So I came up with this idea randomly one night while some friends were over. Doesn’t everyone fly into their own little world sometimes? Pardon any errors in tense or grammar.

[image title="moon_and_earth" size="full" id="1200" align="center" ]

It’s the year 2400. For fifty years now, civilian space travel has taken over as the most used form of interplanetary transportation. Every day, millions of space-faring vehicles travel from planet to asteroid to moon to planet at breakneck speeds. Traffic sensors onboard each ship determines the best route to destinations and keeps everyone from colliding. Nowadays, even the cheapest aftermarket CPUs have the power to perform these simple tasks, too complicated for even the more above average humans. Fatalities have consistently been kept down to 2% for all intersol traffic.

The underpaid ministry of astronomy under the United Federation of Nations has come up with an idea that would put extra processing cycles to good use. As ships travel to and from objects, atmospheric and spectrographic samples are taken and computed. Readings are sent back to Earth at an average of just a few terabytes of information per trip. The ministry can now begin building an elemental composition map of the solar system, a project that seemed too grand a scale until just recently. Now, billions (still only a small fraction of the entire population) of vehicles are running this program at the same time.

Jump ahead ten years. The hype that surrounded this new program has all but died out. Some vehicles are still running the program, forgotten by their owners who installed it years ago. Very few others have been newly installed by the most hardcore of hackers and nostalgic thirty year olds. It was beginning to look like just another twenty year under-budgeted program destined to crash and burn. To get any more funding, an actual discovery would need to be made. Almost 80% of the solar system has been mapped now, by machines that have come and gone, much more advanced than the original idle-processing software. Even still, one of the few million copies still running has set an alarm off at the ministry. Hundreds of scientists are awoken at the same time. most go back to sleep. Only those most interested care to take a glance at what this special vehicle has found.

Carbon, He3, higher levels of dark matter per volume but nothing to write home about. What made the alarm go off was a few specks of dust, to small to be seen by the naked eye, but detected by the onboard sensors. No other rock floating in space has had this composition. Features in the dust were used to determine where exactly it came from. The only thing similar in the solar system was the Moon.

It was proven without a shadow of a doubt that the dust had exactly the same makeup as our own moon, plus a little more. It got stuck in an almost random free wielding orbit around the sun billions of years ago until it cared to be detected by some piece of computer technology. Information gathered by the dust not similar our own moon had compostitions that could be traced to one other star in our galaxy, Alpha Centauri. An old mystery asked since the dawn of man has now been answered.

The new discovery caused planetary governments to rethink their funding for their space programs. Nations allied together to advance their technology to figure out even more about the origin of this strange rock. Small crews are sent to the near star in giant interstellar ships never conceived of before this amazing discovery.

In the newly found system, planets we had only seen from afar came into view and traces of amino acids found. A lonely planet was found almost entirely covered in purple vegetation. On the dark side, light emanates from every location. Intelligent life is here! It is primitive though. However, this is the origin of life on Earth. It travelled here on the Moon!

Not much of a thriller, of course. But a cool thought…