(Looks around with an eye so skeptical it gives jaundice to the hopeful) Let's just say that I've my doubts anyone learned anything and I don't trust my own species...I look both ways at round-abouts and one way streets, then I look down AND up.

To continue the discussion in the previous page's comments a bit, it seems that the isotope found to be most useful to trace (and date) our own dabbling in nukes happens to be ¹⁴C ...

While we haven't learned all the lessons we could? We have learned, we're better than we were, even if slowly. Gharr here is right, and to be so critical of your species to believe that aliens would be our moral superiors does not speak highly of the one who views it. Gharr is not here to be the judge of our world, he is somebody who finds familiarity in our people.

That familiarity is what will bring us to the stars, to be acknowledged as equals. To know that there are others out there who were just as [EXPUNGED] as us and got better, because we can get better.

The English grammar in this webcomic has gotten a lot better recently, so congratulations on that improvement. Gharr still speaks with a formal style and vocabulary, even in the human language he's learning, so I want to ask if that's part of his personality?

Also, for what it's worth, the word "oblast" in English is strongly associated with the Russian language, which is probably why some of the readers' comments on earlier pages asked if the crash site on Earth is in Russia. If locating the crash site "somewhere in Eastern Europe or Central Asia" is vague enough, then the word "oblast" works fine, but if the author wants it to be even more vague than that, consider using "province" or "region" instead of "oblast."

"Or at least, the people in power have not [learned lessons]."

The people in power are largely those who seek it, and that self-selected group has an ENORMOUS over-representation of psychopaths.

Well, the polite thing to say is that most of them have the "dark triad" personality traits, but the easy summary of those is "psychopath lite (or worse)".

So no, the people in power don't care about those lessons. What has happened is that enough "little people" have made a big deal of it that they have to give lip service to those lessons. Only when enough of the "little people" pay attention and are involved do the leaders actually do anything about those kinds of things, and even then, as little as they can get away with.

Those kinds of people are always available in the general population, all times and places. There is no "it can't happen here", because those people are always around and WANTING to make it happen.

The UN in particular, while perhaps a bit better than the League of Nations before it, is a dictators club. That's why the world ignore the General Assembly.

The many atrocities of the last 70 years, and the way the UN has been as useless to prevent them as the League of Nations had been to prevent WW2, show that no, we haven't learned anything. Or at least, the people in power have not. They're just as eager as before to commit industrial-scale slaughter to increase their power and their ambitions.

'you've learned lessons'

(X) Doubt

The Wikipedia screenshot seems to go off the laptop screen a bit in panel 4.

I sometimes wonder how quickly humanity will forget those lessons? Will it be right before the use of (as of yet) unknown weapons in World War III? Or will it be right before the use of sticks & stones in WWIV?