Pikmin died, so that you may live. They paid the price for your sins of wasting your natural resources and ask for nothing in return (except that you safely collect them at the end of each day).

Last piece of pikmin fan art, and with it I will espouse a theory I came up with while hanging out with a friend playing the new game.

Pikmin are weapons of mass destruction that lead to the demise of the intelligent life on the planet in which they are found.

Hear me out here. We know that the Pikmin's planet was once inhabited by intelligent life, as evidenced by the giant artifacts.

We know that this intelligent life has vanished from the planet, and for whatever reason, never returned to the planet until the adventures of Olimar in the first game. Even with a food crisis, they never returned to the seemingly lush paradise. This planet was to be avoided at all costs.

We know that pikmin are queer little creatures. They will fight anything they are commanded to fight without even a passing thought for their individual lives.

We know that pikmin can gang up and kill a creature many times their own size.

We know that pikmin require technology to reproduce, as evidenced by the fact that the only place to get large quantities of them is to put biomass in the breeding chamber thing.

My hunch is that pikmin were WMDs created in the planet's distant past. They were created by either someone with evil intentions, or eventually came to be commanded by someone with evil intentions. The commander ordered the pikmin to attack the population, killing people and converting their biomass to more pikmin. In this future of space flight and planet colonization, the planet was easier to abandon than it was to liberate. Society fell apart, the planets had food shortages, and the rest, as they say, is history! O: