Equation" for which a
critical factor was the "fL" variable-  for Lifetime of
an intelligent race.  A short Lifetime for a race meant
that there'd be fewer of them to communicate -  and would
implicitly increase the distance between races alive at
the same time.  All the other fractional factors were
assigned pessimistic numbers since there was so little
evidence of others "in the stellar neighborhood".

With the advent interstellar flight and the scouting of
the now near-by stars came the discovery that almost all
of the "Lifetime" estimates for the Drake equation, save
the most pessimistic, had been far too optimistic.  

Compounding the knowledge of these extinctions are the few
worlds we've visited whose tenants were still thriving
despite a relatively low technical level.  We recognized
the secret of racial survival without symbionts- and it
was a bitter pill.  This also wasn't a good tactic for
long term survival since none of the systems we visited
were empty of impactors.

It's funny how little variation there is in biology-  it
seemed that having two sexes made more sense in the grand
scheme of things.  Of course the rest of the packages had
a tendency to vary, so it would not be a simple matter to
wander in somewhere.

So here we were, deployed on the 16th world in our list to
visit.  We first did as thorough a catalogue of the
surviving flora and fauna to get a clearer picture of the
basic elements of life (DNA ruled here too though the
proteins varied somewhat);  There were enough differences
that we weren't likely to acquire allergies and we weren't
all that palatable to the local bacteria.

First up for the archaeology team was locating educational
institutions; We'd learned time and again that such
facilities would have more complete information
repositories maintained despite the predations of others.
The rest of the educational facilities made the linguistics
team's job easier since the samples would be fairly large. 
It was fairly quickly that we started sifting through their
written works and data storage devices (we found their
optical media in pretty usable condition but we weren't
surprised with how little information was worth reclaiming). 
It was fortunate that they'd gone from the scene relatively
recently so the archives hadn't decayed far.

We also discovered their shared epitaph in their "business"
libraries.  So many worlds had died the same way.

	-	-	-

As one of the "geezers" (all of my quad had been adults
before the symbionts had spread, giving us a completely
different experiental baseline which influenced our
perceptions) providing oversight and context (we
remembered when there were almost as many males as females
in the general population, and, so, easily recalled how
our own world had been sliding towards dissolution) we
were closely involved in the examination of various
artifacts.  Us geezers stand out since most people don't
age past an apparent age of 14-15 nowadays;  While I had
lost some apparent years of age, I still look over 30.

All of my quad's skills were useful out here, too-  I had
been an engineer and my wife a military pilot before the
symbiont had spread to us; We had added an MD and a writer
to round out our "quad" before settling down again- just
as the world around us had to learn how to function with
fewer males and different economic priorities.  It's
funny how we need extra "wives" in a family in order to
be fertile.  Admittedly, their higher sex drives kept me
busier than I would have otherwise been.

At the dawn of the bioweapon's release, there were those
not immediate victims to it but they ended up dying
through chronic drug abuse; Our symbionts don't like that. 
Other diseases, like HIV, killed more quickly, so it was
burned out of the population within a matter of months. 
Between this and other issues the gender balance of the
population across the planet had shifted to one where our
"quads" made sense.  Less than half the world's
pre-weapon population had survived.  Despite this, the
planet was still "just crowded enough" to reduce fertility
and reproduction to incredibly low levels.  This tended
to push people into the solar system so that quads could
conceive and bear children.

When the first starships were finally built (we had to
wait for 23 decades but there was enough other work to do)
we signed up for a survey ship.  In the interim we worked
on economically exploiting the earth-crossing asteroids
and turning those into homes.  Not only did we create
places where new children could be born, we were also
protecting earth from every asteriod we converted. 
Somehow our symbionts could recognize crowding and only
by expanding into new frontiers could we re-enable
fertility.

It took another 54 years before a need for "geezers" was
acknowledged and we were finally put on an analysis
missions to follow-up surveys.

	-	-	-

The Drake equation has many factors;  First is the number
of stars in our galaxy.  Our estimates weren't too far off,
but it would be a while before we got deep enough to make
measurable progress on a galactic map.  Most remaining
factors are "fractions" of the stellar count.  A fraction
of suns that could have planets, then the fraction of
planet-herding stars from that, and so on ...

All of these factors had been pessimistic since there was
little evidence of communicating civilizations-  until we
tripped over enough formerly occupied worlds which started
to show how far off these fractions were.

Because of the assumed length of "fL", the lifetime of a
race on a geologic timescale, all due to rank optimism,
the other factors were historically pessimistic.  The
first of the dead worlds was located by a survey ship a
mere 12 light years away from earth.  The frequencies of
suitable life-bearing worlds along with intelligent life
had been far too pessimistic;  These frequencies were
instead incredibly high-  It was the almost instantaneous
lifetimes of "advanced races" what was far off.

Our own mission had a list of 30 worlds to study that
would keep us off earth for well over two hundred years; 
We were now on the sixteenth landing and the folks who
maintained the main ship were again dealing with setting
up the necessary manufacturing capability on this world's
moon- giving them an opportunity to study these people's
"space" program.  There was evidence they'd touched it
repeatedly with robots and had even landed people on it
a few times, but only as explorers, for there was no sign
they had followed up-  and we found this confirmed in
their histories as "not economical".  The other "trash"
in their sky consisted of communications and weather
satellites that were in high enough orbits that hadn't
decayed completely.  There was no sign of instruments
pointing outward, where they may have heard our own
transmissions.  (They could have heard us if they'd've
bothered to, but their radio-based astronomical
instruments had already been scrapped.)

