One Question for the Astronauts

This was one of the many Earth-like planets, discovered long ago, and a human colony had been implanted there 500 years earlier.

However, contacts had stopped since almost one century, and nobody knew why.

 According to some, the colony people had all died, but a small amateur radio station in Siberia, forty years earlier, had detected signals coming from there, indicating living organisms in movement.

Long discussions arose among the space scientists on Earth, whether it would be worthwhile to send an expedition, or not – finally, yes, and, in fact, one of the tasks of the space ship now was to clarify the situation, and to study what had happened to the population of that colony.

Robert Smith, called Bob by the crew, the chief scientist, and also a renowned space physicist, had written years earlier an interesting book about the possible behavior changes of the Ciclope-34 population.

It pointed out that in such a short period of time, the genome certainly would not have changed, but cognition might have changed. Particularly because cognition has to do with the interaction between living organisms and their environment, and in fact the environment in Ciclope-34 was quite different from Earth.