In engineering, experience gained is directly proportional to the amount of equipment ruined. - Stephen Baxter

Ah, Mardina. Evidently you entirely lack imagination. You’ll go far in the Navy.

There were no cop cars cruising through that darkness, no watching choppers or surveillance satellites, nobody out there to help him—no law operating save the savagely impartial rule of nature.
And yet every day he was struck by the strange orderliness of the place. Decaying animal corpses did not litter the ground, save for a handful of bleached bones here and there; it was rare to walk into so much as a heap of dung. There was death here, yes, there was blood and pain—but it was as if every creature, including the hominids, were a cog in some vaster machine, that served to sustain all their lives.
And every creature, presumably unconsciously, accepted its place and the sacrifices that came with it. All say one species of hominid, it seemed: Homo sap himself, who was forever seeking to tear up the world around him.

The last of the Qax had come sliding through the interstices of space and now hovered with him over the frigid surface of the star.
Human and Qax, huddled around the chill proton star, did not attempt to communicate. There was nothing more to say.
The river of time flowed, unmarked, towards the endless seas of timelike infinity.