When We Stopped Looking for Ourselves
Image by Willgard Krause from Pixabay
Asteroid PZ2745 contained too much iron and lithium to resist.
Its slow orbit and extreme size meant companies could send ships with drills.
The miners scanned for the various ores of course, but
no one stopped to consider what else might live among the craters.
The beings that looked like gray flames had hidden from our probes,
but their fear cycled into murder when the ship landed on their home and
began drilling. They soon swarmed en masse, and everyone watching the livestream
saw the twisted bodies of the astronauts.
Two generations later, human beings tried again, this time colonizing PL78453.
The leaders assured everyone that the planet contained no sentient creatures, and the
military advisors were partly right. No civilizations lived on the plains.
The Mydineons only came out from the deep waters onto the fertile grasslands once yearly.
Finding the human housing desecrating their sacred mating sites sparked an intense fury.
The settlers claimed ignorance. They demanded to stay.
Soon 15,000 colonists found every source of water toxic, and those
Monitoring the journey witnessed those who had traveled 400 light years die of dehydration.
It took humanity another eight generations to try again.
Each test revealed PL9826543 as a more colorful version of Earth.
Traveling through space in a self-sustaining ship, all 30,000 colonists knew the plan.
After landing, they scanned the area. Then they waited.
Three months after the ship settled into a large field, the
sentient trees moved to surround it, waving and swaying.
The humans spoke of their desire to share but also offered to move their ship.
The trees welcomed and embraced them, and the humans celebrated this new harmony.
Over time, the colony outgrew the ship of course,
but by then, the first dryads had already been born.
When humanity stopped looking for ourselves,
we found ways to evolve and prosper.
Now, we live spread across sixteen different planets, and Earth is no longer alone.
Some of us call trees and other life forms family.
A few of us prefer to live on asteroids and space stations.
Once we ask nicely, the universe grows less harsh.
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