-Proffesor Dhasso?
-Yes?
-I was intrigued the other day about the human history you told in class, and I was wondering if I could request some bibliography on the subject?
[Dhasso smiled slightly] -Ah, Humans piqued your interest, I see. Well, there is not that much, to be honest, humans sometimes keep to themselves in puzzling ways. If you want I could explain some more history, and then you can decide if you still want the books. Anytime you wish, I have a very open agenda.
/a chair creaks when the student slightly leans on it/ -How about now?
[Dhasso checked his wristwatch and cleared his throat] – Heh, I guess it’s a good time as any other.
When the human exodus happened, 50 years afc., it was a chaotic mayhem. There is no easy way to put it, and it almost ended up in disaster.
When I said that the planet spat a million ships, it was a bit of a poetic license. You see, there where about 8.000 million humans at that time, not exactly a small number. I should check my notes for exactitude, but a guesstimate of 50 million ships were constructed in total. 5% of all land vehicles on the planet at that time, were converted into spacefaring caravans of sorts. Sure there where deaths all around, about 10 to 20%, it was extremely difficult to calculate, as sometimes there was nothing to reach land in its fiery way back. Even at that 20% loss, FORTY MILLION spaceships salied out into space.
BUT, I’m getting way ahead of the story, let me backtrack a bit.
Terra had already a busy low orbit, full, so to speak, with communication satellites of all military and civil kinds.When the first few hundred tinkerer ships temptatively began flying worldwide, at first everyone was keeping low altitudes and safe speeds, so mostly went, no pun intended, under the radar.
Plans for building grav generators and particle shields were flying at the speed of light through terran computer networks, and anyone who was curious about how they worked and had access to a moderately amount of high power electronics and machining equipment, could at least make wineglass floaters to awe the neighbors. We have to remind ourselves, that at that tech point in terra, a few home tinkerers were capable of building their own silicon based computation nodes at home, from scratch.
It didn’t even took the first accident (there would be, later on, of course) to ring the alarms in the airspace industry. One early morning of a long lost date, a homemade ship took off from a landmass near the equator, first appearing in the airspace radars until it reached too a high altitude to be further tracked by atmospheric flight radars.
At this point, of course, all the militaries in most of the terran governments, had space warships and where doing their thing, when a small blip appeared in everyone’s (in the correct hemisphere of detection) radar.
You see, the fun thing about having grav generators is that you no longer have to worry about atmospheric heating (as long as the gg’s work, of course), nor reaching space fast, for that matter. So this makeshift first attempt at DiY spaceship took a long, LONG time to reach high terran orbit. At this point literally everyone capable, was tracking the object, even radioastronomy aficionados. And a few armies were both pinging and hailing it.
It is considered a fact that whomever built that ship, it had had amidst it’s group at least a pilot, a space nerd of some kind and an amateur radio operator, it may have been, for all we know, a single human, though, as humans can have wildly different interests. There are remainders of logs about that flight, and the flying was not erratic, comms were using amateur radio equipment, and the orbit pretty much was on point avoiding anything in it’s path.
Then the funny thing happened.
We don’t know for sure what the interaction was between the ship and the last of the military ones that hailed them was, but my guess is that everyone was saying “stop right there”. I assume that the militaries did warn about blowing them to pieces, when two things happened:
The ship outran the military. Yes, as you hear me. That little ship, that no-more-than-a-radar-blip chunk of metal, outrun a terran state of the art warship (I imagine everyone had more or less the same capabilties at this point). Again, there are no exact records about the speeds, but I have heard it was like 100 to 1 of difference in acceleration.
Of course, that would not have worked for long, missiles with greater accelerations would have catch that ship if the military had been in full alert, with the finger in the launching button. However, they weren’t ready, and the pilot pulled the most insane, dangerous and politically incorrect maneouvre I have heard of. I like to imagine they did that while saying a big fat
“TRY ME, FUCKERS!”
They descended from high orbit into the most packed low terran orbit, where blowing them to pieces would create a cascade of destruction that would fill the entire orbit with projectiles too hard to track, literally destroying any possibilities, for other than the most hardened of spaceships, to get through, in both ways. Cleanup of that, even for us, would take decades, so imagine the terrifying thought in the captains of those warships when they realized. They had to let them go.
The story did not end there, however.
Apparently, the ship was destroyed by the builders after landing in a different point, not to prevent anyone knowing how they did it (the plans where on terran computer networks a few hours later), but to protect themselves from any and all governments. In hindsight, there was someone really smart with that project, to begin with.
This is where the whole debacle began.
The airspace industry at large went ballistic. That had to be controlled with iron fist, no matter what. It is true, as it was seen later, that the dangers of uncontrolled spaceflight could be disastrous, but not everything was due to them worrying about human life, no. The economic consequences could be catastophic for them.
But at this point, the know-how about building homemade starships was out there in a coalesced and condensed form, rather than individual parts. As we all know, governments tend to move slowly. Their inertia increases as the number of them that have to agree, increases. Even then, the speed at wich they decided to cut off the whole planetary computer network to prevent the spread of the information, was notable, but to no avail. The few hours that had passed between the flight, the spread of the plans and the cutoff, were enough time to get a copy of those plans, into anyone’s computer that also had the habilities and materials to pull it off.
Even after their great terran pandemics, this was just too much to try to control or enforce for any single government to try, short of removing the computers and workshops from everyone’s home.
At this point, all tinkerers capable of, knew something. Unless they fled right away, and in masse, they would be earthbound for the rest of their lives. I have to think that the human species has to have some form of telepathy of sorts, or it may be just chance, because the tightness of timespan between the incident and the day of the million spines, is astronomically small, given the effort required.
With the information and personal lockouts, planetary protests ensued. The economy suffered greatly, as international trade and businesses relied on the same networks to properly function. There was a limit on how long the Government siege of their own citizens, everywhere, could stand. Not even the majority of the military components, humans too, after all, were keen on this treatment of their families, and slowly but surely, all lockouts where lifted.
There where demonstrations of force, mainly the most prominent tinkerers and builders were rounded up and locked down, wich of course, would work wonders to keeping the millions of others at bay, would it?
As we now know, it didn’t do shit to prevent what would happen next. Exact progress of events is blurry at this point, as most of it was conducted in somewhat secrecy by individuals, or groups of individuals. But it is easy to see that when governments tried to track materials, builders resorted to scrapyards, and when those where closed too, it was too little too late.
This brings us to the days of spines, when, in a few weeks timespan, about 50 million starships took off. Casualties I imagine were larger than 10 million humans, as many ships could bring up to space more than one, but it’s a sad thought I don’t want to entertain.
It is safe to say that a whole small country worth of humans, had just abandoned earth, with an impossibly huge percentage of them being tinkerers. Of course, more average humans would follow later, but this first exodus would be determinant for this particular bunch.