When I went to Earth for the first time, I was in the dawn stage of my life. My father had brought me on his little ship, and we landed late at night in a patchy field. As we sat there, he pointed at the tree-line in the distance.

"You see, son? This is a beautiful planet, beaming with life, and I wish it would remain that way. Unfortunately, it's inhabited by humans, incredibly stubborn creatures that live such short lives that they can't understand the consequences of their actions. They take from the Earth and then they die. I promise you, son, in our lifetimes this world will die at the hands of humans."

My father was right. I did witness the death of planet Earth in my lifetime. Unfortunately, my father wouldn't get to witness such an event, as he passed not long after our return home. For most of my dawn stage I stayed at home, pursuing study and living a normal life. Many, many solar rotations later, I returned to the solar system on a work assignment, and while en route to the sun, I remembered the trip I had taken with my father when I was young. I looked at my solar map, seeing the little blue dot on the page, "Earth", what a funny name. Following the instructions the map had set me on, I found myself upon the bizarre planet once more. This time, it was not a beautiful and lively blue-green biosphere, but a tan-grey world with only splotches of blue.

Confused, I wanted to stop and take a closer look, even despite the trouble I risked had my superiors found out I landed my ship on a foreign life-harboring planet without a grant. I had heard stories back home, devastating wars, humans committing massacres against each other, as well as wiping out much of the other life on the planet, the chemicals spewed into their atmosphere by their machines they used to churn out electrical energy, but now I witnessed it with my own eyes. I landed my ship near a body of water, so that there would be more to observe than just an empty desert.

My ship settled on the ground, if you could even call it that. Dust spewed up and covered my ship, as though the Earth was trying desperately to swallow me and take any material it could to survive. I slowly opened my door, and felt the blazing sun against me in that moment. Now, I'm no stranger to solar radiation, or radiation from any star for that matter. A large part of my job consists of studying stars up close, but this I wasn't prepared for. I had no protective gear as I didn't expect to be bombarded by this much radiation on a life-harboring planet. It was like I was trapped underneath a nuclear blanket, how did humans endure this? Well, short answer, they didn't.

I walked for a short time until I reached what looked like an abandoned city formed out of mound-like architecture. Beyond all the tiny mounds that surrounded me, there was a grand structure a short ways from me, and so curiosity got the best of me and I thought I might investigate. It was dark inside, as though not a soul had been here in ages. I took a light from my pocket, and what I saw I'll never forget, my answers.

There was a decomposed corpse slouched against the wall, the wall painted with the bodily fluids of humans, pictures of disaster, chaos, war, famine, death, written in fluids the words I couldn't translate at the time, so I copied them down and brought them home with me.

Upon returning home, I translated them, and they said as follows:

"We've lost. The siege has wreaked havoc on our grand city, and we must let in Merdisi and has army. The fool won't live. The sun has decided our fate already. Goodnight."

A chill had run down my spine the first time I read that note. How could a species destroy itself in such a brutal way? It still scratches my old mind every time I think of it.