• One day, a group of alien teens from another planet were zooming around in their sleek, brand-new spaceship. It was shiny, it was black, it had cost a fortune, and already it had scorch marks from flying close to one too many comets.
    They were happy, they were carefree, and they’d had a drink or two at the pub near the edge of their galaxy.
    Suddenly, they stopped their little spaceship short, staring at the strange planet below them. It wasn’t very large, nor very remarkable, but their trendy new meter told them that it was inhabited. They circled it a couple of times, learning more on each trip around. Apparently, the creatures that lived on it knew it as “Earth”, and called themselves “Humans”. Already they had launched several spaceships of rather poor quality, and learned quite a bit about the galaxy they lived in. Of course, they didn’t know nearly as much as the teens could have learned in a few days of coasting around while their state-of-the-art technology picked up pertinent information.
    Obviously, these beings weren’t very smart.
    Then, one of the alien teens had a crazy idea.
    “Say, what if we blow it up for a coupla laughs?” He suggested, grinning lopsidedly. His comrades agreed that this was a wonderful idea, and that they would get right on it.
    So they flew back to their home planet a few galaxies away and started right on making a rather large ray gun.

    It took them a day or two, but they completed it. It wasn’t anywhere near as good as the new rays; in fact, it was rather clunky, and definitely old-fashioned. Still, it would serve their purpose, and they bolted it onto the front of their shiny new spaceship they’d saved up for together, chattering about how much fun this would be.

    They positioned themselves in a convenient place near their target, revved up the ray gun, and aimed carefully. It was powerful enough to blow up a whole planet in one go, but they’d only get one shot out of it before it melted.
    They fired, filled with anticipation.
    The blast of energy flew at amazing speeds towards the earth, but was knocked off course by a passing satellite, jumped over the earth, and smashed full-force into Mars, which then exploded into a thousand pieces.
    The teens, disappointed, flew home, deciding they’d not try again. It was too much work. Might as well go find some other planet that was easier to trash.

    On Earth, scientists had seen the whole thing through their nice high-powered telescopes, and gave the owners of the satellite that had saved the world an obscure award that no one had ever heard of, which came complete with millions of dollars.
    The teen aliens ended up growing into extremely wise alien beings, who warned other alien beings of the follies of wasting your time trying to blow up planets.

    Unfortunately, there was a downside to Mars’ untimely demise.
    On the surface of the planet lived a little ice-lizard, who happened to be a poet. He had composed in his little white lizard head the best poetry the universe ever has, or ever will know. It was so moving, so beautiful, it would have ended all war on all planets for all time, or rather the lust for war.
    Of course, since he didn’t possess vocal chords, he had been unable to share this wonderful poetry with any other beings, and so it was destroyed when he was, when his planet was.

    So war still exists, but at least the world is around to enjoy the good things in life.
    For once, in a science fiction story that included aliens discovering the Earth, they failed to blow it into a million pieces.