Prologue

EARTH CULTURAL ARCHIVE
Educational Film — Circa 1962
“Humanity and the Stars”

Throughout history, people believed they were at the center of everything.

First their world.
Then the heavens above it.
For a time, even the universe itself.

Of course, we know better now.

The Earth circles an ordinary star, and that star drifts through an ordinary galaxy.

And the universe is far too large and far too old to have arranged itself around the small blue world where we happened to begin.

Yet humanity has never quite stopped imagining itself at the center of things.

Perhaps one day we will travel to distant planets and discover strange new creatures. Dinosaurs of another world roaming beneath alien skies.

Perhaps children watching this program will grow up to walk among the stars themselves, wearing rocket packs or gravity boots, exploring strange new worlds in ships faster than anything we can build today.

Why, some of you may even become astronauts.

Though by the time you hear this, that may be an outdated term.

You may be called galactic pioneers.
Interplanetary colonists.

Or perhaps…

Star Men.

But if that day ever comes, if humanity spreads beyond Earth and builds new homes around distant suns, we may discover something curious.

Even as we settle new worlds, we may still measure everything from where we began.

Humans on another Earth circling another star may count their own seasons, their own days, their own years. But somewhere in the records, those numbers will still be translated.

Back to Earth years.

Their distance from their sun, or from their home here on Earth, may be measured in units far greater than miles. Yet they will still be compared to the measurements that meant so much to us for so long.

So many things may be measured differently.

But they will all point back to one thing.

Back to the original reference.

Not because Earth is the center of the universe.

But because it was the center of ours.

Perhaps that is simply how people understand the world.

Everyone builds their life around a center.

For children, the center of the universe is their parents.

As they grow older, that center expands outward, to friends, to communities, to the places where they begin to build their own lives.

And sometimes, if they are lucky…

the center becomes one other person.