It didn’t take long before Mankind was feeling constricted by her own solar system. Of all the planets, only two were marginally inhabitable. Earth was still in the Age of Storms, and Mars was not yet terraformed to host human life. The Moon had no biosphere at all and was forever destined to be the subterranean and domed industrial suburb of Earth. Venus’ scorching and crushing atmosphere was at the time almost impossible to conquer; Mercury was too close to the sun. The colonies on the moons of Jupiter were constricted to be subterranean or domed, or in the case of Europa submerged in the ocean under the ice. The cold methane atmosphere of Titan was a totally different engineering challenge to solve.

The other problem was infrastructure. The resources were there: easily harvested asteroids spread out all over the solar system; a sun radiating more energy than Humanity would ever need; the resources were not the problem. Moving them to the few places where people lived was. Crammed together in space stations, domed cities and subterranean caves, or confined under hostile skies of extreme weather, Mankind realized that all the resources that could be harvested was simply too scattered and too far away.

The boundaries of the solar system sparked a system-wide economic stagnation as corporations struggled to harvest its resources. The struggle turned into competition; competition into conflict; and conflict was close to turn into all-out war.

History is not without irony; what Mankind really needed was living space.