In the early 21st century, an anonymous person under the handle ‘Captain Gravity’ posted detailed mathematical formula detailing how gravity worked as well as plans for a primitive gravity manipulation machine. The debates in academic circles lasted months. Two years later, the first physical prototype gravity engine was publicly unveiled, assembled by General Electric. The gravity engine, codenamed Archeoptryx, lifted into the South Pacific sky and into the history books where it hovered for almost twelve minutes before settling to the ground. Archeoptryx was a titanium ring wrapped around a faraday cage of rare-earth magnets and thirty-two types of metallic wire. Within the cage was housed both the engine and the massive power supply. The ring was eighteen feet across and the cage was slightly thinner, only fourteen feet.
Eight years of refinement reduced the size of the engine by a meager two feet in both directions and did nothing for the extreme level of power consumption, though the intervening years did generate better methods of power generation. Another three years saw the first launch of a colonization vessel towards the moon, and six more years the first manned exploration vessel towards Mars. Another three years saw the USSV Sky Eagle, the first Haslett class long range exploration vessel begin its voyage to wander our solar system and better understand our cosmic neighborhood.
It didn’t get far.
Near the orbit of Neptune came first contact with extraterrestrials. A squad of forty Soquindus warships interdicted the Sky Eagle’s journey and bombarded it with communications in over eighty languages and dialects. Their message was simple: Don’t leave the solar system. Once the humans of Guinturra, their name for Earth, had established a planetary government capable of speaking for our planet it could petition the Gamedian League for probationary membership. Any attempts to leave the solar system would be obliterated.
End Message.
It has been twenty three years since that ultimatum, and humans are still stuck in earth, resigned to their galactic reservation.