I’m gonna be building around a rather simple premise: in the relatively distant future, somewhere close to the year 3000, a group of scholars from a distant planet plan an expedition to the Old Earth, that their people left several generations ago to follow an alien spaceship than landed on the moon in the 27th century.
The story is told from the standpoint of one of the scholars, a historian or linguist, most likely, and he recounts the history of the 3rd millenium, how the much anticipated Technological Singularity never happenned, and that the speed of light is still something that humanity has to deal with in interplanetary and interstellar travel. The Solar system is colonized by humanity, but impracticalities in travel and communication means that humanity is not a coherent, unified world, but a chaotic mess, much like earth was a chaotic mess before anyone left the planet…
The world that those scholars inhabit is a nameless planet in a not-so-distant system, 10 or 15 light years from the Sol system, but the centuries of isolation and contacts with the aliens have changed humans in the way they see themselves and the universe. They are confronted, after the years of travel back to earth, with the chasm of difference between them and the Solars, as they name the humanity that stayed behind…
