On Important Events

Three major events defined the contours of stellar humanity's attitudes when discussing the exo event. The first is Energetics. Sometime in the 19th century, a small percentage of humans were, seemingly, born with an innate ability to control motion in inanimate objects. The most powerful energetics of the time would only be able to move things under half a kilogram, with developments of the form taking generations to materialize. According to the few primary sources remaining, the emergence of energetics had a strong but unexpected effect on the societies of Earth. Some societies were already accustomed to spiritually significant events with seemingly no scientific or rationalistic explanation, and for these communities the discovery of magical children, born at random with the ability to see the geometry which permeated the world, a field or dimension altogether separate from those scientifically defined. When researchers of the 20th century drew up fairly accurate models of the forces which knit together the universe, nearly all of them set energetics off to the side, a problematic system of unexplainable ability exclusive to humans which didn't seem to play nice with the Standard Model. Overall, though, the two or three centuries following the birth of widespread energetics saw a humanity that was less hostile to the unknown. The world had been growing smaller, atrocities were being committed on global scale, and while the records of most of the 17th through 23rd centuries are lost thanks to the vast majority of historical data being left on Earth (more on that later), the overall trend is clear: while the history of the world did not swerve in the direction of tolerance and equity right away, by the 22nd century it was clear that energetics represented a kind of cosmic equalizer. There were no countries or nation states without a sizeable population of energetics. Early research found no way to predict innate energetic sensitivity, leaving racists and eugenicists with even less ground to stand on as the world shrank and people shared common ground, energetics ability sometimes included.

The second event is clearest in the collective memory of stellar humanity. Humanity's departure from Earth. In this writing I'm going to be annoying and not use the words people in the world would use for the exodus from Earth, because I think me, by authorial fiat, deciding what the Correct term is would be bad. The birth of stellar humanity had to come at a cost. Let's be completely clear here, there are horrors inflicted upon people throughout history and in many cases we can name the people responsible as well as those who sat idly by. Sometimes the guilty are charged, tried, and locked away or sentenced to death. Humanity's great departure was the express result of the sins of an industrialized world. Energetics did make humanity more affable toward one another eventually, but it did nothing to stop the ravaging of the planet spurred on by an economic system with foundations laid in centuries of imperialism, slavery and white supremacy. The 21st century saw the fall of the empires which had doomed the planet, but it was too late. Humanity had finally built a more just and equitable world just in time for it to begin to collapse around them. Tipping points had been passed, billions of people were already displaced by rising sea levels, extreme weather and regional famine. Earth would not be completely uninhabitable, but its capacity for large scale society was almost completely diminished, and so humanity had to turn its gaze skyward for survival. The following 50 years can only be described as the greatest single undertaking in human history, an accomplishment unmatched even in an interplanetary age, and the greatest collective trauma for humanity in generations. Being born is a trauma, to be ripped from the safest place imaginable and shunted out into the world. Now humanity was being reborn, shoved out of the nest like fledgling birds into the eternal tempest of the vacuum. Ten billion people, told to board a ship, find higher ground, or die. Some did stay, indigenous communities who had survived the worst of climate change and wanted to remain, cultivating what they could, one conglomerate of scientists holed themselves up in a city-sized complex built in Northern Europe, researching terraformation and climate control technology, plotting a centuries long course to a healed Earth. The rest, all ten billion of them, were told that in ten years the first ship would launch from a to-be-upgraded mass driver in Baikonur, Kazakhstan, one of dozens that would be either retrofitted from existing drivers, or built from the ground up. Fifty years after lift off of the first, the final ship would launch from the driver that now sits beneath New Seraph. Sixteen ships shot into orbit every month, each one nearly two orders of magnitude larger than any vessel built by man, carrying one million passengers. Every 3 months, once fifty ships had reached lagrange point 2 above earth, they further assembled themselves. Nearly ten thousands already gargantuan ships became two hundred arks. Over five decades, ten billion people were exiled to Mars, Ceres, and the largest habitable moons of Jupiter and Saturn. Each ship served as the core of whatever the people aboard built once they landed. Two hundred human settlements, each fifty million people strong, brought into fierce unity by the failure of generations long dead. Ten billion people, who, by the end of the 24th century, had found their footing among these less fit celestial bodies.

There are three major events of note when discussing the development of humanity leading up to the exo event. The first is the discovery of energetics, the clearest ""Alternative History Divergence Point"", occurring somewhere within the 19th or 20th century. This discovery and its consequences (especially manifest events and the subsequent acceptance among humanity of something bordering on the supernatural). Humanity as a whole had to become more open to the supernatural being an every day part of their lives, though the low ability of early energetics meant that even the initial shock was smaller than might have been expected. The second major event is the clearest in collective memory. Stellar Beginning, year zero of humanity's new history as a truly inter-planetary people, and one of the greatest traumas inflicted upon it.

Prior to our departure, in the centuries following the second millennium's dawn, space was seen by some as the inevitable expansion vector for a society that would simply outgrow our home planet. The wealthy and the powerful used scientific progress as a cover for exploitation and extraction. Small automated bases were established on Mars, Ceres, and several of Jupiter's smaller moons. (The largest three moons of Jupiter were the subject of the UN Solar System Charter, the signing of which barred private actors from taking any action with regards to Io, Europa, and/or Ganymede without express permission of the UN. The reality of the charter meant that the moons' surfaces would be scanned to the nearest meter, and small scientific bases would be established,