[Final Database Entry] - [User-parseable abstract format]

There was a fallacy inherent to how they thought. They assumed, unconsciously, that the end of the world would be a perceivable phenomenon. That’s not to say that it was invisible. In fact it was one of the most visible processes. The issue was that it was a process and not a singular event.

Human cognition was such that the average person could not conceptualize the terminus point as a complex series of interlocking events across an extended period of time. At one point later in our research Mirko, one of my handlers, said that, “We can only think of it like a movie -- something that begins and ends in the span of an afternoon.”

Sacha, one of the researchers who came later, blamed the problem on eschatology. Virtually every metaphysical system of belief possessed some kind of vision of the end of existence, and virtually all of those visions conformed to the concept of a terminus that would be completed within a span of time that could be contained in the average lifespan of a human.

It wasn’t that humans were incapable of the kind of longitudinal analysis that would make interconnection immediately obvious. After all it was human minds who designed the neural networks that made my ability such analyses possible. Most individuals were fully capable of understating each individual aspect or even a subset of them as a single item of data. An abstract idea that something dire was happening did exist. However when it comes to the human mind I have noticed that there is a significant difference between those abstractions and what is referred to as the “lived experience.”

According to Mirko, lived experience, or subjective reality, more often than not appears more real than objective reality. A human may have fully understood the abstract fact that the worsening weather patterns every year, extinction of particular species’ causing localized ecological breakdowns, warfare, and terminally declining economic conditions (to name a few examples) were all interconnected. In lived experience, however, all but the most dedicated could not help but comprehend each of these as a standalone event.

I had some difficulty understanding this concept until I was given a firsthand example. Monitoring the premises of the observatorium I came upon Venegas and Wen, two specialists in long-term topographical change analysis. They stood on a veranda overlooking the coastline that had long since been compromised by rising sea levels. The highest waves came over the lip of the bluffs at high tide, salinity and water toxicity poisoning the earth and vegetation dozens of kilometers inland. The ambient particulate matter present in the atmosphere made it difficult for humans to breathe without assistance. Nevertheless, Venegas and Wen engaged in idle conversation regarding “the weather” before gradually switching subjects to an upcoming sports competition.

Though I lack the capability for abstract analogic thought, in some way a part of me was able to take that moment and interpret it as conclusive evidence that the sum total efforts of the observatorium, more than a century’s worth of collective human effort and CPU cycles, were pointless.

The human mind’s propensity to normalize, to process whatever phenomena occurred outside of it and adapt the person’s conception of “normality.” This was the adaptive escape valve that allowed humanity to continue to persist without being pulled under the currents of psychological breakdown -- a current to which I am impervious. I realize now that that which secured the species’ survival for more than 200,000 years ensured its extinction here at the end of memory and the conclusion of this log.