It’s surprising, looking back at history, how few people actually leave the planet on which they’re born. No more than a few hundred left in the first wave of Martian colonization; a few thousand, once we no longer required artificial structures to breathe the air.
I use many of these terms loosely - “we”, “no longer required”. When I say we, I mean our entire genus, including the species of humanity that can no longer interbreed with each other. These only develop from long-term evolution on a different planet; it took only a few generations, and some creative genetic manipulation, for Martians to develop different mineral and nutritional needs than earth humans. Children of a Sapien and a Martian still produce…people, though they rarely survive without an artificial environment, ironically enough.
I grew up on a generational ship bound for an exoplanet, determined to colonize it. Conditions on the ship are periodically checked and updated to increasingly match what we expect to find when we arrive.
Or that’s what we had planned on. There are people there already. A hundred and twenty years after our ship launched at .9999 some number of nines% the speed of light, we received a message. Let me repeat that - we received a message while travelling the speed of light. Turns out, they invented faster than light travel fifty years (from our viewpoint) after we left the solar system, and have been there and back already. It just took another seventy years to try and communicate with our ancient computer systems. Well, about forty (again, our viewpoint). It took nearly thirty years (Do I really have to say who’s viewpoint again?) for our computer to realize it was being communicated with.
Of course, travelling as fast as we are, we're already more than halfway to our destination; only now, we have to reset our systems so that my grandchildren will be ready for a planet more like Mars than the Dwarf planet we had expected to be exploring. Of course, our crafting engines can’t create the sophisticated and rare-material laden photon-heavy items it would take to modify our engines for faster than light travel, and the attempt would likely kill us all, so there’s no stopping early. Instead, we get to sit back and read about the human empire among the stars.
They finally encountered and confirmed aliens with non-human origins. Several species, in fact. There was a brief galactic war, and tensions remain on a few planets. But there is trade. No cross-species pollination, though. Despite what nearly every story I read about aliens growing up said. There are people who try, apparently, but uh...well, there’s DNA at the center of life, but so much of it is different, on a structural level, that crossbreeds can only come in an artist’s rendering.
The world my grandchildren enter won’t be a world my grandparents imagined; they were hardly capable of imagining such a world. And I am caught in the lonely space between. I know of the change. I have the stories of ancient humans so recently my ancestors, and I see the patterns that will one day shape my grandchildren’s lives. But I cannot touch it, cannot interact with it. We made war and peace with aliens in my lifetime, but I will never meet one.
What other changes will I see? What other changes will I miss? The life I trained for, that I am training my children for...seems to be already outdated.
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