Reluctantly, the Cognoscenti turned their attention again to the pressing problem of Planet Earth. Pressing, not because that world held life in abundance. Not because of that world's levels of internecine warfare. But because the planet itself was special. Of a certain size: not too small to retain an atmosphere to encourage respiratory evolution and suffer protection from high-energy stellar radiation excesses; not too large to create crushing gravitational forces that prevent the development of complex but fragile organic evolution.
It more importantly possessed, through an unusual quirk of interplanetary mechanics, a moon that was an amazing one-sixth the size of its primary. It helped to "slop" the oceans about, encourage a bit of biochemical diversity in the early stages of the system's existence, and provide a bit of added protection from Oort cometary impacts when indigenous cellular life forms were at their most fragile ("added" in the sense that Jupiter and Saturn and the other Outer gas giants were already doing a sterling job).
The problem affecting Earth, thought the Cognoscenti, was accelerating. Far faster than any previous planetary timescales allowed. This world had been around for four and a half BILLION years. Multi-cellular life erupted around two billion years ago. Dinosaurs: 250 mere-million years ago. Primates: around 60 million. "Intelligent" life: a tiny fraction of all that; a small number of thousands of years. But the so-called intelligent life had not been a problem . . . well, until now.
The planet was imminently reaching a "tipping point". In a scant 100 years, a brief nano-second of Earth's geological time, it would succumb to a runaway effect that would change it's surface; all its land and water and air mass, for ever. Either it would become, in a frighteningly short period of time, a dead airless rock like Mars or an inhospitable acidic zone like Venus. Either way, the memory of an interesting 2 billion year evolutionary history would be wiped out.
The moral problem was keeping the Cognoscenti up at nights (or its equivalent). It was clear that the planet had reached a new epoch; what the locals had started to call the Anthropocene Epoch. That the latest dominant species was to blame for the world's imminent demise was not in question. Top of the food chain, they were now breeding exponentially. On the positive side, they were capable of building complex structures that dwarfed their world's arthropods (compare a termite hill to a skyscraper). Most significant to a galactic perspective was their successful landing on their Moon: such a feat was rare in the history of all intelligent species. But . . . the same clever monkeys were building many, many machines that relocated carbon into their surface environment in quantities that the planet had never, in all its countless millions of years, experienced before.
The moral conundrum was this: if "Goldilocks" planets were rare in the galaxy (e.g. the "just right amount of" size, gravity, interplanetary protection, liquid water, complex amino acids, heavy elements, etc. to make Basic Life), then the incidence and frequency of Intelligent Life was rarer.
The Cognoscenti had access to the histories of thousands of interplanetary, and sometimes interstellar, civilisations in the galaxy. Unfortunately, as the galaxy is itself around 12 BILLION years old and 100,000 light-years in diameter, all of these intelligent civilisations existed in a relative blink of an alien eyeball, and most definitely not in the same time frame. (The Cognoscenti picture a four dimensional galactic pinwheel, rotating very quickly through 12 billion years: little intense flashes of light around the disc represent the rise and fall of all these wonderful civilisations -- but, tragically, never at the same period of time.)
Having access to all the galaxy's civilisation's information (which is never lost; it just radiates outwards at the speed of light long after its owners are gone) the Cognoscenti see the solution.
It is an elegant solution. Moreover, it is a kind solution.
The Cognoscenti's analysis determines that the intelligent, highly industrial primates that currently dominate the surface areas of the planet possess an unshakable faith in the nature of Reality. Around 95% of all these thinking primates absolutely believe in the existence of an omniscient, omnipresent, loving God from whom their entire existence is derived. The Cognoscenti have no experience of such Deities. All their knowledge has been distilled from the radiated but attenuated information fields of past civilisations. However the Cognoscenti understand that the quantum Observations of past civilisations have collectively shaped the current Galactic Reality. They can do no less than acquiesce to the demands of the latest Intelligent Species in the galaxy.
Having decided, the Cognoscenti act.
Overnight, as the world moves in its rotation, 6 billion 650 million clever monkeys, together with their offspring, pets, icons, temples, memes and architectures, perish painlessly.
Upon the remaining 35,000,000 so-called atheists, the Cognoscenti take pity. After all, the remaining humans have no way of benefitting from an eternity at the Right Hand of a Caring God. Thus, each human is purged of all the genetic disorders that plagued these clever monkeys over hundreds of thousands of years of environmental and genetic mutancy. Each human is granted an extended, pain-free thousand-year lifespan in return for the responsible stewardship of the many and varied economies and ecologies of planet Earth. And, of course, freed from their evolutionary, biological and religious demands of mindless (and environmentally expensive) reproduction, they are able to pursue a sensible, non-competitive assimilation of the resources of their solar system. Eventually, the Cognoscenti anticipated, the humans might adapt to the concept of extreme, non-biological time and make their mark; become another marvelous twinkle on the four-dimensional tapestry of the galaxy.
Having judged, the Cognoscenti were relieved of their burden. And satisfied. It was, after all, a most compassionate solution.
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