4.0 Overview

During this era, mankind consolidated its position in the Solar System, took its first halting interstellar steps, and right before mid-century, made face-to-face contact with intelligent aliens. This last was an epochal turning point in the history of the Earth, ending forever our world's solitude and beginning our participation in the galactic community, a community forged in part out of man's own efforts toward friendship and cooperation.

This meeting with aliens, however, was preceded by a significant portent. Radio astronomers at Farside Moonbase discovered intelligent signals emanating from a star toward the galactic center. While they could not decipher the code they knew from the star's distance what it must be—or must have been; the star's signals were 15,000 years old by the time they reached the moon—an incredibly advanced civilization to be able to broadcast with such staggering power. When man's first interstellar ships ventured to the stars, they took with them the humility borne from the evidence of overwhelming alien superiority.

Perhaps the most dramatic event in the Solar System during this period was the terraforming of the planet Venus, which had previously been considered totally unsuitable for human habitation. Its thick carbon dioxide atmosphere (100 times as dense as Earth's nitrogen/oxygen air) had created a "greenhouse" effect, trapping the sun's heat radiation to produce surface temperatures of a cauterizing 500°C. To reverse this greenhouse effect, the atmosphere was seeded with billions of blue-green algae, which eat carbon dioxide and give off oxygen as a waste product.* In a remarkably short time, the algae had lowered temperatures to an acceptable 30°C. and created a rich oxygen atmosphere and protective ozone layer. Also, hundreds of massive ice asteroids were freighted from the asteroid belt and sent crashing into Venus at a rate calculated to increase the planet's angular momentum. Venus not only got water enough to create vast oceans, its rate of rotation was speeded up enough to generate a radiation-Van Allen belt around the world. Botanical terraforming made the surface habitable, settlements soon followed, and today Venus has a population a tenth the Earth's own.

Mankind also continued to populate the rest of the Solar System, settling especially in the Asteroid Belt, which became a center for space mining. With a population swelled by enterprising space homesteaders, this region soon began exporting such needed raw materials as nickel and iron, allowing the Earth to revert to the pollution-free beauty of its pre-industrial past. Asteropolis, the capital city of the Asteroid Belt, is to this day the largest and most important space city in the outer planets.

Commercial spaceflights were set up to join together the ever-expanding human civilization, which had reached all the way to Pluto; a research station was established on this furthest out planet to take advantage of its great distance from the sun for precise electromagnetic readings. Because of the time it took to traverse the staggering planetary spans, the solar spaceliners were equipped with all the amenities of long-term travel: gracious dining, null-gravity gymnasium, a stage and video theater, rear stellar observatory. Our present starliners owe much to the conveniences first designed for the solar spaceliners.

Also the familiar Pioneer Solar Communications System, one of the most important technological links to mankind's expanded space development, became operational. Their rugged viewscreens, to this stardate, are still in use in some old-fashioned solar-based homes. To feed this growing population, huge windmill-shaped space farms were sown, each transparent blade contained 500 square kilometers of controlled-growth micro-organisms.

The United Nations Solar Fleet (UNSF) was commissioned during this quarter century to maintain the rule of law throughout the Solar System, and much of the United Federation of Planet's Star Fleet structure and operational principles are directly taken from the old UNSF. The Solar Fleet patrolled from Mars to Pluto and played a vital role in the development and testing of future interstellar ships.

For the quest to the stars was not ignored during this solar consolidation. A new generation of interstellar probes superseded the old "Stellar Series," and the reception of this much more precise and comprehensive data proved essential in the construction of ships capable of interstellar travel. In addition, just as the U THANT stumbled across the existence of antimatter with dramatic consequences for the future spaceflight, one of these new probes discovered the holes in the space-time fabric that are now utilized for warp communication.

At the time, however, these discoveries did mankind little practical good. While the theoretical applications of matter/antimatter propulsion, subspace radio and the like were discussed, dissected, proposed and refuted, neither the mathematics nor the technology then existed to take advantage of these now-familiar realities.

The first successful interstellar vessels, the United Nations Starships ADAMEVE and ICARUS, employed advanced fusion propulsion, which enabled them to attain relativistic speeds during their round-trip journeys to the nearest stars thought to have any possibility of life. The UNSS ADAMEVE's journey to Barnard's Star was extremely valuable for the scientific insights into another star. But the ICARUS voyage to Alpha Centauri changed the history of man forever.

Intelligent life was found on Alpha Centauri, though scientists had been skeptical of finding any there. This celestial neighbor of Earth became one of the founding members of the UFP. Theirs was a civilization practically as advanced as our own, in accordance with Hodgkin's Law of Parallel Planet Development. And in one extraordinary individual, it was clearly the superior—namely Zefrem Cochrane, a genius on the same par with Einstein or Daystrom.

Thus, in one momentous voyage, the course of mankind was radically altered. The people of Earth met and established friendly relations with an alien society (on the ICARUS' return the U.N. immediately dispatched a mission to exchange the diplomatic formalities of official recognition), and became aware of the revolutionary principle of warp drive, finally enabling the speed of light to be surpassed and heralding for man the true beginning of his interstellar age.

*Of course, exhaustive tests were performed to find out if any lifeforms existed on Venus, since the remotest possibility of global genocide of organisms different from man was too horrible to permit any chance of.