A little more than two hundred years ago there was a growing problem of overpopulation on Earth. Medicine became better and better, food became cleaner and healthier, and with the right medications, almost everything was curable. The mortality rate decreased drastically, the average age of the people increased and in the meantime more was built upwards than in the breadth. It would probably have gone even faster if the birth rate had also risen, but due to loneliness, media and technology people moved away from each other and posed astronomical demands. There were hardly any functioning interpersonal relationships, everyone thought only of themselves and love was a term from movies, just like the word ‘happy’. The space program of the leading government had discovered a colonizable world in an adjoining star system and was ready for a test.
At that time lived an astrophysicist named Henry Earl Mutten. With the help of a new kind of telescope, Mutten had discovered a star system that was far away by the standards of the time and contained a planet that was life-friendly. If he had found this world ten years earlier, nobody would have noticed. But space research had developed advanced engines and improved shuttles that could reach Pluto within a few weeks. This made Mutten’s discovery much more interesting for the government. The idea of colonizing this new world came quite quickly, and there have always been many wealthy and eccentric entrepreneurs who have willingly spent their money on such pilot projects. With a few billion in funding, the government was able to form the expansion group. Several massive transport ships that would fly with hundreds of thousands of passengers into the new star system over a few years. Poverty, adventure and curiosity drove enough volunteers on board to stabilize the population for the time being.
At this point, the government was quite willing to sacrifice all the hopeful colonists to get the problem under control. But the calculations had all been done by Mutten himself and he was a genius. After three and a half years, the first ship reached the planned waypoint. The world that had been thought of, temporarily called Eden Alpha, was, unfortunately, little more than a floating boulder without a noteworthy atmosphere. They had landed in the neighboring Kendar-System. The planet was renamed ‘Failure’.
Mutten’s best student noticed the mistake and extrapolated a new course. It took another three months to get here. They landed on this world and since it was very green and full of energy, they called it Utopia Beta. It took a few years to build the first settlements and to cultivate the land.