After a friend read some of the ideas I came up with for a friend’s game he said I had a interesting way of writing and telling a story. So he asked me to put something on paper. I still think my writing skills are completely nonexistent, but to do this a friend a favour I wrote this really small short story. It was more meant as an essay about morals and values of us human beings, but it turned out a bit differently that expected.
“We’re an adaptable species” is what a great man of the past once said. His name lost in the now enormous archive of human history. Each day the vast knowledge we have of the universe is expending, simply because we as humans finally mastered space travel and the power to adapt.
By pure luck humanity found a way to travel faster than light, a technology that only has been fully understand during my generation. However it didn’t stop us to start colonizing other planets quickly. As known in human history as soon as we are given the chance to explore and leave our natural habitat we will take this chance instantly.
My grandfather and his girlfriend at that time were some of the first to volunteer for this change of human life, which was coined Alpha Centauri after the star system they were going to travel to. Around ten thousands of people were selected for this, their professions ranging from a simple gardener to a price-winning chemist. The grand idea of this was to recreate a society similar to Earth, yet smaller, including most of the cultures, religions and scientific fields as possible. Since traveling such a huge distance was still considered an enormous time-consuming task thus resources were limited and there was no easy way out for anyone.
Yet as we all known humans aren’t that forgiving when it comes to sacrificing their own morals and values, something that a colonization project actually needs to thrive. What started as small conflicts between the different groups soon became a full-fledged war. Expensive materials that were required to keep this new society running were turned into tools of war. A colony considered the Magnus opus of humanity that would outlast any other invention ever made by us quickly turned into something that should never have been created.
Instead of worrying about the problems the planet was giving us with a shorter day, higher gravity and extreme weather the only thing we could think of was fighting each other over who was right or wrong. Where did we go wrong as humans where the only thing we could think about is trying to destroy our own species and planet, or to be more exactly our second planet? Did we truly not change in all those thousands of years? Are we still the warmongers we were before we even discovered fire and the wheel while are now traveling among the stars?
Morals, values, ethics are all lost in the grand envision of war, a war that could now wipe out humanity as we know it on this planet. The war has now been going on for almost two generations yet nothing has changed. I’m still fighting for some reasons I don’t understand or want to actually. We haven’t adapted at all even if everyone is trying to convince themselves, we are still just beasts trying to survive. However it does feel like I’ve adapted to this planet for now, but the adaption to fight and destroy has been greater. I’m not a warrior; I’m a scientist, a doctor, I am someone who wants humanity to grow and outdo itself. I want humanity to adapt to new morals and values
Many more are realizing this and are willing to throw down their arms, melt them and forge them back into the tools we used to colonize this planet. We have been capable of bending the space-time continuum to our advantage and to adapt ourselves to the effect this has on us. We’ve started a new project on the planet that throws away the old system as we know it. The challenge for many of us was not to throw away our old values, but to not adapt back to them. You can teach old dog new tricks, but making sure he doesn’t remember the old ones is far trickier.
It took us one generation to fall into war, two to fight and one trying to stop it. The question however is can we adapt to a new way of life, a new way of looking at what makes us humans? We’re an adaptable species that should use their power of adaption to create a new paradise on this new planet. Where my grandfather took the steps to go live on a new world and create a new existence and where my father took the step to defend his old existence with measures that are inhuman. I will take the first steps to create a new way of existing for the future generations. This is the first of many colonies of humanity and if are true power is the power to adapt we should use it for improving humanity and not destroying it. War has always been good for adapting new technology, yet this time it might be the final adaptation we get before there is nothing left to adapt to.