
P&I has obtained a copy of the confidential report to headquarters prepared by a recent intelligence gathering mission to Australia from Mars.
Your most esteemed and benevolent Excellencies
We have the honour to present the final report of our recent expedition to the Blue Planet, hereinafter referred to as Earth. Consistent with the expedition’s objectives, our report offers an assessment of the current civilisational status of earthlings and, in particular, whether the Greater Martian Cooperative Enterprise (GREMCEN) would benefit by now inviting Earth to join its councils.
During the expedition, detailed field research was undertaken in areas of the Earth known as the “United States of America” and the “Middle East”. Inclement weather forced a resupply mission planned for the USA to be relocated to “Australia”. This provided further opportunity to test the hypothesis of the Martian scientific community that life on Earth might actually be in a de-evolutionary phase.
Our year-long visit coincided with a fresh outburst of extinctionising, which earthlings refer to as “war”. They are very fond of this activity and apply the term to almost every facet of daily life, including supermarket competition over food prices, sporting activities and waste disposal. Their philosophical justification for war is presented as “conflict resolution”. We saw no evidence that it has any efficacy in that regard. Early Martian history reminds us of the brutal chain reaction that is an integral element of extinctionising and which produced such disgust and self-loathing on the part of our forebears it was formally banned in the GREMCEN Constitution.
We observed firsthand the consequences of extinctionising across large swathes of Earth, especially the “Middle East”. This informed our judgements about the contemporary nature of earthling mentality and future prospects for GREMCEN.
Two findings dominate all others:
i) The earthling appetite for extinctionising is boundless. We calculate that since our last Earth Research Activity (ERA-19), extinctionising has risen by an annual average of 9.7 per cent, with some hotspots recording increases as high as 71.1 per cent. This has created significant alarm even among earthlings. Regrettably, their capacity to do anything meaningful to counter it is invariably neutralised by the equation set out in our next finding.
ii) ss∞=d
Your Excellencies will know from data gathered during earlier expeditions that, at times, earthlings can be highly activist and seemingly determined to change the circumstances in which they exist. See, for example, ERA-11, ERA-16, the latter providing a detailed overview of earthling climate change activism. It is true that such activism was neither universally applied nor welcomed, the ERA-16 report observing that many earthlings had very little idea of what was happening around them and no measurable desire to find out. Most important, that report observed a growing phenomenon whereby earthlings regarded saying something many, many, many times over as the exact equivalent of actually doing something about it, irrespective of any change in behaviour. From our research it is abundantly clear that such a phenomenon is now the modus operandi in most, if not all, earthling governmental processes. For ease of reference we have formulated this phenomenon as: ss∞=d, where s = saying, s = something, ∞ = infinitely, d = doing.
As evidence of this we offer the example of the Australian Minister for Foreign Affairs, Senator the Hon Penny Wong. As a practitioner of ss∞=d she has no peer. Although not the leader of the current Australian Government she is widely regarded as a clearer advocate of what it is not doing to counter extinctionising than its nominal leader, Anthony Norman Albanese, affectionately if despairingly known as “Albo the Timid”.
Since the current outburst of extinctionising in the “Middle East”, Senator Wong has publicly expressed “concern” about developments in and around that region a total of 1,274 times. Of these, 694 were “serious” concerns, 379 “deep” concerns and 201 “grave” concerns. “Growing” also accompanied 599 expressions of “concern”. (All data has been verified by the MIA.)
Pressed to cite specific actions to reinforce these “serious/deep/grave” and often “growing” concerns, Senator Wong referred to a new “Declaration” intended to protect those who are victims of extinctionising but who should not be, either because they are trying to help others or they are children. Close examination revealed that this Declaration has in fact existed in some form for decades but has been totally ignored by all perpetrators of extinctionising.
Senator Wong’s facility with ss∞=d has made her the front-runner for a new United Nations “We love to talk peace” Award. The ease with which Senator Wong is capable of furrowing her brow and speaking with profound gravity for extended periods has set her apart in a highly competitive field.
Regrettably, this talk-equals-action approach leaves us no option but to recommend that further activity on GREMCEN be suspended immediately. The pandemic-like ease with which ss∞=d has infected earthlings makes them dismal prospects for any meaningful cooperative endeavour. The project might possibly be revisited, in a millennium or two, if earthlings are still around.
Recommended for your Excellencies’ consideration.