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From Africa to the Stars – further thoughts on the Exodus Phenomenon by Dr Aspen Greaves

Introduction

Of all the traits almost unique to the human animal, perhaps the most interesting is travel. Of course, we’re not the only species to travel by a long shot; much as birds sing and elephants have language and Arctic pigs use tools and long-toed blood dolphins play, the Earth has been full of migratory animals since before our ancestors crawled out of the ocean. But, like song and language and tools and play, nobody else seems to do it quite like we do. For humans, unlike our cousins, do not only migrate between stable food sources or spread by accident when new land is suddenly available. Humans, unlike our cousins, are gripped with a powerful, inherent urge to go everywhere, to see everything, and to make the entire world our home.

What did the first humans to walk out of Africa feel, I wonder? Or the first to cross an ice bridge on a long-harrowing journey to a new land, or the first to cast off in a boat not with the intention of fishing for a while and returning home, but with the intent of making a new home, somewhere else? What did humans feel when they first trod upon the moon, or colonised Luna? What did the first Martians feel, stepping shakily out of their spacecraft and onto the red dust of the world that they would make their own? Again and again throughout history, when their current environment becomes stressful, humans alone have sought to spread out, reach further, see more. The initial excuse is always different – overpopulation, war, famine, profit motives, the sudden accessibility of unexplored land – but the effect is always the same; some catalyst draws forth an ancient, ancestral urge in a large fragment of the population all at once and, like the instinct pulling a salmon home to breed, pulls us away from home in large, coordinated groups, away to establish new homes.

And today, as our eyes turn towards deep space, we see this ancient instinct arise once again. The Kleiner Array has allowed humankind to see new homes further away than ever before, and to a proportion of the population, they call. Much as our ancestors their first steps out of Africa, now humans prepare to take their first steps out of our solar system. But why? What is this mysterious urge that calls to us, that drives our species ever outward and onward? Where does it come from, and how can it coordinate such large groups? How does the Exodus Phenomenon actually work?

Let’s find out.