Space travel had always been possible, easy even. You just had to get over the initial difficulty of ascending the earth’s gravitation. Some ancient people of what are now know as the south americas mananaged to do it by constructing what ammounted to, esentially, a very long ramp.
To these people, the challenge of traveling to the top of the earth was no less a multi-generational effort than today’s cross-solar system travels. Generations completed the work of generations before them, unsure why, sometimes, but always making progress of one kind or another, Building upward. They made offerings to the skies above them and received offerings from the lands below. And so on.
These days, Sol Langstrom thought a lot about those ancient people. For years eons even, the people of earth believed that ancient beings from beyond the solar system had sent down secret knowledge to the South Americans. They couldn’t fathom that the giant circular structures and markings left behind, long after the tower had collapsed and their culture, as all cultures do, had dissipated into the ashes of time.
The people of earth could not accept that ancient men, just like themselves, had built giant structures, climbed them until the air became poor and the sun would not heat their bodies or grow their crops, and then fell from them, destroying untold generations of work in the process. It was easier to belive that outsiders had been here. They even had folklore that described the collapse of the tower.
The tale of the Tower of Babel, which told of an angry deity that punished and lashed out against those who dared to go against his greatness. In a way, the folklore was kind of right. Except the angry deity and simply been time, and technological progress. Civil unrest and questioning the old ways caused the tower to collapse.
And really, the whole thing was a pretty sketchy idea anyway. Just what did they hope to achieve by poking their ancient heads up over the top of the earth’s atmosphere and taking a sad and empty look around the vacuum of space? Sol didn’t know.
Sadly, the reasons for the tower’s development had not been handed down. The histories had been lost. And without knowing the history, Sol shrugged, the people of earth were probably better off thinking so little of themselves, that it just _had_ to be outside forces that caused the tower to topple and erase itself from he earth. He shrugged.
