Origins 3

From the dark depths of the solar system something hurtled toward the sun and had caught the attention of a few inhabitants of earth. Graduate student Cassandra Bradley, despite her regular work cataloging outer solar system debris for NASA, had taken an interest in the strange properties of the object. Against the advice of her colleagues she was able to secure some study time using a telescope at the Kitt Peak National Observatory.

Her results were stunning to say the least.

"The results that came through were worth all the trouble to get them. Granted the resolution wasn't great, but the thing didn't look like an asteroid or a comet. Not much in space has perfectly straight edges unless it's artificial. And the size was larger than anything humans had ever launched into space!" Dr. Bradley later commented.


"Orbital simulations couldn't resolve the issue of its speed or how it got into the orbit it had if it were human-made. We had to be looking at something extra-terrestrial and very old. The intriguing thing was that its orbital perihelion brought it just inside earth's orbit. Many of my colleagues argued that this was a dead giveaway that the object was from earth. But the heart of the matter is that its orbit was 10,000 years long and wasn't heading out, it was on its way back!"

As it came closer and more measurements and imagery were possible, even the naysayers in the scientific community came to realize that this might be what humanity was waiting for. By 2024 there was no escaping the truth that a massive spaceship was heading for earth. However, there was no sign that it was powered beyond residual energy fluctuations and an occasional bust of electromagnetic static. It appeared to be some alien civilization's discarded space junk.

When the world learned of the derelict, the widespread panic depicted by popular science fiction never materialized. Indeed, the topic of what to do about the ship became commonplace in schools, bars, people's living rooms, and on the nets. Some expressed the belief that the ship would bring all the beings of earth into a new age of prosperity. Others feared that the object was only the first of an advanced guard sent to enslave or even destroy humanity.

Few could have dreamed that this first contact with an extraterrestrial society would launch one of the greatest space races since humans landed on the moon.