Tarnish
The thing you really need to know about the humans is that they are not big fans of chaos. They have some sort of fundamental issue with entropy, I guess, or maybe they just don't understand it.
They are constantly, I mean constantly, building things. They make complicated machines with a huge range of tools and it doesn't seem to bother them too much that it's all going to break or fall down or decay at some point. Or rather, it does bother them, but their solution isn't to get over the whole idea of building stuff, of trying to "keep" things, but rather it just makes them work even harder to build even more things so that, I guess, they won't miss the stuff that breaks and falls down and decays so much. It's like the ephemeral nature of material order just drives them to fight the inevitable even harder.
It's the same with their own species itself. The more they are confronted with their own mortality, the more they try to prolong their lifespans *and* the more offspring they have! They can't even just pick one foolish quest to dedicate themselves to - they have to have two of them!
There's no point in trying to explain inevitability to them. They seem to have an objective grasp of the concept, they certainly have representative structures for the idea in most of their languages, but viscerally…? I think they are just skeptical that it's true. They have this remarkable practice called "gambling", which is the closest I think they come to embracing the ultimate truth of universal futility - the whole idea of gambling is that, on the average, it takes more resources from you than it gives back - and yet somehow, in their minds, it's not about inevitability over time. Oh, no, instead it's somehow transformed into this idealized vision of "beating the odds", of being somehow designated by statistical reality as a focal point for some localized randomness that results in getting more *out* of the universe than one puts into it. It's crazy. There's no other word for it.
But that craziness is at the heart of everything they do. You knock the same building down five times in a row and they'll build it a sixth time because, you know, maybe that's the time that will finally work. They take this as a point of pride, this willful ignorance of how the universe works, and the more the universe grinds everything down the more certain they are that it's vital to fight it. Their entire planet is being slowly but surely turned into a garbage heap, sucked dry of every useful resource, and they don't even question whether they should keep trying to use whatever's left to live in, making more of themselves to live in it.
All of which is to say that… well, I'm starting to worry that we're being infected with the same foolish ignorance of inevitability that they have. We've been waging our war of attrition against the humans, and their planet, for a very long time now, and not only do I believe that we are not winning…
...I'm not even sure they realize that we're here fighting them.
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For consideration: I am quite confident that we can defeat rust in our lifetimes
They are constantly, I mean constantly, building things. They make complicated machines with a huge range of tools and it doesn't seem to bother them too much that it's all going to break or fall down or decay at some point. Or rather, it does bother them, but their solution isn't to get over the whole idea of building stuff, of trying to "keep" things, but rather it just makes them work even harder to build even more things so that, I guess, they won't miss the stuff that breaks and falls down and decays so much. It's like the ephemeral nature of material order just drives them to fight the inevitable even harder.
It's the same with their own species itself. The more they are confronted with their own mortality, the more they try to prolong their lifespans *and* the more offspring they have! They can't even just pick one foolish quest to dedicate themselves to - they have to have two of them!
There's no point in trying to explain inevitability to them. They seem to have an objective grasp of the concept, they certainly have representative structures for the idea in most of their languages, but viscerally…? I think they are just skeptical that it's true. They have this remarkable practice called "gambling", which is the closest I think they come to embracing the ultimate truth of universal futility - the whole idea of gambling is that, on the average, it takes more resources from you than it gives back - and yet somehow, in their minds, it's not about inevitability over time. Oh, no, instead it's somehow transformed into this idealized vision of "beating the odds", of being somehow designated by statistical reality as a focal point for some localized randomness that results in getting more *out* of the universe than one puts into it. It's crazy. There's no other word for it.
But that craziness is at the heart of everything they do. You knock the same building down five times in a row and they'll build it a sixth time because, you know, maybe that's the time that will finally work. They take this as a point of pride, this willful ignorance of how the universe works, and the more the universe grinds everything down the more certain they are that it's vital to fight it. Their entire planet is being slowly but surely turned into a garbage heap, sucked dry of every useful resource, and they don't even question whether they should keep trying to use whatever's left to live in, making more of themselves to live in it.
All of which is to say that… well, I'm starting to worry that we're being infected with the same foolish ignorance of inevitability that they have. We've been waging our war of attrition against the humans, and their planet, for a very long time now, and not only do I believe that we are not winning…
...I'm not even sure they realize that we're here fighting them.
------
For consideration: I am quite confident that we can defeat rust in our lifetimes