GIFT

One billion, two billion? Such numbers hardly matter. Let's just say not long after the big bang, after the first stars ignited and the first planets became capable of bearing life, one planet did so.

It was the fourth planet out from a very young yellow sun. By mere chance, the system was in an uncrowded eddy within the universe. So when life arose there were no major asteroid impacts or stray star fly-bys to cause catastrophe and slap life back down.

This led to a rapid nearly linear evolution of life and resultant early development of an intelligent species. it doesn't matter whether they looked like us( They didn't ). What mattered was that they were intelligent, had means to manipulate their surroundings, and were alone in their galaxy. Not just alone but nearly isolated. For in that little eddy of that galaxy at that time the nearest neighboring star was over 30 light years distant and receding .

So in their isolation their thoughts and science concentrated on their one little world.A world a bit smaller than ours.

Being a small young world, it had not had time for its biosphere to become overly complicated.This made it a bit easier to study and master the mysteries of their biology and within a mere 20,000 years they had done so. They were able to map their equivalent of DNA and engineer it to delete imperfections and produce improvements.

Al during the history of this species, their little solar system had been speeding through the relatively empty eddy in their galaxy and toward a distant spiral arm portion of it. Not too long after their civilization had become static a few renegade scientists began looking outward. Into the void. Too late...

Had they looked 1000 or maybe even 500 years sooner, they might have had time. Time to develop physics, time to build better energy systems.Time to invent large scale interplanetary transport . Time to save themselves.

continued tomorrow..............
Gift (part two)

But that water had already flowed under the bridge. The person (they thought of themselves as people just as we do) who first started looking outward with a telescope saw what was happening. His name wasn't Leo, or anything else we can pronounce, but we'll call him that. And Leo wasted 50 years, a large part of his life, building bigger and better telescopes in order to verify what he thought he saw. That they were rapidly approaching another solar system.

Finally, he sounded the alarm. That they were about to become crowded. very crowded. Well, it took another 70 years (20 years after Leo's death) before it became accepted that his observations were true.

The group of scientists who had been tasked with this verification also discovered that their approach to the other system would be close. Very close. By the time they realized how close it was way too late.

Their people had a firm grasp on celestial mechanics by then. They saw that their solar system and the other would not actually collide. But this didn't matter. The gravity interactions of the two systems spelled their doom.

Their planet would be pulled millions of miles farther from their sun. The same gravity would cause their large moon to collide with their world, stripping it of all atmosphere, most of its water and all of its life would be extinguished.

Even going full out they would not be able to build up the ability to relocate. The same gravity that would doom their world would cause the orbits of all the other planets in their system to change also. The outermost two planets would be hurled into interstellar space. Two of the gas giant planets would collide and form a super gas giant.

But what mattered was the third planet from the sun. It would move and settle into an orbit just a bit farther out than that in which their home currently traveled.

Now this third planet was a real hell right then. It was too close to the sun, tide locked and had far too dense an atmosphere. It's surface temperature was twice that of boiling water. A place where life could never develop. But..........

continued tomorrow
GIFT (conclusion )

Calculations were done, observations made. On its way to a new orbit that third planet would collide with and capture a moon torn loose from one of the gas giants. This was a good thing. For the collision would blow off most of the excess atmosphere and thus do away with the green house effect. The impact would set the planet to spinning and the new moon would by way of tidal effects cause the planet to become tectonically active. This would result in volcanoes which would create a new atmosphere.

Now it would take a very long time for this atmosphere to form and even longer for it to become suitable to any type life. And it would take aeons for any microscopic life to convert the air into a mixture usable by any higher life forms.

These people saw they had no future. But they decided to give one to this third planet.

In the last seventy five years before they were destroyed they stopped reproducing. It was deemed cruel to bring any more to life just to be destroyed. They invented and played increasingly dangerous sports and games in order to trim their population. But they also carried out two crash programs.

The first was to develop a failsafe interplanetary self guiding craft.It had to be capable of transporting numerous types of microbes to that third planet. then land intact, then burrow into the planet's crust. then wait and keep its cargo in suspended animation. For at least one thousand years. And lastly it had to release its cargo to the surface.

The second project was to grow and engineer this cargo. Now they could not predict all eventualities. So they had to try to put a large enough variety of microbes, all engineered to evolve, in place to assure survival of enough of them to jump start an ecology on a lifeless world.

By the time they had built three ships ( for redundancy ) and bred and loaded their cargo, the visiting system's star was almost rivaling theirs in size and growing larger every day. And its gravity was already causing severe earthquakes. On the day they launched there were fewer than 500,000 people left. Upon successful launch all but five thousand people who were to oversee the completion of the voyage took a quick painless poison. When the three ships were but a few hours from their destination a stray asteroid hit the control complex and completely destroyed it. Thus there was nobody left on Mars when their gift to Earth arrived............end and beginning