A History of Extraterrestrial Contact with Earth

It’s a pretty natural to think about humanity eventually reaching out to the stars and contacting alien races. But what if we’re not the first race to reach out? What if the shoe is on the other foot? What if the first contact beings were to contact us for some reason? Let’s explore a quick history of the contact between humanity and the cosmos as it happened over the past couple of centuries. Let’s assume we can understand them by some means that I don’t really want to get into right now.<br><br>---<br><br>Humanity had been expecting it for generations. Because it was inconceivable to believe that we were alone in the galaxy. We started sending out signals and messages in the 20th century. It took a lot longer than anyone thought it would, but eventually, humans made contact with an alien race.<br><br>It was an odd greeting. It came as a series of numbers in something not too different from base 10. That was all. No other message came. Just the numbers. It was the beginning of something called the First Contact. The strange thing was that the numbers didn’t point to any star in particular but instead seemed to be pointing towards Andromeda. It took another generation to crack the code that the numbers were a base 10 system representing a specific set of coordinates in our own galaxy. It wasn’t until we developed faster-than-light travel that we were finally able to meet them.<br><br>The first message in decades was received in 2176. While the first message had been a series of numbers, this second message was much more confusing. It was an image of two suns, a blue one and a red one, and a series of dots orbiting the suns. It was believed that they were showing stars in their native system in an attempt to communicate with us. The dots were interpreted by some to be planets and by others as some sort of alien spacecraft. It wasn’t until the development of faster-than-light travel that humans came into contact with the alien race.<br><br>The aliens referred to themselves as the Aetherians. They had been a spacefaring race for thousands of years and had settled numerous star systems in the Milky Way. They had developed faster-than-light travel hundreds of years before humans. Surprisingly, their technology level was only somewhat higher than humanity’s. Not leaps and bounds higher like it would have been if they had developed it 1000 years earlier. It wasn’t until humans asked about it that it became clear what the Aetherians were after all this time. The strange messages they sent had been theoretically possible to crack but for the fact that the nearest star they represented was 75 light years away from Earth. A distance it would take 75 years to travel at the speed of light.<br><br>When the Aetherians realized that humans were not able to crack the code, they sent a probe out to Earth. The probe contained a piece of the alien’s sun and the information needed to create a stable wormhole. Before the wormhole could be created to a planet other than the sun that was represented in the initial message, it needed to be built around an incredibly high gravitational center. The nearest center that would allow for a stable wormhole was the Sun itself. The wormhole then bridged the void between the Sun and the alien star, connecting the Milky Way Galaxy with the Andromeda Galaxy. <br><br>The first contact was not the only contact with Extraterrestrial races, but it was by far the most important. The wormhole connecting the Andromeda Galaxy to our own opened up access to countless races we would never have been able to encounter otherwise. Humans quickly took to the stars. Space travel became faster than ever before. The wormhole was the key that eliminated the main barrier to space travel, the sheer distance and time required to travel between stars.<br><br>The Aetherians were the first of many Extraterrestrial contacts, but they were not the only ones to have sought out humanity. It wasn’t until a few decades after the First Contact that we were approached by the Kyrexi, a race that had been monitoring Earth for centuries. They believed that humanity was not ready to join the cosmos and tried to dissuade us from the idea of interstellar travel. They had seen countless races rise and fall throughout their long history. It wasn’t until the humans proved that our species was not committed to the inevitable path to destruction that the Kyrexi began to work with us.