This Is a Doomsday Perspective You've Never Seen Before

Observer-7 poured himself a glass of refreshing liquid, walked to the porthole, and looked at the blue planet for a while. He didn't start recording immediately, he just looked at it - like looking at a report that he hadn't finished reading but could already guess the ending. This is his first day at the station. His job is simple: to determine what is left worth taking away before the planet dies. The parent star is old enough and stable enough to burn for trillions more years. His species has lived for so many generations that it has almost forgotten what it feels like to "panic" - they don't need to panic, the geothermal heat at home will not suddenly go out, the neighbor planet will not suddenly disappear, everything is as stable as if someone has written the ending in advance. Earth is different. He looked at a group of creatures and after learning that he had ninety days to live, his first reaction was to rush to buy a kind of paper used to wipe excrement. He tried to fit these behaviors into the bureau's evaluation model that has been used for hundreds of thousands of years, but he couldn't fit it. The model told him: This is noise. But another voice in his heart said: Maybe this is not noise. It is the first time in his life that he has encountered something that his civilization has never had. He suppressed this thought and continued recording. What he didn't know was that the evaluation protocol he was in was originally inherited from an older civilization - and a long, long time ago, his own home planet was also looked at by others in this way, and then was judged to have that ironic ending.