Kaidan does pause at that, but only so as to give the question proper thought. Like everything to do with humans exploring things, the answer's not a straightforward one. Fortunately, Kaidan Alenko is not-so-secretly a giant nerd when it comes to Man's Destiny Among The Stars.
"Well," he says, resting his dunging fork against the stall wall as the chestnut continues to mug him for carrots he doesn't actually have. "If you're talking extra-solar, there was the Manswell Expedition a little more than a century before my time. Early, no FTL, just three hundred people in cryostasis hoping they'd make it to Alpha Centauri alive. That was pretty much it, until a few years before I was born when people figured out the mass effect. We went a bit crazy with colonization after that, until we ran into the turians. They call it the Relay 314 Incident. We called it the First Contact War."
Or, rather, humanity in general did. Kaidan, aged six at the time, didn't call it much of anything. He suspects that Piotr will at least appreciate the historical irony of it, considering the Cetagandan vs. Barrayaran view of current events. Giving the chestnut gelding a final pat that concludes with a shove back towards his hayrick, he picks up the fork again and starts dealing with soiled straw.
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"Well," he says, resting his dunging fork against the stall wall as the chestnut continues to mug him for carrots he doesn't actually have. "If you're talking extra-solar, there was the Manswell Expedition a little more than a century before my time. Early, no FTL, just three hundred people in cryostasis hoping they'd make it to Alpha Centauri alive. That was pretty much it, until a few years before I was born when people figured out the mass effect. We went a bit crazy with colonization after that, until we ran into the turians. They call it the Relay 314 Incident. We called it the First Contact War."
Or, rather, humanity in general did. Kaidan, aged six at the time, didn't call it much of anything. He suspects that Piotr will at least appreciate the historical irony of it, considering the Cetagandan vs. Barrayaran view of current events. Giving the chestnut gelding a final pat that concludes with a shove back towards his hayrick, he picks up the fork again and starts dealing with soiled straw.