The world hovers on the brink of eternity, a thrum of excitement through every news cast, every teleprinter serial or radio drama, every movie and short, on the handful of television sets -

The International Science Association announced a global push three months ago, a period of unprecedented scientific collaboration towards one end - a greater understanding of the cosmos and, surely, within our lifetimes - space travel. The creative minds of the krissan ran off with this idea, of course, and space fiction is quickly becoming one of the most popular genres.

Life's good, if you ask the krissan. They have unprecedented communications - an era of peace seems on the horizon, and people speculate excitedly about the ideal of a global alliance, outstripping the limited mandate of the International Science Association. Robots aren't yet able to take over in factories and release the world's workers into a post-toil paradise, but that, too, is a popular fiction trope. People listen to the public service campaigns encouraging them to have fewer children per adult in a household - most young adults considering family matters decide they're going to solve this by having more adults in the household for the same kids - because surely, surely, no one wants to put too much population pressure on the world, we're going to go to space and we need to clean up our own act before that -

(People speculate excitedly about space colonies, of course, and terraforming planets, and having an infinite vista - no one's sure if finding a planet ready for terraforming or a planet with aliens would be more exciting - )

People listen to the educational campaigns, too. Those countries which offer student stipends adjust which higher educational degrees they favor. In a few years, there'll be a bumper crop of scientists and engineers and would-be astronauts, or at least secretaries and factory workers getting scientific, engineering, and mathematical problems on their home teleprinters and sending in crowd-sourced solutions to every problem imaginable.

Life hums along, a touch more hopeful.