Looking through a powerful telescope, it’s just another misty ball in space.
Although scientists really don’t know much about Kepler-425b, beyond doing the regular thing by giving it a name and thereby making themselves feel less foolish about their not really knowing much about it… but they do have theories. For instance, they believe its gravity could be around twice that of Earth and that its mass is most likely to be five times greater. All this, despite the fact that no one can get a decent look at it, on account of it having lots of active volcanoes that have just about covered its entire surface with a blanket of thick smoke. To cap it all, the fact that it’s been calculated to be 1,402 light years away, no one is likely to discover the existence of the Sminch any time soon.
Of course, none of this really matters, whichever way you look at it. It just so happens that this solitary creature is about to die out. Solitary being the operative adjective because it’s the only one left. Going back a couple of decades there were dozens of these tiny rodent-like creatures running around, nibbling at the sparse plant life and multiplying.
Then, quite out of the blue, came the virus! From that point on it was only a matter of time. The disease itself would appear to have been remarkably similar to Covid-19. As a result, one by one, these poor little souls went to meet their maker.
Although it isn’t known how these life forms actually came about those relatively few years ago, at least their sad demise is being recorded here.
Although it could be said that none of this has any basis of truth and therefore such a scenario shouldn’t be described in this manner, something needs to be pointed out.
Writing fiction is what it is… fiction.