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"We failed," said Zy. "We destroyed everything except the nuclear weapons that we had intended to destroy."
He turned to Olaf. "We've killed those people. We've destroyed everything they needed to survive. We've taken it upon ourselves to protect them, when our goal should have been to develop them further and to create a renaissance on their planet that would have made all weapons obsolete, and with it the very notion of war and violence. We should have created a culture breakthrough with profound ideas like the Golden Renaissance on Earth in the 15th Century. If we had done this their civilization would still be intact and be infinitely richer. The conflicts would have vanished in this atmosphere."
Olaf turned to me. "There were three power blocks on Quian planet, each with a high level economy comparable to what we've seen on planet 'O'."
"Oh my God!" said Wendy. "You mean you went in and wrecked all that?"
He nodded. "We thought it had to be done. We called it the 'hard choice!' We thought this was necessary to disable the powder keg."
"Let me assure you, this was no longer fun," said Olaf. "It hurt deeply to do these treacherous things. Unfortunately, that'e what is still being done on Earth in the service of empires."
"That's when Olaf quit," said Zy.
"Not only did it hurt," said Olaf. "It wasn't easy either. It was like administering a slow death. We had to destroy what supports an economy, which are two things: Faith in the system, and a ready pool of investment funds for maintaining a productive environment. Once this pool was drained, and it was easily drained by introducing speculation into their world that had been totally foreign to them, their faith in their system had been shattered and things went from bad to worth after that until one morning all hell broke loose. Now, there is no a single person living on this planet anymore, and won't be for a long time to come."
"Peace has been restored," said Zy sarcastically. "Before this happened," Zy added with a long sigh, "every continent on Quian had been reduced to the state that Russia had been in at the end of the second millennium, which had been looted to the bone by speculators to the point that nothing worked anymore. Everyone thought that nuclear weapons were not a threat anymore. They told the whole of humanity that the Cold War is over. People believed that. That's what they wanted to hear. They rejoiced, and they reacted accordingly. They even talked about disarmament. That was the situation we had hoped to create on Quian. But they didn't disarm. We didn't realize that the economic destruction that we unleashed would also destroy their armed forces, which can only be supported by a healthy economy. This meant that the people on Quian had no means left to defend themselves in their evermore-tense situation amidst a global economic collapse. They had no options left but to resort to nuclear strikes. They had no other capability left. We practically forced them to resort to nuclear weapons. How stupid of us!"
"It is widely believed that the final conflict that ignited their world started at mid morning in one of the capitals," said Olaf. "By noon their entire world was destroyed and the sky was filled with ashes that might take a decade to settle to the ground, which is still ongoing. No one survived that day to tell us what specifically had set off the firestorm."
Olaf turned to Wendy. "Get the children away from Earth. Bring them here. Educate them. What do they know about the scientific principles that support civilizations? They may become misguided environmentalists and do the same thing that we did, except they may do it with a green pencil instead. What do they know about the structures of oligarchies? What do they know about the necessary development processes that can cause the kind of cleansing that is required to dissolve the oligarchies? What do they now about the awakening of civilization to great periods of renaissance, cultural optimism, economic freedom, freedom to create, explore, build, surge ahead in every field? What do they know about a world powered by a global cultural renaissance as boundless energy resources can enable? Do they even know how many nuclear power complexes still exist on the Earth that have not yet been shut down, and at what day the lights will go out when the remaining ones become demolished in the way America demolished its automobile industry and aviation and space industry? Do they know what happens then? Do they know what happens when the nations have no economies left, and no defenses except for those tens of thousands of nuclear weapons that they still maintain? I do respect their noble motives in their nuclear fight. We had noble motives, too. But they need much more than that. They need the kind of scientific understanding of the underlying principles of civilization that we didn't have."
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