We finally developed a workable faster than light propulsion system in 2158. It wasn’t easy, let me tell you.

I guess it started in 2037, when the United States put the first permanent outpost on the moon. Population was increasing faster than technology was able to keep feeding everyone, so they had to do something. It was mostly a research lab to discover what was needed to live off world for extended periods of time. They didn’t talk much about the zero-point energy experiments at the time; it was all about saving the human race.

In 2046, the Eurasian Hegemony leapfrogged the westerlings and started settling Mars while the westies were still building the Lagrange stations.

The explosion happened in 2055. Shattered the moon, rained debris down on the mother planet, and destabilized the Lagrange points. Millions died in the first week, and hundreds of millions more in the months following. Earth’s sky was overcast for 8 years. It took five decades to really recover from that catastrophe.

Of course, it wasn’t all bad news. The investigation proved that the explosion was the result of an unexpectedly successful experiment in the energy lab. Because of it, the existence of the tachyon was finally proven and its properties determined, which led to the theories that eventually culminated with our FTL engines.

But it wasn’t that simple. The colonists on Mars and the Galilean moons of Jupiter saw Earth’s weakness as an opportunity and started the First Interplanetary War in 2057. The colonists wanted independence. The home team wanted, no needed, the resources from off world to survive. Neither side was willing to budge.

War in space is tricky, but we’re an adaptable bunch of monkeys. Both sides cranked out ships, developed weapons, and devised defenses against them. The debris cloud around Earth kept a lot of the war outside of its orbit. But don’t ever let anyone tell you asteroid bombs aren’t damned effective in certain situations.

Anyway, the wars eventually ended, all the old ways were overturned, the dead mourned and buried. In 2119, it was announced that the last theoretical hurdles had been overcome, and that it should be possible to build and pilot a ship faster than the speed of light, and that’s pretty damn fast, believe you me.

So, the race to do it first began. Governments and corporations financed huge development programs. Some, less scrupulous than others, took shortcuts just so they could say they were the first to achieve what hadn’t even been though possible a hundred years earlier.

There were accidents. Venus had only been habitable for 7 years when the Sirocco went wrong in 2130 and converted its atmosphere to plasma. Here’s a hint; never do that. Three million dead. Io got knocked out of orbit in 2144 by a gravity surge caused by an engine test that never should have been allowed to happen. It dipped too close to Jupiter and the whole planet was lethally irradiated. Yanked Ganymede along for a ride in the process, screwing up what had been the start of quite a lovely ecology. The Medeans survived, but the joint’s never been the same.

So, along came 2158, when they finally got the bugs worked out. The test ships started coming back, the test pilots stopped getting turned inside out, and the tricks to navigating when you can’t see what’s in front of you until it’s behind you were solved. With great fanfare and celebrations across the entire solar system, and more than a little somber remembrance, our first interstellar exploratory vessel, the Argo, got launched into the void with a handpicked crew of the best and brightest among us.

Almost immediately, the Argo was intercepted by what can only be called a flying saucer. The little green men inside explained that their kind had been watching the progress of the human race for the last 300 years. With the successful launching of the Argo, we finally proved that we were advanced enough to merit an invitation to join the interstellar community and send a representative to the Star League.

They were impressed by our tenacity in the face of adversity, and revealed that they had in fact been pulling for us. They had cringed with every mistake, counted every death in our struggle to reach the stars. When others in the Council of Observers had written us off as too fragile and accident-prone to survive, they spoke on our behalf, reminding the others that the path was never easy

While we still had a long way to go before we would be considered civilized, and a great many scientific advances to make before we could step out into the galaxy-at-large as anything more than curiosities, membership in the League would provide protection, both against hostile forces and the contaminating influences of alien cultures. By following their rules, they would also ensure that we didn’t inadvertently spread our barbaric tendencies to other alien planets that had yet to develop sufficiently, just as we had been protected.

The Argo returned home and told of this historic news. We immediately declared war. Beat the bastards, too.

All right, break’s over. Let’s go over this again. The black stuff is charcoal, sulfur’s yellow, and the white is ammonium nitrate, generously donated by your local avian population. First, you grind the charcoal and…that’s right…just like that. Not too much. Good! At this rate, we’ll have you people airborne within a decade.