First Contact Day

—Chrissie

Listen here: https://www.spreaker.com/user/ufpearth/hwts091

On the fifth of April 2063, the question that had been asked by humanity for millennia, are we alone in the universe, was answered.

The years leading to humanity’s first faster-than-light flight were difficult ones. The early 21st century saw Earth in a state of tumult. The availability of basic resources became a point of contention between people and governments, due to widespread drought from climate change. At the same time, the gap between the richest and the poorest widened to a point never before seen in human history. These conditions led many countries to move toward fascist and dictatorial governments, though often not openly. In the United States, the increasing number of the unemployed and unhoused led to the creation of sanctuary districts. These areas were presented as temporary shelters but were, in reality, ghettos used to remove these people, as well as the mentally ill, from society. One can assume this was the intent from the beginning; however, as with so many such events in history, there are no records which explicitly say so. Pushback against these districts did end up prompting social change after the Bell Riots of 2024, but this was overshadowed by the outbreak of World War III just two years later. By the end of this conflict, in 2053, both conventional and nuclear attacks had resulted in approximately 600 million dead as a direct result. At least as many can be said to have died in the years immediately after from the aftereffects of the war.

Postwar recovery was uneven at best. Some parts of the world recovered more quickly than others, and the limited resources meant that these countries did not want to offer aid, for fear of not having enough for their own people. Urban centers that had seen minimal disruption during the war, and which were connected to functioning agricultural areas, continued to thrive, though with a much-reduced population. Many rural areas, particularly those reliant on agriculture and ranching, felt the effects of both the climate change and radiation resulting from the use of nuclear weaponry.

The state of Montana, in the United States of America, was one of the harder-hit areas on the North American continent. The economy had been focused on farming, but also with a large amount of money coming in from government and military contracts for the nuclear silos scattered through the area. It was from one of these silos that Zephram Cochrane launched his faster-than-light prototype, the Phoenix. He and his team had been developing warp drive technology for at least three years prior. Cochrane gives a date of 2060 as the beginning point of his work, but was quick to acknowledge prior work in the field, particularly that of Stephen Hawking, as invaluable to his efforts. The records of the particulars of Cochrane’s work are, like so much of the information of the time, piecemeal. He collected his papers and began a memoir shortly before his death, but didn’t finish it. The date of their flight is sure, however. Cochrane and his colleague Lily Sloane launched from Bozeman, Montana in the morning of 5 April 2063 and made a successful, if brief, test of their engine and returned safely to their launch site. Unknown to them at the time, Earth was being monitored by Vulcan scientists on the science vessel T’Plana-Hath. The ship detected the Phoenix’s energy output, with its tell-tale warp signature. After some communication with the Vulcan High Command, it was agreed that first contact should be initiated, introducing the Earth to the rest of the galaxy. The ship landed near Cochrane’s launch site and greeted the scientist-engineer, beginning the long process of healing the wounds humanity had inflicted upon itself. In a little over a century, Earth went from essentially being alone in the universe to a founding member of the United Federation of Planets, an organization in which it still holds a leadership position.

Cochrane continued his research for decades, until handing it off to Henry Archer and his Warp Five engine project. He retired to Alpha Centauri, but decided to join a colonizing mission launched from there shortly after he arrived. He was not listed among those who began the new settlement, so it is assumed he died en-route, though there are no remaining records to consult.

In the years immediately following First Contact, Cochrane often mentioned in his telling of events an odd element: that his flight had been nearly stopped by a group of “cybernetic creatures from the future” and that it was completed only with the aid of humans from the same future era. In light of Cochrane’s known issues with substance abuse, this has never been taken seriously by historians. However, since Starfleet’s first encounter with the Borg in 2365, there has been some question as to whether he had an otherwise undocumented encounter with the Collective and, if so, who were his helpers from the future?