This is commander Zork filing the final visitation report for the third planet of solar system 97433 designated by its inhabitants as Earth. It is my solemn duty to recommend classification of this planet as not inhabitable. I do not make this recommendation lightly. My long experience in the federation's exploratory division includes leading 47 planetary expeditions across six galaxies, cataloging lava worlds, ammonia atmospheres, and the infamous shrieking bogs of Sector 12.
D. K. Wall:Never have I encountered a less hospitable environment or been forced to order a full scale evacuation of my team with such haste. Please allow me to explain.
D. K. Wall:Our preliminary intelligence warned us that the dominant species, bipedal creatures calling themselves humans, posed a significant threat due to their astonishing capacity for conflict. This assessment proved accurate.
D. K. Wall:They argue about territory, resources, governance, and inexplicably, the performance of arbitrarily organized athletic teams. We observed two humans nearly come to blows over whether something called a designated hitter improves or ruins the integrity of a sport neither of them actually played.
D. K. Wall:Despite this confirmation, we were not deterred. My crew handled the threat of human volatility with professionalism. We are explorers. As our experience with those shrieking bogs demonstrated, we have dealt with far worse.
D. K. Wall:We also discovered other large fauna. Enormous gray creatures with nose arms, striped predators of startling speed, and a furry creature the inhabitants call a bear, which I will simply described as unreasonably large and chronically annoyed.
D. K. Wall:We assessed those threats, adjusted our perimeter protocols, and carried on. Our efforts continued without incident until that is the axial tilt of this planet lengthened the days and the season the humans call spring arrived.
D. K. Wall:The first signs of trouble began simply enough, a faint yellow dust accumulating on surfaces, a slight haze in the morning air. Our instruments flagged an atmospheric increase in particulate matter.
D. K. Wall:Pollen, our xenobotanist, Doctor Vren explained cheerfully. A reproductive mechanism employed by Earth's plant life. Entirely natural, essentially harmless.
D. K. Wall:I include this quote in the official report so that doctor Vren's fateful words are preserved for posterity. The Professional Standards Board may wish to review them with great care. Essentially harmless.
D. K. Wall:Seventy two earth hours after that assessment, my vision was compromised. My eyes, all four of them, produced fluid at a rate our medical scanner described, without apparent irony, as impressive. The burning and itching were relentless.
D. K. Wall:When I attempted to rub them, which every medical protocol forbids, and which I did anyway because desperation is a powerful motivator, the sensation intensified to the equivalent of grinding sand from the Xenox's deserts into an open wound that is also somehow on fire.
D. K. Wall:Ensign Flurp, my most stoic crew member, a being who once navigated a meteor field while humming a relaxation hymn, stumbled into the command center on day four in visible distress. His nasal passages, all three of them, were completely sealed. He communicated exclusively in a series of desperate hand gestures and what I can only describe as a muffled sob.
D. K. Wall:I quarantined him immediately. He spent the next six hours lying face up in the medical bay, staring at the ceiling with a hollow expression of a creature who has forgotten what breathing feels like.
D. K. Wall:I should note that Flerp's congestion was so severe, it caused our universal translator to flag his vocalizations as a previously uncontacted language. It submitted an automatic request to linguistics command for a first contact protocol team. I have since canceled that request, though not before it generated a considerable amount of paperwork.
D. K. Wall:Complications extended to our vessel.
D. K. Wall:Chief engineer Mox, reported that our air filtration systems, designed to process atmospheres containing sulfur compounds, radioactive particulates, and the biological output of 17 distinct alien species simultaneously, were failing to provide suitable quantities of breathable air.
D. K. Wall:Mox catalogued the situation with the grim precision of a battlefield casualty report. Filter array one, clogged but operable. Filter array two, clogged and wheezing with a worrying mechanical grind. Filter array three, taken offline for emergency cleaning. The resulting repair noting, and I quote, an almost architectural quantity of pollen.
D. K. Wall:The engineering crew will be recommended for commendations. They worked in rotating shifts around the clock in a valiant but nearly doomed effort to eliminate the invasion of this aggressive substance.
D. K. Wall:Our exterior optical sensors suffered equally. The fine yellow powder coated every surface with a tenacity I can only describe as personal.
D. K. Wall:Each morning, no matter how thoroughly we cleaned the equipment the night before, the sensors were blanketed again. Our surveillance logs from this period are largely recorded in a soft golden blur. Several of them resemble what I believe humans mean when they describe a dream sequence.
D. K. Wall:Here is what I find most remarkable, and I say this as a scientist. The humans endure this every Earth year, yet they continue to live there.
D. K. Wall:They have made meager attempts to reach the nearest planet, but they squabble over the cost. Further evidence of the conflict orientation noted above.
D. K. Wall:We observed humans sneezing with a frequency and violence that seemed structurally inadvisable. We watched them walk through visible clouds of pollen with expressions of exhausted resignation, wiping their eyes and blowing into small cloth squares they carry specifically for this purpose.
D. K. Wall:Yet, they stay. They even celebrate the season. They hold festivals celebrating the blooming of the very botanical perpetrators responsible for their suffering. They photograph the flowers and post the images on a crude global communications network accompanied by words expressing joy and admiration for a season they call beautiful.
D. K. Wall:They plant gardens. They cultivate the offending species on purpose, in decorative arrangements, directly outside their dwellings.
D. K. Wall:I cannot explain this. Our psychology team has filed a supplemental report. It is 40 pages long and reaches no conclusion.
D. K. Wall:Our working theory, and I offer this with academic humility, is that chronic oxygen deprivation caused by perpetually clogged sinuses may impair long term reasoning capacity. I should note that the team reached this conclusion when none of us could breathe particularly well either, so we acknowledge some potential bias.
D. K. Wall:On behalf of my crew, Lieutenant Zark, who sneezed so forcefully on day nine that she briefly achieved lift, doctor Vrenn, who has quietly retired the phrase essentially harmless from her professional vocabulary. Mox, who has submitted a formal request for his entire team for hazard pay that I intend to support with enthusiasm. And poor Ensign Flurp, who has not hummed a single hymn in eleven days, and everyone else on this crew, I am formally recommending that Earth be struck from all future colonization consideration.
D. K. Wall:The violence we could have managed. The bears we could have avoided. The designated hitter debate, while philosophically troubling, posed no direct physical threat and could have sustained years of research. But the pollen broke us.
D. K. Wall:I am filing this report with dry eyes or rather aggressively watering eyes, which is technically the opposite of dry, but produces a similar inability to read anything, and a level of personal grievance that I will be discussing at length with the fleet's wellness coordinator upon my return.
D. K. Wall:We are departing immediately and have set course for Sector 44, which our charts describe as having a lovely temperate climate, reasonable fauna, and critically, no recorded botanical reproduction events with side effects of this magnitude.
D. K. Wall:If that information proves wrong, I am retiring. Respectfully, Commander Zork.