Two creatures from a solar system in a galaxy far, far, far away, approached the planet earth. They were slowing down from six thousand times the speed of light and were ready to deploy their rather small parachute as the final phase of descent.

Before landing it is routine to ‘have a little listen’ to the inhabitants of the target planet. To this end, they activated their sound receiver, a sort of giant ear. It was pointing at a place called Marble Arch in the centre of London, England. They were anxious to see if they understood the language they had been taught in Exploration Command – English.

The creatures leant forward and listened with full attention. Two inhabitants of the planet were out for a bit of shopping. As they stood on the kerb of Oxford Street, poised with a lethal substance known to them as coffee, in their hands, they could be heard talking.

‘Here! Er, the thing is, in terms of feeding, how often do you feed your dogs?’

‘So, you know, my dogs, to be honest with you, is fed twice on a daily basis.’

The two distant life forms looked at each other quizzically. Had they both misunderstood their intensive English language learning induction? Surely, the sentences they had just heard should have sounded like;

‘How often do you feed your dogs?’

‘Twice a day.’

They had been warned to suspect that this race that call themselves ‘human’ were becoming regressively more stupid. This short ‘eaves dropping’ – as their colloquialism plug in put it- was unexpected, but confirmed their worst fears.

They looked at the date on their English Language induction programme. It had been produced fifty rotations of the earth around it’s star ago. Was it possible that language could devolve so suddenly? Their own language was not permitted changevelopment. It was known that poor language discipline lead to losing thinking skills. When life forms, begin to forget how to think, the first indications are stuttering and meaningless appendages to and within, sentences. The process develops until the speaker is unaware of the control unnecessary words have over their thoughts. Left unchecked, this decline will contribute significantly to the downfall of civilisation.

On similarly declining planets it had been observed that no individual understands another, just treats others as an extension of themselves. There is either a match, which was good, or a mismatch, which leads to criticism and hatred. This was well documented across the Universe. ‘In the beginning was the word‘ spirals downwards into it’s corollary, ‘in the end was the word‘.

After a short communication with Exploration Command they were given permission to terminate their Earth Regeneration Mission. Fortunately, their journey was not wasted. Another solar system had been chosen as a secondary mission objective; in case of just this eventuality.

The two unfortunate creatures hopped back to their floatation chambers and activated the learning experience language module for their next destination. By evening they would be fluent in Andromedish.

The beautiful blue planet was shrinking into almost nothing. They both felt a deep regret that yet another civilisation was going to fail due to the inability of it’s inhabitants to think and communicate clearly.

The taller of the two leant over to his colleague just before lowering the chamber lid. In the background they could hear the computer supervising the storage of the planet cleansing and regeneration equipment. Frictionless motors moved heavy weights with ease. The space craft was soon to be silent again.

The taller one spoke;

‘I was so looking forward to sitting on our pyramids again.’

‘Yes, I believe the earth inhabitants have not worked out that the pyramids we left in Egypt were nothing more than chairs for you me and the little one.’

‘I am full of regret for their lack of thinking skills. Least of all is their idea that we are dangerous! How can they think creatures from civilisations such as ours, have any reason to fight! They are the species who continue to have wars!’

They lay in the iridescent floatation fluid and waited for the lids to close. The smaller of the two creatures looked across at it’s mate and closed one eye briefly in the manner they understood humans did as a gesture of fun.

‘Yeah Dave, the thing is, you know, what have we got to lose? In’it?