Humanity

Man's destiny in the stars seemed, to most, inevitable.

Having made the tortuous yet necessary leap from the stable and sure Earth to space beyond, human societies could once again grow without fear of poisoning their home. At first, they formed only little outposts on the Moon or small, but permanent, space habitats; minor footholds for the precious few people living in space. Once here, however, mankind's presence in space grew to an unshakeable grip. Soon, giant cylinders appeared around Earth, and many of them even beyond, while the foundations of buildings penetrated the regolith of Mars, and the Moon grew into a lively hodgepodge of cultures. Between these, colonies rapidly propped up to support the hastily growing interplanetary trade network. In seemingly no time at all since the great jump from Earth, there were tens of billions of people in a vast volume of space only roughly centered on the jewel that birthed them.

Though jewel it is, it is no longer cut and polished, but cracked and misshapen. It houses an order of magnitude more people than it could ever support sustainably. Despite this, it is stable; the result of its people toiling for years to correct the mistakes, both knowing and unknowing, of their ancestors. Though most of its land area is dedicated to serving, housing, or feeding its great population, its atmosphere is cleaner by the day, and its various species of wildlife, though living in tiny pens in little corners of the world, are safe. This wildlife even has the opportunity of a new beginning as some organizations, with some pity, regret, or combination of the two, allot much real estate in space in imitation of Earth's untouched past.

However, though local space has begun to explode with life, the universe beyond the Solar System — or the Earth System, as it is often called now — seemed completely lacking. Mars, though fascinating in its own right, was a sterile rock windswept and withered. Dead too were Titan, Europa, Enceladus. The stars beyond, though with some promising question marks, did not yield any convincing evidence of life, only deeper and deeper corners of space resounding in ever more deafening silence. Humans, although more numerous than ever, seemed utterly alone.

Within the imaginations in human heads, however, extraterrestrial life still abounded, and the possibility of abiogenesis only grew with research. Not only did it seem plausible, it was achievable — according to most definitions, novel lifeforms borne of nonliving chemicals already existed, products of ever-prodding labs. How could one doubt with so much outside humanity's doorstep and within its scientific journals? The Universe's silence paled in comparison to sheer curiosity. 

With manned missions in the outer solar system and so many eyes on the millions of promising worlds deep in the great expanse, the second great leap beckoned forth. Unlike the first leap, that strenuous effort of clawing out of Earth's gravitational well enough times for fears and hesitance to quell, the task now was to cross the immense spaces between the Sun and the tantalizing points in the sky.

Like the leap before it, this one initiated with ever-growing public pressure on governments and companies, and the competition between these bodies. The people voted for it, the scientific community predicted great rewards both academic and material, the investors saw money waiting for them, and the organizations craved glory over their competitors. Masses of money were collected and mobilized; so much more than that of the old leap, but again, the task was almost that much more arduous. Researchers labored, manufacturers fabricated, and planners tied it all together. Before long, with solar sails unfurled and fuel stocked, robotic probes aplenty rocketed into the abyss. To Alpha Centauri and Barnard's Star they traveled, among others, and the data did not disappoint.

As the melange of probes scattered from Earth, the next step seemed imminent, but the motivation was not. Humanity certainly could follow one of these probes with a ship of colonists, but why? What was there to do but live in little cans floating in space? Was that really worth all the fuel, time, and risk? Space over there was just like space here, but worse, for it was so far from any familiar habitats or planets; only death could bring one further from the known and loved. Finally, the opinions of all of humanity, simplified to one voice, indeed consisted of many competing and contradicting ideas about colonization; ethics and ideologies did not agree on whether or not to send people to the stars, much less on how to do it. So although exploration was popular, settlement was not. Such colonization sat in the realm of the perpetually-almost-here, the near future that never arrived, for decades.

But the urge remained stubborn in the back of too many heads. The question of what to do next, and how, required an answer, and for this the international community banded together as they did for many causes many times before. Though glory and riches abounded in the inky dark, and the people itched for growth, the immediate benefits were sorely lacking. What was it about the familiar that drove humanity so, that inspired them, that filled their heads with grandiose dreams?

That answer, of course, was Earth. That treasure at the center of the Solar System, if only metaphorically. It was the hub of culture, the core of traditions, religions, cultures everywhere, the administrative center of it all, the ground upon which this interplanetary civilization sprang. It was the sole place they could live without a dome over their heads holding them down; an expanse larger than any building, an entire planet made just for them. What a thought, one that was once so commonplace as to go unmentioned: A planet you could actually live on! The key to the cosmos, then, was an analog to Earth, another gem in the stars that satisfied this romantic urge and whose uniqueness in the sterile universe would draw attention from light-years away. To find such a prize nearby and ready for the taking, however, was nigh impossible; humans would have to somehow create their second home. But what a tall order! Though humanity was more powerful than ever, able to use matter and energy at godlike scales, the scale of planets was still greater. Even constructing a planet-sized megastructure in the image of a living planet would be pricey, and it would use infrastructure that would take ages to develop, yet still lack the romance of a real planet. Terraforming an existing planet would cost even more, though, and take much longer.

But with research and capital came a solution. Instead of worrying about funding and building some robust extrasolar infrastructure to fuel an army of terraforming probes, maybe the probes themselves could build the infrastructure as they terraformed. If the probes could arrive only in very small numbers, then collect power and resources exponentially upon arrival, then the timescale would shorten drastically. This, of course, implied self-replicating robots. Though such machines already existed, they numbered few, as they lacked a use case that more typical automation — predictable, well-established, and cheap —could not fill better. At last, such machines had a purpose. With the right choices of planet, substantial initial energy in accelerating the payload to speed, and a self-replicating robotic system tailored for this specific purpose, what was once a dream became a palpable, if committed and time-consuming, reality.

Thus, the New Skies Initiative was born.