Chapter written by Bob Frank
Humanity has two great fears. The first of these is extinction, for our entire species to be cast into the void, and so we took to the stars. We jumped from earth the only way we knew how, by strapping our frail living bodies to bombs, pressing the big red button, and hoping that the explosion leaves us in space, and not in a million crisp pieces.
Well, well, well...
Of course, the rockets we used were state of the art at the time. They were complex machinery, circuitry and sensors, feeding into complex algorithms, all arranged so that when the countdown reaches zero, instead of becoming a massive pier, this mountain of mad machinery does the impossible. It carried us into space.
Now we have less volatile methods of ascent, but that is getting ahead of myself.
The idea of mankind living on Mars has been in the collective noosphere for over a century, possibly far longer. One of the first stories of humans on Mars was the 1922 novel Aelita by Aleksey Nikolayevich Tolstoy. These stories were all well and good, but the advanced technology to bring the first human boot to the surface took nearly two centuries to develop.
I suppose I should say...
As of 2245, humanity has nearly 300 healthy colonists on the surface of Mars. This settlement just happened to qualify for the grand introduction of humanity to the intergalactic stage. The Galactic Assembly, the sitting rulers of much of the entire universe, deposit a massive dump of data to every new candidate for integration to the Galactic community. This solves two problems. First, many new additions are horribly behind in their physics, onto-kinetics, and thaumaturgy, and the data dump brings them up to speed. The second problem that it solves is the issue of the addition’s stability. Some candidates disintegrate, while others panic, and attempt war. Not humanity, however. Humanity, or as they were soon to be known, the Terrans, grouped into one determined mass, and pushed for the stars.
Hello.