Short and sweet. It probably took 15-30 minutes writing the bulk of this thing. And then I let it ferment in my sandbox for a week before I got the energy to post it.

Thanks to:

fenderson, Westrin, AthosNetwork, Uncle Nicolini, Leveritas, and Player 02 for feedback.

Image is from here under CC.

'Being alone in the universe is scary' is a pretty old philosophical and sci-fi idea. I can understand some people might enjoy this sparse, deadpan presentation, but it didn't really bring anything new to the table.

There are a couple of errors here: 'luminscent' in two of the testing logs and "as of 12:26 PM CST, 4/3/2019" - is this meant to be 4/8/2019 or am I misunderstanding how the object works?

Also, I'm sure the Earth's population would have changed over the course of 1 day, unless there is something more to the number remaining static from 4/08 to 4/09 I'm missing.

I think I get what you're going for. I think it's not to my personal taste.

My primary issue is that there's one of two premises here: Earth is essentially, mundanely unique throughout the whole of creation - which I, personally, find pretty implausible. The other is that we are anomalously unique throughout the whole of creation, which shifts the dramatic weight of this article from 'we are mundanely alone throughout the whole of creation' to 'we are specially endowed throughout the whole of creation' - which, you know. Not really the same thing, and it's not exactly as existentially frightening, imo.

However I do concede that these gripes are more based within taste and outlook more than the actual quality of the content, so I feel a downvote would probably be in poor faith. I don't think it's a bad article, it just doesn't work on my end.

edit: also, as a followup to ModernMajorGeneral's nit - +-250 children are born every minute. If we're counting children conceived, it's even more than that. I second Laneous in that this essentially undercuts the dramatic device you use of the counter staying static, so it's not an easy issue.

Also… if I'm understanding the criterion correctly, the number doesn't include non-anomalous, non-sapient organisms? Which would potentially leave out extraterrestrials who, are that, thus kind of killing the whole… thematic thrust, or whatever.

edit: After more thought, I've decided to downvote. It's still technically solid, but I have misgivings with the details of the idea itself and the way it was executed.

At this point, SCP-XXXX appears to bypass the Earth itself

hmmmm

An interesting Thaumiel candidate perhaps?

I was really, really hoping that the counter was going to tick up one once the Moon came into view.

Nice to see my old SCP number has a better one, I like how the Description talks about all the key points and the Comtaiment procedures make since, nice job 👍