Habitation

If you dream of sailing the stars, be sure too that you do not dream of dismantling them for parts.

— Elia Rowan, 21st-century futurist and transhumanist

The process by which a given location in the cosmos becomes inhabited is gradual, centered around growing an intimate, familiar understanding of that location. Every celestial body is unique, and learning to build a sustainable life —and a new branch of civilization— upon any of them is a different journey every time. However, said journey is always slow, methodical, and almost unintentional; a far cry from the predictions of historical "science-fiction" writers.

Stages of Habitation

The process of turning a place in the cosmos into a home is not formally codified in law or protocol, nor is it given a concise name in academic literature —the terms "colonize" and "settle," while apt on the surface level, carry deeply unpleasant historical connotations that do not reflect the gentle, considerate methods applied today. However, the pattern of establishing a new sophont presence anywhere in the universe takes on a familiar shape across time, space, and civilizations. It generally follows a series of steps that span many decades.

1. An object is first visited by autonomous explorers, then by sophont explorers. This stage typically totals around 50-100 metric years, depending on the presence of sophonts elsewhere in the star system.
2. After the overall environment of the world is understood enough to design reliable permanent habitats, a research station will be constructed. A regular staff rotation will proceed for anywhere between 30-60 years, building up the self-sustainability infrastructure required to establish sustainable permanent residency.
3. By the time the research station becomes (mostly) self-sustaining, it is more akin to a small town. In UNH-allotted space, this is the point when —as recommended by periodic supervisory reviews and/or public opinion— the former outpost (and, by extension, the object it resides upon) is filed as a Common Territory and jurisdiction of the outpost normally switches from its parent program within the United Nations Aerospace Coalition (USSC) to the Planetary Habitation Administration (PHA).
4. Once registered as a territory of its respective parent polity, population and infrastructure tends to grow at a greater rate than the previous stages. More habitats are established; a system of government is enacted to organize and operate things on the local level; the economy takes off as the inhabitants determine how to best utilize the local resources. This stage usually spans anywhere from one to three centuries, depending on the local environment.
5. Once the new world is economically and politically stable, the local government will have the option to file for independence as a junior member of their respective polity.

It should be noted, however, that there are actually very few planets with native life that are inhabited by nonnative sophonts. Since the USSC's ratification of the Cosmic Biodiversity Preservation Agreement and the creation of the Ecological Research and Preservation Agency, settlement of a planet with an endemic biosphere is functionally illegal —and culturally speaking, viewed as something like a cardinal sin. On biotic worlds where a permanent presence was already established prior to the Agreement, extreme care is taken to preserve the native biosphere and prevent further contamination.
In short: grand expeditions of colonization amid the stars are a complete fiction. Instead, hundreds of little university-towns spring up at interesting sites around the local cosmos, and over time become cities. There is no manifest destiny, just habitual curiosity and everyday life following along in its wake.

History

Please note that the following discussion of historical space exploration focuses on human history specifically. The respective spaceflight histories of other species will be discussed in future updates to this page.

In the early days of human space exploration, particularly in the years directly following the first moon landing, there was much discussion of space as the next and final wilderness to be conquered and settled by mankind. Luminaries of the age spoke of a great Space Boom to come: a rush by countries, corporations, and individuals to grab as much of the endless cosmos as they could for themselves. All of the space on the planet Earth had already been claimed, so of course the moon, the planets, and the stars themselves would become the Final Frontier. Infinity itself could not sate the hunger of the Western culture, but they would devour it all the same.
Fortunately for everyone, such a dream was not to be.
As the Apollo Program drew to a close and world governments refocused their attention once again on having more nuclear weapons than each other, spaceflight was reduced to a curiosity and space agencies were limited to robotic probes and temporary low-orbit habitats. What they found should have been obvious from the start: space, and the other worlds within it, was exponentially more difficult for a human to inhabit than anywhere on their home planet. Dreams of homesteads on Luna, colonies on Mars, and vast generation ships bearing thousands of people to Edens beneath distant suns all faded from the public imagination as it became clear that the universe was not made for us after all -neither, indeed, were we made for the universe. The mystique, glory, and riches of alien worlds were nothing more than the fanciful projection of a culture that had not yet shed its desire to tame nature, its urge to prove its worth against a world it saw as hostile. A culture that, for all its technological prowess, had not quite yet relearned that humanity was not above nature but instead a part of it.
The exploration of space was left largely in the hands of scientists, which in retrospect was the best possible outcome. When the global demilitarization movement began to take hold of international politics at the turn of the 21st century CE, the government space programs of many nations received increased funding as interest in space grew once more. Members of the United Nations of the time quickly realized that the exploration of space could serve as an excellent model for multilateral worldwide collaboration and established the United Nations Aerospace Coalition to that end, pooling their space programs together into the first truly human project since the beginning of civilization itself: the exploration of the solar system.

The first permanent human presence on another world was the International Lunar South Pole Surface Research Station at Shackleton Crater —shortened to Shackleton Base. The station provided a base camp for long-term lunar operations, including ice mining and hydrolysis to generate chemical rocket fuel. Over the following decades the base steadily acquired more facilities, personnel, and living space. Eventually, this former scientific outpost grew in size to become the modern city of Shackleton.
Shackleton Base and the city it became set an important precedent for human space exploration: a foothold will, in time, become a footprint, and eventually an encampment. The space age was never destined to rewrite the ancient pattern of humankind: first we learn, and then we live.