Departure from Earth

Date: 2241
Era: Era of Arrival

What happens

Six Earth Survey Vessels left Earth together in 2241: the ESV Enduring Hope, Eternal Dawn, Unbroken Will, First Light, Defiant Heart, and Silent Vigil. Each carried ten thousand colonists in cryosleep, watched over by a skeleton crew working in rotating waking shifts, sixty thousand people in all. It was the last time humanity moved as one, under a single mission, before the long dark of the crossing began to pull them apart.

Consequence

The crossing took roughly a hundred and twenty years, long enough for three generations to be born, live, and die without ever seeing the world their grandparents had set out to find. Each ship carried its own people through that time in near-total isolation from the others, and over those decades the six cultures drifted quietly apart, the divergence that would later harden into the houses already beginning in the silence between the vessels.

Related

• era-of-arrival (era)