Wandering a little nearer, you are alarmed to find your way to the planet's surface virtually blocked by clouds of metallic and ceramic fragments.
(The accumulation of space junk in orbit has reached a "tipping point", American scientists say, where spaceships and satellites now frequently risk destruction from flying pieces of debris.)
Then you notice the brown fog-like haze that covers large swathes of the landmass; your chemical analysis shows this is made of particles from primitive combustion-driven industry and transport.
(President Barack Obama dumps plans to tighten regulations aimed at reducing smog in order to appease Republicans hell-bent on burning whatever they can while it lasts.)
You also notice smoking land around the edges of great rectilinear plots where ancient rainforests - the very thing that produces the oxygen you favour - have been clear-felled for animal and crop farming.
(Destruction of the Amazon - the "lungs of the world" - will be exacerbated by Brazil's plans for some 26 hydro dams along its river systems as well as the passing into law of a bill that exonerates illegal farm-loggers.)
Dismayed, you turn your attention to the seas, thinking that surely the great oceans must remain unsullied, only to discover to your horror a collection of industrial flotsam measuring more than 1 million sq km has accumulated in the waters of the largest ocean.
(Even on the otherwise-unpopulated beaches of the remotest Hawaiian islands the "sand" is more than half made up of granules of degraded plastic.)
Your sensitive instruments are capable of spying down beneath the waves and here you find further evidence of despoliation: jellyfish and algal blooms expanding through the eco-niche of fin fish, whose stocks are below sustainable levels, and great benthic deserts where machinery has carved the sea floor into lifeless rubble-filled strips.
(Sealord refuses to accept its fishing practices are harming the environment, naming economic imperatives as its only excuse.)
Shocked, you pause to evaluate data on the planet's climate, to find that the temperature is rising, causing polar icecaps to melt and the sea to rise and start to swamp the land.
Given the composition of the atmosphere and the pollutants therein you logically conclude this change is being caused by the planet's inhabitants and their cavalier ways.
(Hawke's Bay could see a rise in sea level of more than a metre by 2100, a scenario that makes the debate about coastal erosion control somewhat moot - given that coastline as it stands will cease to exist, regardless.)
Finally, you turn your attention to the authors of this destruction, imagining that at such an advanced stage of degradation any intelligent being would be doing all they could to redress things and allow the planet time to recover, only to find the dominant bipedal species swarming across the globe in a mad dance of consumptive greed, seemingly oblivious to the fact they are set upon a suicidal course.
Still reeling at the implications of what you witness you receive an automated galactic code emanating from the planet's distinctive moon: a signal that has acted to turn away so many other passers-by who might otherwise have visited, despite the mess.
It's a single word: Quarantined.
Waving your appendages to convey approval of the wisdom of former travellers, you sadly but pragmatically turn about and head for home, leaving the lonely planet to spin on unloved.
Note: All the bracketed items are from news reports within the past week.
Bruce Bisset is a freelance writer and poet.