Their extinction wasn't the "bang" that three others
we'd already visited had taken, but the whimper of
apathy.  We discovered so much in their history that
seemed to follow our own and learned how they chose
their own path to oblivion.

It's no longer funny, having faced this so often now,
but all of the extinctions we had seen so far came
from unrestrained greed.  Greed starts out with
material objects but grows into areas that jeopardize
whole species.

We'd learned that greed seems to be a sublimation of
reproductive urges, and, on earth (as elsewhere),
sparks economic and technical advances since all
biologicals desire to either breed or protect related
breeds.  Greed is a goad towards innovation and
technological advances (thank you James Burke) that, as
long as on-planet (cheaply exploited) frontiers
beckoned, improved the survival value of the race as a
whole.  If no further frontiers are easily accessible,
the race starts to consume itself.

When new frontiers become too expensive, races turn
inwards and entertaining each other with fiction and
fantasies undercuts the drive for exploration and
expansion-  so, instead of mining moons and asteroids,
they mine their own imaginations and put price tags
on their creations, holding tight to most insubstantial
of properties-  the products of the mind.

We'd learned where greed comes from in our own race,
and the still living worlds we'd studied confirms why.
The seeds of safety had been present in the history of
this world (just as it has protected the 2 "living"
worlds we'd seen);  Dead worlds seem to drop the
practice of (for want of a better word) polygyny
because it was a "primitive custom".  After the
bioweapon we humans had little choice, so it was
fortunate that we were already used to technology.

While their genders didn't match human gender traits
one-for-one, there were still male and female traits. 
It was through the frustration of the "broadcast" drive
of males by a system that enforced a system based on
"monogamy" that greed is first born and flourishes- and
allows a race to advance into technological realms.

In our travels, we've discovered that financial systems
vary less between worlds than biology;  It seems that
economics was less of a variant and we have yet to see
a system vary much from any already seen on earth.

Our own cycle of self-destruction had been broken by
the symbionts that enforce polygyny (one pre-requisite
for reproduction) and thus "satisfy" (to a reasonable
degree) the drives that human males have.  All our sex
drives (male and female alike) had been turned up quite
a bit, so there's a lot of sexual activity whenever we
can get some downtime.  Interstellar space has turned
out to be a wonderful way to escape our in-laws, though
our ships are too crowded to allow fertility to awaken.

Humanity's greed, while not completely dead, has helped
drive us forward in technology; It was no longer the
self-genocidal weapon it once was.  A sexually satisfied
male has difficulty maintaining a drive towards greed. 
The two "primitive" cultures were progressing at
extremely low rates because of this kind of satisfaction. 
It didn't hurt that their birth rates were low and the
gender balance in children would be maintained through
their lives.

So this dead world was slowly recovering.  We'd dropped
off various gengineered terraforming agents that'd help
clean up the atmosphere and the seas of this world. 
It'd need some more visits by better equipped
terraforming ships.

So we left another world that'd be comfortable to human
beings in another 500 or so years and started for our
seventeenth stop, writing up the reports on the world
we had just left.  Our computers had copies of all of
their written materials and even audio-visual
performances for our research, as it carried the
cultural records of the previous worlds we had visited. 
Our reports may vary in their details, but the summaries
are getting too repetitive and depressing for us.

We'd learned with their greed in snapping up property,
materials and technology they moved on to intangibles
to prop up their asset lists.  Knowledge became an
"intellectual property", divorced from fertile minds,
so both fact and fiction was closed off from most of the
population who could no longer afford to pay for access. 
At the same time their workforce was encouraged to
greater and greater degrees of productivity without hope
of reasonable compensation-  or acknowledgement that
mortals are fallible.  Their world was laid waste-  None
raised a voice against the ecologic onslaught since the
knowledge needed to recognize and cope was restricted
and undisclosable to the population at large (we'd had
that done to us so many years ago;  It is truly
frightening to realize how close to self destruction we
ourselves were over the issue of copyright) and so many
of the pollutants dumped into their biosphere disrupted
their reproductive systems, rendering the vast majority
of their race quite sterile.

As a species they never saw their final extinction
coming.  Their own economists and accountants were all
happily beside themselves over how productive the world
had gotten since fewer and fewer resources were being
expended on the long-term investment in offspring.

Their greed in forming monopolies has bequeathed their
world to us.

They had their MBAs and Accountants, their CEOs and CFOs.
Their own copyright and patent laws limiting the
dissemination of knowledge.  Their own organizations that
hoarded knowledge, that most precious seed grain of the
future, intent on consuming the future, not planting it.

Now they are no more.

It's our move.  It'll be a pretty world.

			- Fini -

 - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

The Drake Equation background:
	http://www.seti.org/science/drake-bg.html
The Drake Equation calculator:
	http://www.seti.org/science/drake-calc.html

Go out to Google's Advanced Search and look up the
"exact match" for "drake equation".




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-- 
Pursuant to the Berne Convention, this work is copyright with all rights
reserved by its author unless explicitly indicated.
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