Recycling the Planet

Year 1

The funny little creatures stepped outside their box and cylinder shaped spacecraft on the virgin soil of Planet Earth.

The ageless intelligent fungus buried deep underground spanning continents took notice through it’s numerous protruding mushroom caps and assorted flora and fauna aboveground. The creatures were either too busy setting up their new little colony or were too small minded to recognize that the fungus was there first.

But it wasn’t angry, jealous, just curious. Deep underground, where it’s expansive root system lay, it wondered and thought about the new creatures on the pristine surface, but not for long. The fungus had been around a long time and thinking, waiting, and watching were things where it possessed an expert level of skill.

100 Years Later

The creatures got used to the place pretty quickly! They spread across the entire planet, all the continents and even created cities on some of the seas. The ageless fungus learned a whole host of new words and thoughts, home, love, war, hate, kill, win. Even so, it was grateful for the company now, even though the creatures with the funny bodies still had not made any effort to talk to it. Maybe they just needed a little longer to figure themselves out?

3000 Years Later

They created an amazing civilization, cities upon cities, and then forgot all about what they had done. The creatures would pair off, sometimes in groups, and then they would multiply. They had done this so many times, that their descendants now walking on the surface had forgotten all about the amazing ships they had used to get to Earth and all the amazing tools they brought with them.

Year 5000
How could they have made things so bad for everything else so quickly? The air smelled bad, and the soil wasn’t in any better shape. They had managed to suck most all the good food out of the ground and the temperature was way too hot. Not that it matter since living underground made it easy for the fungus to cope. It just drove it’s tendrils deeper into the ground, drawing on the reserves of nutrients even deeper down, far deeper than any of the creatures had ever traveled, or ever would.

1,000,000 Years Later
The entire planet was destroyed. Desolate, burned and charred. Nothing lived on it’s surface any longer. Somehow the creatures had rediscovered some of the tools they originally brought with them but instead of using it to help one another, they wiped each other out. The burning radioactive energy coating the surface at first hurt the fungus, but over time, it grew used to it, even like it. Sadly, all the little creatures were dead. Well most of them. A few managed to remember how to create those little boxes and cylinders they arrived in, and they left.

2,000,001 Years Later
It had been lonely for just a second, by the fungus’s reckoning, but the way it measured time was far different from any other creatures. The world had changed a lot. It was green again! And just as the fungus was spreading it’s root system across another one of the newly formed continents, another set of strange cylinders landed gently amidst the rains of it's favorite continent, Africa. And out came some of the same little creatures the fungus remember from before. Maybe, this time, they would do a better job of taking care of the place!