When he took this extended vacation to one of the remote moons of Pluto, he was training as part of the backup team on a mission to relieve crew of Eden – a small experimental outpost around 4 light years away in the Proxima Centauri system. The trip itself was to take four years one way, one year at the station, and another four years back to Earth so they were to spend nine years in an artificial cocoon of the test lab disconnected from the real world through a thin few inches of the ship’s fuselage.

The Eden outpost was a small starbase orbiting the planet Kaii – one of three planets in the Red Dwarf star system. The station was the planet’s only moon. The planet, approximately the size of Earth, had liquid water under its desert surface. The base was established twelve years ago when space travel at close to the speed-of-light speeds was made possible by inventions in nano molecular chemistry. The scientists had learned how to control combustion on subatomic level achieving unbelievable levels of efficiency. This extreme precision allowed development of new engines that gave us a chance to travel much faster than ever before. Around that time, the data from a few old satellites – sent at great expense of money and resources (it took almost 41 years for the first satellites to reach the Proxima Centauri star system) – started beaming down data. That data confirmed that one of the planets orbiting the Proxima Centauri is possibly habitable. This star, so close to our Sun, was always considered premiere destination in our drive to colonize other star systems. In our Solar system we had places to go but Kaii was the first planet we encountered that had large reserves of water that didn’t have to be artificially extracted – it could serve as our new home – at least this was the slogan used to sell the expedition to the public. Kaii had water but it was hidden deep under the surface and would require such heavy complexes to extract that we didn’t dream it would happen within our lifetime.

This possibility of establishing a New Earth inspired everyone. A small station was established around the planet long before any humans were sent. We wanted to give astronauts a safe home when they would get there. The major obstacle was our inability to confirm if the station’ systems worked as the signal beamed back to Earth still took over 4 years to reach us. The designers of the systems had to create semi-autonomous devices that could perform their own maintenance and find ways to self-direct in case of component failure. Engineers did some brilliant work coming up with a number of ingenious solutions. Extreme advances in artificial intelligence let the system architects create a self-controlling devices. Unfortunately, even brilliant artificial intelligence couldn’t withstand the pressures of reliance on itself to survive. The original station went silent just 7 months after full deployment around Kaii. No matter how brilliant the technology, the human mind was still superior when it came to resolving problems involving a multitude of disciplines because we can utilise sets of data from one discipline in totally unrelated areas. This human flexibility lets us find unorthodox solutions. If we wanted to explore Kaii in hopes for one day to have a human step on its surface, it was only natural that we should send a manned mission.