Alternatively, these explorers might just leave this planet and cross it off as ‘dead’ on their maps and never wonder how Humanity lost its light. After all, the universe is scattered with countless stars all vying for the attention of anyone capable of exploring them.

So in this way why should the Earth be any more privileged than any other dead rock floating in the endless void?

Imagine a list complied somewhere and then put before a committee and each item on the list was a planet being considered for further investigation.

What claim the Earth over any other?

Once the pride of the city centre, Stephens Green Shopping Centre is now a festering pile of broken glass and looted shops. Pulled to the ground by a frenzied mob while shots were fired over their heads and water cannons set upon them, this site of civic consumerism now resembles a Renaissance painting depicting Hell in all its profane glory.

In millennia to come when brave explorers from another solar system land upon a non-responsive planet and start to look around they will find the Shopping Centre long-buried and over-grown and perhaps marvel at the possibility that a significant battle was fought at such an important-looking archaeological site.

The simple song of the NotBeSpeak is not something they will likely ever hear.

With the Provost’s House in front of you turn right and head up Grafton Street itself towards Stephens Green and all along the way there are now the shells of the shops that lined this prestigious thoroughfare.

Once smug Brown Thomas, the department store of choice, is now a battered, beaten, broken shell – four hundred and seventy-eight people are still unaccounted for when the foundations gave way and the walls fell inward.

Grafton Street was once lined with public entertainers seeking money for their performances now it is simply choked by the dead and the dying and the spectacle that they offer is of a very different kind.

The Provost’s House sits at No.1 Grafton Street, where the city’s main shopping thoroughfare meets College Green and Nassau Street. Built in 1789 this splendid piece of Georgian urban architecture has hosted the visits from countless dignitaries from all around the world.

Now, however, this once proud building has suffered the utter indignity of being pulled apart pilaster after cornice after Venetian window after round-headed arch.

Where parties once gathered in the grounds for receptions and celebrations these same grounds are now filled with the scattered detritus of the three thousand people charged with the building’s destruction.

The demolition of Trinity College also continued apace. The bronze globe that has sat outside Trinity’s Berkeley Library since 1982, Arnaldo Pomodoro’s ‘Sphere with Sphere,’ was worked loosed from its plinth and rolled across Front Square where it was then used as a wrecking ball to demolish Front Gate and splinter the wooden doors into firewood, crushing twelve people along the way.

The fact that different versions of this same sculpture can also be found in the Vatican and the Headquarters of the United Nations was a wonderful irony not lost on the NotBeSpeak as they oversaw this perverse transformation from an existing artistic statement to a new statement of an altogether very different kind.

Imagine how long it would take to dismantle a length of iron railings with your bare hands.

Or take down a wall of granite blocks with only a screwdriver.

Cobblestones are reasonably easy to get up but what about doing just this for days and nights on end and the only tool you were given was a broken tablespoon.

Windows of any size are always simple to break but collecting all that broken glass with no gloves and bare feet is not a job that anyone would undertake unless forced to at gunpoint.

Two days later and the Minot Tower was finally destroyed and the debris rained down upon the toiling crowds like a deadly blessing. The group responsible for achieving this goal all perished in the collapse except for one (un)fortunate woman who was able to grab a handhold as the Tower fell.

She hung from one arm for another sixteen hours before she too lost her grip and fell wailing to be impaled upon the railings.

This death mattered for as long as it took the crowd beneath this woman’s fall to pull her body from the railings and place it in the park next door with all the other corpses so that they then could carry on uninterrupted with their toil.

Forced to continue working beneath powerful searchlights and volleys of gunfire the hapless group on the Minot Tower made a major breakthrough the next day when the foundations of the spire itself were worked loose and the Tower began to come away from its perch. With ropes and crowbars the group began to remove the struts of the spire and as the dark day progressed some headway was made. Not without accidents, of course. Six people fell to the ground when another ladder was moved by the high winds. Another eight lost their lives when the rope they were pulling on came undone from its mooring and catapulted them all backwards off the Tower.

Thousands of hands all hammering and hurting as the walls of St. Patrick’s Cathedral put up their greatest resistance to the throngs now forced to pulled this building to the ground.

Crowds swarming forward, climbing high and falling from ladders. Blunting chisels on the bricks but not stopping; using the handles to get the job done.

Searchlights and armed guards make sure the work doesn’t halt. The exhausted stepping over the fallen. The fallen crushed beneath panicked feet.

Families forced apart.

Children scattered everywhere.

Helping. Helpless. Howling. Ignored.

Nothing matters now.

Only futile labour.