Terrans are contacted by an alien civilization, nothing like anyone had ever imagined, not a war-like race, not wise overlords, just alien, and so alien that communication is not only difficult, it is just impossible. In fact even the concept of communication seems to be impossible for the alien race to comprehend…
After the excitement and the media frenzy, the aliens just fade from attention, and only a small group of people stay interested. At one point the aliens leave and humans mount an expedition to follow them. They get into the aliens’ ship, and tag along in the voyage, and finally, after a long time, end up on a planet of those aliens, and the humans settle there. They slowly learn and teach a way to communicate with the aliens, learning many things about themselves in the process…
Generations pass before actual communication is possible, and before the Stowaways change enough to be able to comprehend the aliens and how they think. The descendants from the Stowaways mount an expedition back to Earth, and they arrive, after years of traveling back, to a Earth that is now almost as alien to them than the original Aliens were to them centuries ago…
I’m gonna be building around a rather simple premise: in the relatively distant future, somewhere close to the year 3000, a group of scholars from a distant planet plan an expedition to the Old Earth, that their people left several generations ago to follow an alien spaceship than landed on the moon in the 27th century.
The story is told from the standpoint of one of the scholars, a historian or linguist, most likely, and he recounts the history of the 3rd millenium, how the much anticipated Technological Singularity never happenned, and that the speed of light is still something that humanity has to deal with in interplanetary and interstellar travel. The Solar system is colonized by humanity, but impracticalities in travel and communication means that humanity is not a coherent, unified world, but a chaotic mess, much like earth was a chaotic mess before anyone left the planet…
The world that those scholars inhabit is a nameless planet in a not-so-distant system, 10 or 15 light years from the Sol system, but the centuries of isolation and contacts with the aliens have changed humans in the way they see themselves and the universe. They are confronted, after the years of travel back to earth, with the chasm of difference between them and the Solars, as they name the humanity that stayed behind…
