Listing to Port

1. In the year 2560, a secretive security agency determined that there was a high chance of a large rocky body hitting the Earth via a sophisticated future-divination technique. Although the projected collision was confusingly low-velocity, they decided to plan for the worst case. A generation starship project was initiated. In order to avoid mass panic, the project was kept secret, with the ship constructed behind the moon and disguised as an asteroid. It was duly filled with a furtively-chosen selection of Earth’s brightest and best in long-term hibernation units. Meanwhile, a confused Earth was being informed that there had been an unusually large number of deaths and disappearances that year but still, nothing to worry about. Unfortunately, due to a calculation error, the ship eventually set off in the wrong direction, ending up in an eccentric orbit around Earth from which it eventually executed an emergency landing/crashing combination in a field in Mongolia. The prophecy was duly fulfilled. The powers that be kept silent about the true nature of the large rock, which eventually became a major tourist destination. Some three thousand years later, the ship executed its pre-planned wakeup procedures for arrival at the new planet, and a confused selection of the great and good from 2560 blew open the hatches to find themselves in the middle of a giant theme park from the future.
2. It became customary in the 12650s or thereabouts for the discovery of a new inhabited planet to trigger the automated launch of a flotilla of trading craft. The idea was that with the enormous timeframes involved in sending physical ships to the new civilization, the initial contact phase would be well over by the time ships launched at discovery actually arrived. Establishing a trading relationship with an entire planet was a lucrative goal and the losses relatively minor if it turned out that for some reason they found whisky poisonous, had no use for pens, or were not actually able to detect Chanel No. 5 due to lack of appropriate nostril equipment. Unfortunately, the contact process with 51 Pegasi c was aborted at an early stage by request of the inhabitants. A few thousand years later, they interpreted the arrival of a freighter full of aged cheddar as an act of war, leading to the expulsion of humanity from that bit of the galaxy for twenty thousand years.
3. There have also been a significant number of alien spaceship mishaps related an error in galactic positional coding for the Earth. In fact, numerous other civilizations have detected Earth’s signals and attempted to make physical contact. However, the universal positioning system used by most other civilizations has Earth down as the fifth planet from the sun in its system, possibly as the result of lazy data entry. The related automated systems have thus classified the third planet as uninhabitable but used for the siting of data relay systems from the main civilization. Consequently, the planet Jupiter is one of the most-explored gas giants in the solar system and humans have acquired a reputation for being extremely good at hiding.