On November 9th, 2005 at 6:35 p.m. all life on earth suddenly became extinct. In 4004, an archaeological expedition from the planets Darwinia landed on earth and began an excavation in what used to be the city of Chicago.
The planet had been found by an unmanned survey ship which had entered the Solar System and conducted a wide range of scans for intelligent life. The probe concentrated first on the larger outer planets where life was more likely to have evolved. It conducted a radio wave analysis across the entire band and found no radio wave transmissions. When the probe began its sweep for radio-isotopes, it found vast quantities of enriched uranium on the third planet from the sun. The probe then scanned for the presence of plutonium and received thousands of returns of fissionable quantities of plutonium scattered across the planet.
Approaching the planet, the probe began to take thermal and radar imagery of the surface, as well as X-ray and gamma ray surveys of the substrata. The probe found no indication of carbon based or silicon based life, but clear evidence of the fact that intelligent life lived recently on the planet in the form of buildings, cities, communications systems, power grids, water delivery systems, undergroud excavation, and underground pipelines. As it was programmed to do, the probe notified Darwinia of the discovery.
When the report was received, Darwinia's archaeologists applied for a permit to travel to the planet. They provided authorities with information from the probe including costs estimates, resource requirements, time requirements, and preliminary goals. The archeologists proposed to travel to the planet, conduct aerial surveys and excavate one promising site with the goal of determining what caused this global extinction. Approval was given and a survey team was dispatched from Darwinia.
When the survey team arrived, they established a geo-synchronous orbit over the planet while ...