Explorers became teachers and mentors. Initially in Earth orbit, later in lunar space and on Luna itself, they guided settlers in developing new lifestyles and colonizing skills, and showed them how to wrest and refine usable elements and minerals from nearby sources. They devised and tested methodologies to convert crude space matter into forms with which to create and integrate structures, and manufacture and operate machines and networks that would sustain surface and contiguous space and inter-satellite and interplanetary navigation and logistics systems.
The emigrants procreated and populated their cities in the void. Their disparate ancestries blended through a natural vitality that accelerated human evolution so as to survive in a radically new environment. In so doing, they turned away from traditional conventions still deeply ingrained in their common species. Adjusting over time to the novel experience of space, they conceived new ways or adapted their ancient qualities and prospered in wholly enclosed artificial worlds. Organ modifications, genetic engineering and cloning gave impetus to human transformation.
Instinctively, humankind-in-space prepared for an eventual voyage to the stars.
At the close of the first interplanetary millennium that shaped and launched The Great Migration to Space the original emigrants' progeny had become an indigenous population. Five centuries into the Interplanetary Era's second millennium the Solar System included more than five hundred populated colonies and outposts, and twice that number of robot stations for interplanetary and inter-satellite navigation, communication relay, and space rescue. Populated by humans and their robots, colonies extended from the voids above Mercury and Venus through the Asteroids, the satellites of the gas planets, to Planet Pluto.
As colonies multiplied and spread across the vast interplanetary realm the solar community became impatient with time consumed in normal point-to-point space communications and transport. The excessive transmission and portage time was especially irritating in communications, shipment of priority cargo, and human travel across distances from bodies orbiting along on opposite sides of the Sun. Hyperspace technology solved the problem.
"Spunnels" in the public's jargon, came into being, the term compressed from the phrase "hyperspace tunnels," a universal phenomenon once suspected and eventually confirmed. In the centuries preceding The Great Migration the phenomenon had been generally referred to as a wormhole, an archaic and irrelevant expression, even in those ancient times.
Spunnel networks reduced transmission time between the most widely separated points in the system from hours to real-time. Successful in communications, scientists and engineers concentrated on the technological leap from spunnel communications to spunnel teleportation, a capability urgently and clearly essential to move humans, machines, and raw materials across interplanetary distances.
The flood of emigrants to space colonies and outposts exceeded tens of thousands each year over several centuries, leaving behind a still over-crowded Earth that had long since cried 'enough'. Among the migrants were artisans and technicians, minimally to highly-skilled administrators, sociologists, teachers, scientists and engineers and, scattered among them, contemporary philosophers who preached the metaphysical. Together, they represented all of Earth's peoples and a cross-section of their cultures.
Technology, however, imposed constraints. The insatiable appetite for metals, minerals, rare earths and other nonrenewable substances increased inexorably. They remained the foundation for the Solar System's industries, driven by the constant clamor of indulgent lifestyles. Fully aware that vital minerals and other substances were beyond replenishment from within the Solar System, the solar community nevertheless squandered its rapidly diminishing resources.
In time, reserves of nonrenewable resources dropped from residue to gleanings. Recycling, salvage, ever-deeper mine shafts and tunnels, repeated sweeps of the Earth's sea beds and planetary and satellites' crusts, trenches, beds and craters offered insufficient returns. Scouring the Asteroid Belt, sifting the Kuiper-Oort regions, and intense competitions for substitutes provided inadequate and merely temporary relief. The solar community's population, on Earth and in space, had exploded to more than fourteen billion people. The search for substances to support humankind's needs ranged throughout; there were no more sources, nor were there sanctuaries.