A historical excerpt explains that the first twenty years of the Crisis Era were later grouped under the label “Crisis Infantilism.” Historians saw this period as marked by actions that became difficult for earlier or later generations to understand, because the Trisolar Crisis disrupted the foundations of human culture, politics, religion, and economics while society still reacted with old habits and institutional conservatism.

The excerpt identifies the Wallfacer Project and the Stars Our Destination Project as classic examples of this early-Crisis mindset. While the Wallfacer Project would reshape history, the Stars Our Destination Project quickly disappeared after launch. Its origins lay in two pressures: the attempt to expand the United Nations’ power and the early appeal of Escapism.

As humanity confronted a common extraterrestrial enemy, many people and smaller countries wanted a stronger United Nations, while great powers preferred to keep real space-defense investment under national control. UN Secretary General Say tried to use the moment to transform the UN into an institution capable of directing Solar System defense. Because the UN lacked independent resources, Say devised the Stars Our Destination Project as both a funding mechanism and a political declaration.

The legal basis came from the Space Convention, especially the Crisis Amendment, which placed development of resources beyond the Kuiper Belt under UN authority and defined such resources as those not already occupied by nonhuman civilizations. At the same time, early Escapist ideas made distant stars and planets seem potentially valuable, since some believed humanity might survive by leaving the Solar System.

The UN resolution proposed auctioning the rights to stars and their planets to states, businesses, organizations, and individuals, with proceeds funding basic research for Solar System defense. After debate, the final resolution limited the auction to stars more than one hundred light-years away. The project failed commercially: only seventeen stars sold, all at minimum price, earning the UN about forty million dollars.

The buyers remained anonymous, and observers wondered why anyone would pay so much for a legal claim to unreachable worlds. Say nevertheless refused to call the effort a failure, arguing that the project had always been a political proclamation. The excerpt concludes that the Stars Our Destination Project was soon forgotten, becoming an emblem of humanity’s strange and immature early response to the Crisis.