Across Eons

The year is 2661 CE, by Earth reckoning, at least. Earth, AKA Terra Prime, hasn’t been habitable for hundreds of years at this point. Stories of what happened have become muddled by politics, conspiracy, and the passage of time. But whatever the reason, humanity decided to pack up and head towards greener pastures. 

It took a few generations of space travellers to make it, since we had not quite figured out FTL flight. Nevertheless, in 2511 CE, we finally landed on an oxygen-rich planet full of habitable features that resides only a few systems away. The place was named Terra Seconda formally, but the general populace calls it Hearth. It was almost as if the place was just waiting for us; we have one sun and two moons and a year cycle of 350 days (we decided to keep counting from Earth years and just sort of make the math work out). There was also water and plenty of edible flora and fauna, but apart from what looked to be some proto-wolves skulking about, there wasn’t an apex predator in sight. 

Fast forward to the centennial anniversary of the founding of Hearth. The Terra Intraplanetary Council (TIC) announced that we would once again be sending explorers to space. From this new vantage point, and with lived confirmation that life did indeed exist on other planets, humanity once again turned its gaze to the stars and wondered what else was out there. 

It’s been 50 years since the first Terranauts took off. They are heroes, people from all walks of life who decided to take off in one of a half dozen spaceships and search the cosmos for a potential Terra Tertia. We still receive updates from them when we can connect long enough to send a message back and forth, but so far, they’ve yet to find anything as interesting as Hearth. It’s demoralizing, but it’s only been a few decades. The food could be better, they tend to joke. 

The hardest part, though? Well, you don’t age so quickly in space. Some of the Terranauts who left infants at home are watching their children start to go grey before them. And the farther away the ships get, the longer it takes for a connection window to open. These days, they seem to be about 5 years between exchanges...for us at least. For them, it tends to be more like 6 months or so. I wonder what it’s like up there for them. I wonder if they mourn the ones they know will be gone by the time their next video arrives. 

Oh well. Ad astra per aspera.