This is how our leaders achieved world peace.
One government decided to run a computer simulation of the after effects of a total nuclear war. This was not a run down of chemical possibilities, hypotheses on changes to landscapes, or fake ballistics tests. Instead, it was as if they watched a world through a video camera. This was a glimpse into a future a few button pushes away, made possible thanks to a computer with the processing power of North America.
The simulation was, as you can imagine, desolate. Gale force wind rattled around the shells of buildings long after the final bombs ground the last of humanity into shadows and glass. Sand piled against the monuments, paint peeled from the schools. Vegetation won.
They aimed to watch for two hundred simulated years (about a normal working day in the speed of the simulation). But there was something so haunting about the image of the broken world, they decided to keep on watching. Just a little bit longer.
It took about another ten simulated years before the creatures wobbled out of the shadows.
Although they were square, translucent, and seemingly cast from a giant jelly, they built art galleries. Galleries that stretched mile upon mile across their world, containing sculptures built from the steel and brickwork of the previous inhabitants, and paintings of melted ink and crayons.
Even the most obscure and surreal of homo sapiens art has some kind of cultural reference point, something you can grasp onto. These pieces had less meaning to humans than a fuzzy television screen. But the works attracted great, wobbling crowds, staring at the artwork with pale gelatinous eyes, talking in a language that sounded like a kettle bubbling.
Now we had burnt the colour green from the Earth, the ever flowing skin of the new inhabitants turned it a rosy peach, and their bubbling and whispering lasted a million years.
The government ran the simulation again and again, changing the variables, accelerating and slowing the time frame. But the jelly men always returned, and their art followed with them.
Within six months the nuclear weapons were decommissioned. They must never let this happen.