The Disunity Filter (RAR!)

[Zor]

In this scenario a spacecraft appears on the fringes of Sol System in a flash of Gamma Rays and then makes it's way to to the Earth over a few weeks while transmitting the first sixteen prime numbers before entering high earth orbit. It's about 60 meters long and 8 meters wide and launches a small number of satellites around the earth and eventually sending down a set of probes that touch down. Several land in wilderness such as the Amazon Rainforest, Canada's Boreal forest, the African Savannah and similar while several land in cities, most notably New York where they relay a message to humanity.

This ship is a Von Neumann Probe built by it's creators to go forth and explore the galaxy. It has FTL drives, but it still would take more than a thousand years to go around the galaxy. It's functions are peaceful and it's intent is to gather information on alien lifeforms for it's creators, which have an interest in xenobiology in general and intelligent life in particular. However while the latter is comparatively common the former is fairly rare. Planets with microbial ecologies are the most common, though they have found a fair number of planets with more complicated multi-cellular lifeforms ranging from simple things akin to the late era Ediacaran era to worlds which have had complex multicellular life for hundreds of millions of years. Sapience (or at least sophisticated tool use) takes some time to develop, if at all, but when it does it turns out there is a high attrition rate as it moves into it's scientific and industrial potential. For every extant intelligent species (be they cavemen or their fellow space travelers) that they have found they have found the remains of over a hundred extinct ones, including several planets in which intelligent life arose, built civilizations and died off multiple times going by the fossil record. They have only found six other stable space faring civilizations (civilizations which have managed to spread beyond their star system, doing the astro-engineering equivalent of building a raft out of reeds and paddling out to a small island a hundred meters from your village once does not count).

As far as their studies have shown (including a few observed case studies) there are two main factors which contribute to this, though some factors such as a reticence to go out into space and a tendency towards short term goals contribute. Pollution is a big part of that: as an industrial civilization develops it begins to adversely affect the climate which can engineer an extinction event. Given their models this can usually be managed with concerted effort, but there is another issue which presents a consistent existential threat to any sapient species even if they get through through climate change: political division. First of all it means that a unified front can't be mounted against climate change, second of all it generally means two or more blocks with nuclear weapons and more which can blow each other up. If the first cycle does not do them in, subsequent cycles of destruction do as new nation states rise from the ashes and blow each other up. This can happen even if climate change is not a factor.

The civilization which built these probes fought it's last war when it was at a late 19th century level of technological development when a single industrial global empire took over the entire planet. While there were a few local insurrections these were eventually stamped out and while there had been some peaceful internal reforms since then over the past millennia their homeworld and latter Star System remained under the control of one polity. The other space-faring races which have gotten through the tumults of climate change have similarly all been unified either before or after one of the exchanges. One of which has the distinction of rising from a small handful of underdeveloped extraplanetary colonies after their homeworld was all but sterilized and 99.999% of their population was destroyed by kinetic bombardment, atomic strikes and biological warfare. The probe provides information on the species that it has provided.

They are willing to help humanity deal with climate change by providing us blueprints for Fusion Reactors, advanced batteries and Atmospheric filtration plants which turn Co2 into large hunks of graphite to deal with carbon emissions in the long term. Even so the probe tells people of the earth that this is at best half of the issue that humanity will need to deal with in the Long Term.

After a few months the probe leaves behind a monitoring satellite, flies off to the asteroid belt and gathers up raw materials to make a copy of itself. The Original will make its way back to the Dyson Sphere Cluster that it's creators have built on the other side of the galaxy.

What happens?

Zor

[madd0ct0r]

we all blow each other up in a bid to be the last, 'unified' power left and claim the prize of the galaxy?

[Solauren]

The offered technologies will take alot of stress off our species.

Clean power and the ability to stop Green house gases emissions from the atmosphere will stop further global climate change.

Combine with technologies in development on earth to remove Green house gases, we may survive climate change.

Now, did the probe tell us the other problems it's seen we need to solve?