The Stellara Progenitor and the Vow of Non-Interference

In 2072 CE, ten thousand people climbed into cryo-chambers aboard a generation ship called the Stellara Progenitor and went to sleep. They did not expect to wake up. Their children's children's children would. That was the arrangement.

Forty years into the voyage, an unshielded solar flare cooked two-thirds of the cryo-systems.

When the Progenitor finally reached its destination in 2264, 192 years after departure, only 3,333 people woke up. They emerged from stasis into the knowledge that the majority of everyone they had ever known was dead. They looked at their instruments, confirmed that the world below them was alive, biologically complex, and utterly untouched, and they made a decision that has defined human religious and philosophical thought for the three centuries since.

They called the cryo-disaster the Great Filter. They called the planet Solamiri. They did not go down.