“So, what do you think happened to them?” asked my colleague. I had an idea in my mind, but I could not believe it could be something like that. You might be wondering what in the world I'm talking about. Well, here is the story from the beginning. It was the spring of 122243 when I felt a weird energy coming from the galaxy next to ours. It was the first time I felt those vibes coming from there. But, let me explain myself further. My species never really went to places with a high amount of activity because you never know what is out there. Our neighbor galaxy always seemed to be a busy place, so we never thought about going there. However, a couple of centuries ago, the activity decreased slowly until one day we could not identify any. Everyone thought of it as an amazing opportunity to travel there and gather some information about it, so I decided to plan a trip along with a friend to be the first ones to go there.

We packed some food and got in our spaceships. It took us about 2 hours to arrive there, which was far more than we had expected. After entering the galaxy we searched for the point where most of the energy seemed to be and went there. We found ourselves on a weird-looking planet that strangely only had one moon. It was mostly blue, but it also had green. We entered, and it was very nice and completely different from everything I had seen. We soon noticed that the energy we felt came from different kinds of creatures. Although we found the creatures that emitted the current energy, we still did not understand why we felt so much activity coming from this planet before, and now it had decreased. So I got together with my friend, and we started our investigation.

Our first thought was that the reason for the activity to decrease had to be that those who produced it disappeared. This meant there was some kind of species that went extinct some centuries ago. The reason for that had to be something that only affected that species because if it had something to do with a disaster on the planet, other creatures would have disappeared as well, but they didn't. Keeping this in mind, we started to explore the planet to find clues and shape a conclusion. We saw a lot of big structures and decided to go inside them. In each one, we found strange machines and different kinds of devices. As we turned them on, we discovered they all did similar things. They showed random videos about a variety of topics, and there were at least 5 of them inside each structure. After understanding how each of the devices worked, we started analyzing the content they had. By doing that, my colleague and I discovered what the missing species was. They called themselves “humans,” and everything they said or did in those videos was either dumb or manipulative, but according to the number of people who watched them, it did not concern them. Rather than that, humans seemed to like that kind of content. That is when my colleague asked, “So, what do you think happened to them?” My theory was that they focused so much on using the strange machines that they got addicted and completely forgot the world around them. That slowly led to their demise because nobody did anything productive to keep the community alive. It made sense, and all the clues led to similar conclusions. They had amused themselves to death. Even though I knew that, I still couldn't believe a whole species went extinct because of their invention. Aren’t inventions supposed to help make something better or easier, instead of destroying them?

In the end, we left the planet humans called earth and went back to ours having learned a lesson. We told the story to our relatives and warned them to avoid having such a disappointing and sad ending. With all this experience, I learned we should not be dumb enough to ruin and entertain ourselves to the point we are amused to death.

Estefania Pedraza  10A