They came from mud. For one hundred thousand years they struggled. Crawling down from the trees, walking into the caves, salvaging worms, creating tribes, learning fire. They learned to adapt to the weather, learned to pray, learned to dance. They spent their days devising language, tamingwolves and breeding dogs, making weapons, sewing clothes, making babies, building pyramids, roads, massive earthen mounds and two thousand year old calendars. And they created fireworks and discovered mathematics and science and mastered agriculture and trade and civilization, which was, ostensibly an excuse for a invention called war, which was most truthfully defined as killing anything that threatened them.
They even made it to space. They left their precious mother planet, and visited a nearby moon. That was as far as they made it as a species.
They didn’t actually murder each other with nuclear weapons that could vaporize the planet’s surface, no, what did them in was the individual decision to prioritize comfort and convenience over survival, over living. They built machines to make everything more convenient. Travel, food, homes, clothing, even the weather could be controlled by machines! At least the weather inside their artificial caves! They made satellites that watched the weather, watched the earth’s temperatures, and her storms. They tested machines that measured the pollution their great Convenience Machines farted into the air for them, and soon generations of new children were born who had never looked to the horizon and not seen brown clogging up a sad blue sky. Then a brown sky. Then a black sky. In the end what undid them was famine, disease, over crowding, and all of it created by the run away storms and heat and brown skies their machines had conveniently made for them. Horrific acid rains mixed with the brown smoggy sky and the whole planet’s worth of living creatures died in the mud of their conveniently created machines.