Fleeing from reddit, this is an older story of mine (3 chapters so far, but I would like to continue it, just not on that site) Enjoy, or don’t.

Part 2

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Or so we thought, after first contact.

You see, when we first encountered humans, they had barely colonized their solar system. Not even counting the ginormous cost, both in lives and materials, and their primitive spacefaring thechnology, the galaxy in general classified them very low in the scale of species relevance, given what happened right after comunications began.

First, major religions suffered a cataclysmic schism, unable to cope with the fact that there where other life forms, and other faiths, throughout the galaxy. One can argue that their religions where already dead far before, when instead of enlightenment, they were driven by power-hungry megalomaniacs. In any case, over a few terran years, all large faiths collapsed, unable to hold themselves together with enough followers to keep mattering in the world affairs, divided each into millions of pieces and interpretations of life. But more on that, later.

When first contact specialists greeted the human delegations, instead of meeting the best and brightest, they found more power-driven humans that were insidiously desesperate on “technological exchange”, but there was not that much the specialists could actually trade, and they had barely enough patience to deal with the backstabing happening behind the scenes between many of their countries, trying to one-up the others. Our computational technology worked on optical and atomic scale, being thousands of times faster and more efficient than their electrically driven, silicon based technology.

Art and culture may have worked for a bit, but in a coalition of one million species upon millions of worlds, it would get diluted and estranged. Besides, humans would not go anywhere unless we carried them, wich was another can of worms alltogether. Given that their spacefaring technology was chemical in nature, vastly inefficient, and definitely NOT interstellar. They had begun spreading through their solar system, but at speeds that even a rock snail (silicon based life from an obscure planet in the edge of the galaxy) seemed fast in comparison. They had developed habitations in their moon and the fourth planet orbiting their Sol, but as singular efforts from individual countries, rather than a general human endeavor.

Medical and biologically speaking, there would be some trade, sure, but human biology was not that different from other well known species (definitely not counting you here, rock snail), so even there, exchange was going to be somewhat limited on what humans could offer.

Materials? Space mining at large was robotized at this point, and planetside digging was barely worth it anymore.

When sociologists arrived to perform a standard psicological analysis for the archives, they more or less found out why humans where confined to their own corner of space. Their structures of power where mostly coped by not very bright individuals that seeked to gain power for themselves or their selected group. That hindered social, intellectual and technological advancement to a crawl. It’s not like humans were going to destroy themselves right away, but as an interstellar race, they were not even in diapers, but barely even born, so to speak.

With all this, the galaxy at large celebrated their appearance for a short while, like everything that is new, and then went about their business once more.

And here is where you ask, why on terra am I explaining this story at all, if this was an unremarkable species (for galaxy standards), in an average corner of the galaxy?

Well, as mentioned previously, large religions were, in all effects, inexistent after a few human years. With that, all the thinking control, bombardment of beliefs and fears that drove those, fell dramatically, freeing a lot of human minds to think about something else, other than sit in a corner, dreading existence.

Once humans had a reason to look up, to the sky and beyond, without the background noise of their manipulative brethren, they started to think outside the box they had been kept in, but more importantly, they also stopped hindering the thinking in their offsprings. The cascade effect was unpredictable from our side.

We had inadvertently awaken the colossus.

With all the free brainpower bubbling around, the speed of humanity developement started to accelerate. Human governments tried to hold the reins to mantain themselves in power, of course, but they failed miserably, not because they could have not done anything, but because they did not act fast enough.

It is generally known that it’s harder to develop an idea from scratch, than knowing for sure that something can be done, and finding a way to do it.

Humans had seen our ships. We had expected some technological espionage, so to speak, from the humans in power. However, at the time of first contact, Earth was steeming with space travel interest, even if primitive, and the media coverage was on par with any other forms of entertainment. That meant reverse engineering and developement was not confined to a really small percentage of the scientific comunity, but instead, to millions upon millions of ideas hungry humans, with time to spare.

25 years after first contact, humans were already experimenting with FTL drives. 15 years later they had begun gravity manipulation techniques. 10 years later, suddenly, earth exploded.

NOT literally, of course.

That day Earth spat out a million spines. Some were flashy and bright, from the descendants of spacefaring moghuls that still had vast economic power, others were, literally, grain silos. You see, in general, not everyone had the resources to get a starship built for them, be either a government or an individual. So space access for general humans was still a government interest controlled issue, in theory.

It is known that a good Tiv’at mechanic can build a spaceship out of a truck, it’s not that hard for a good specialist with hundreds of years of knowledge in it’s back. Now imagine a race full of tinkerers that had been physically confined to a single planetary surface and the belief of an eternity of solitude. It took a specific kind of mind, of course, to go about building their own, but if it could be welded shut, and have air scrubbers installed, it could be made into a spaceship.

And that’s how 50 year after first contact, smart enough humans plucked themselves out of their home planet, leaving the dumber part of the group, behind.

Uvuk Dhasso, Galaxy Historian.___

enlightenment