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:   |  ;/| |   : .   / |   :  | ; | ' ;   | ;     |   ' '  ; : 
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'   :  ;/| :   ' |      \   \  ',  /  '   ; : .'| '   : |  : ; 
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`----'       `---`                      `---`     '---'        
                                                
                                                

HOW IT ALL CAME TO BE UNDONE

Humankind was tragically prone to drastic overestimations. The nature of their own lifespan was not exempt. The human species bore the vain assumption that they alone would outlast the world that surrounded them. They would be colonizers upon the pocked face of Mars, farmers on the vast gulches of the Moon, Vaqueros of their solar system's Sun.
In their stead, to fulfill the tawdry and menial occupations they no longer had time for, they tasked automatons and other such machines with maintaining the economy on their planet's surface. These beings were sapient, with individual traits, mass-produced physiologies, relationships, aspirations; formulated to fulfill the vacancy left by humankind on their own planet.

Most experts define an epoch as being comparable to a mass extinction event, wherein biodiversity shrinks drastically, and numerous species are left entirely extinct. They are memorialized only by what they leave behind; their anatomy, their structures, the etchings they leave in soft limestone.

The presumption that any race or species could possibly hope for eternality is foolish and vainglorious. Joseph Tainter proposes that all societies eventually crumble beneath the composite weight of their own bureaucracy. That any assemblage of intelligent organisms, no matter how far it propels into the reaches of space, will likely not persist long after it reaches the final stages of its inception.

So, humankind went extinct. In their place, they left machines; complacent, hopeful, grounded to the Earth they abandoned.