My assignment for the Mars Statesman was to investigate a human environment and report back to you, our valued citizens, on the possibility of establishing contact and eventually settlement on the planet Earth. To my surprise, I landed in a large green area on a cold rainy day with the homo-sapiens walking around with big round black covers over their heads and big packs on their backs. I decided walk up the multitude of slippery steps to a large building bearing the title of "Natural History Museum," to investigate these homo-sapiens further.
It seems that these people enjoy collecting the remains of past organisms and displaying them with pride in their artificial recreated environment. I am not sure if they are teaching their younger homo-sapiens how to kill other organisms, or to educate them of the past, but each remain seems to have an explanation written near it explaining its significance. The building had four floors that represented four times in Earth's history. Interestingly enough, it seemed to mimick the rock strata layers that many of these fossils would have come from.
The first floor holds fossil evidene of land and sea creatures who occupied the land before the evolution of the homo-sapien. The second floor shows fossils of a later age. Among them, an impressive bone structure suspended from the ceiling entitled the "pterosaur" with a wingspan of forty feet that lived in this region about 65 million years ago. The fellow homo-sapiens seem to enjoy looking at these bones and reading about them on their placks. They do not look at them vengefully as if they were the remains of something they would like to hunt, but admiringly as if they respected the great giant beast.
To my great horror, the third floor held stuffed animals of Earth's current animals. The homo-sapiens on this floor looking at them seemed to be much happier looking at animals they could relate to. The placks informed viewers of where these animals lived and how their evolutionary sucess either ended or failed. I am not sure why it is necessary to kill other animals so that they could be stuffed behind glass for small homo-sapiens to look at, but they are another species. Yet again, they do not look upon these animals with a superior attitude, but that of extreme interest.
The fourth floor shows interaction with homo-sapiens with animals, specifically an organism called the chimpanzee. Because of the genetic discovery of DNA, whatever a scientist is, claims that homo-sapiens share a common ancestor with the chimpanzee approximately 5-6 million years ago. Further more, they believe that the homo-sapien species originated in Africa about 1-2 million years ago.
From my account of this "Museum" I now know that the species homo-sapiens have not inhabited Earth for a long period of time, certainly not as long as we have lived on our planet Mars. In their natural environment outside the building, there are not very many animals roaming around as the depictions in the museum show. Rather, there are mainly homo-sapiens, large buildings, and hard pathways with box like figures on wheels that move about them. I believe that this "Museum" is to preserve the way certain animals once lived, before and during the reign of homo-sapiens. The museum held remains of animals that no longer roam Earth. I am not sure if this is due to the invasion of the homo-sapien race or of a different climate. From this account, I do believe that homo-sapiens would be interested in contact with us concerning a settlement because of their interest in science, the future, and preservation of the past.
FYI: I listened to some of the phone tour at the museum. Most of the stuffed animals were donated by zoos after having died of old age or or from wild animal sanctuaries where they could not be saved. I was pretty horrified about them too until I listened to that bit of the audio tour.
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