nkind's
grandest achievements. At the Luna landing's
Tercentenary a universal calendar was ordained to
commemorate the Event as New Year's Day, Year 0,
formally beginning humankind's Interplanetary Era.

By then, populated Moon and Mars bases were well
established. Construction cadres had ventured
into and beyond the Asteroids. Their experiences,
surface and strata tests and studies influenced
the selection of sites for mining operations and
strategic outposts along the space frontiers.
Advance construction battalions built basic habitat
and, having attained 'shirt sleeve' environments,
conceptualized, planned, gathered local materials,
and designed and built infrastructure and
industries that, in time, blossomed into enormous
encapsulated cities, social orders, cultural
adjustments and civilizations.

Explorers became teachers and mentors. Initially
in Earth orbit, later in lunar space and on Luna
itself, they guided settlers in developing new
lifestyles and colonizing skills, and showed them
how to wrest and refine usable elements and
minerals from nearby sources. They devised and
tested methodologies to convert crude space
matter into forms with which to create and
integrate structures, and manufacture and operate
machines and networks that would sustain surface
and contiguous space and inter-satellite and
interplanetary navigation and logistics systems.

The emigrants procreated and populated their
cities in the void. Their disparate ancestries blended
through a natural vitality that accelerated human
evolution so as to survive in a radically new
environment. In so doing, they turned away from
traditional conventions still deeply ingrained in
their common species. Adjusting over time to the
novel experience of space, they conceived new ways
or adapted their ancient qualities and prospered
in wholly enclosed artificial worlds. Organ
modifications, genetic engineering and cloning
gave impetus to human transformation.

Instinctively, humankind-in-space prepared for an
eventual voyage to the stars.

At the close of the first interplanetary millennium
that shaped and launched The Great Migration to
Space the original emigrants' progeny had become
an indigenous population. Five centuries into the
Interplanetary Era's second millennium the Solar
System included more than five hundred populated
colonies and outposts, and twice that number
of robot stations for interplanetary and
inter-satellite navigatio