Prologue

A long time ago, in a galaxy no farther away than our local group...

In the year 2077, sensational evidence of an extra-terrestrial human civilization was intercepted by a probe of the Starshot Programme. This has brought us immense insight into the nature of life in the cosmos, as well as having profound implications for our own Earth-based societies. It seems we do not have to look to parallel universes or the vagaries of quantum theory for so-called ‘alternative’ possibilities to our lives and existence; our own universe is plenty large enough. With 200 billion galaxies in the known universe (our current estimate), each of these containing an average of 100 billion stars (at least two previous generations of such stars having passed), the vast majority of these having planetary systems, and now – it appears – a good proportion of these having habitable planets, why should we be surprised if there is a plethora of alternative possibilities to the civilizations we have witnessed or experienced here on Earth?

Our precise doppelgangers – he who simply puts sugar into his coffee where you do not, or she who chose the black shoes today where you chose the brown – perhaps remain in the quantum realms. To meet your ‘real’ self’, as it were, you might have to do a ‘shift’ into one of those realms. However, the scope for this physical universe itself is vast; the old maxim oft-used by the quantum buffs ‘anything that can happen, does happen’ can very well be applied to home, meaning even at the scale of the Milky Way alone. Put another way; if it is possible, it exists. Perhaps even there is a version, in our immediate and tangible universe, of our classical Star Wars movies being played out for real!

Our ‘friends’ on Acarnia, if we may call them that (and they do seem warm and giving), dwelt a little farther afield, but not much farther: the Andromeda galaxy. It appears they achieved interstellar travel for themselves, although perhaps limited to ‘near’ stars in their own galaxy, but their technical exploration and communicative ability went much father. It is this that reached us in 2077, in the form of a space capsule containing written (actually engraved microscopically on gold) testimony of their civilization; the Annals of Acarnia. It is estimated they had been travelling at least 200 million years to reach us, having been propelled at a full 1% of the speed of light.

It was quickly apparent that this was very much their equivalent Bible (a comparison which will upset some) down to the style of expression and format. It is broken down into many ‘books’, but shorter than most Biblical books. These were surely written by diverse authors across the range of their history, and the chronology can be elusive, but it is evident that they accumulated to what was their present day. They are grounded more in secular wisdom and science than our holy tomes. That is not to say they were without spiritualism, but it appears they had a more fundamental awareness of physical truths and cosmology right from their primitive times than we, and divested themselves of superstitions very quickly. Stunningly, they are written in English.