I grew up in a house full of science fiction. My dad collected it, read it constantly, and kept handing me books long before I was probably ready for them. I don't remember a time when I wasn't reading something with a spaceship or an alien on the cover.
By the time I was a kid, I'd already gone through the Foundation trilogy and most of Asimov's catalog. I read the big names of '70s science fiction the way other kids read whatever was assigned in school — except nobody assigned this. My dad just kept sharing it, and I kept reading it.
Then came 1977, and Star Wars. I saw it in theaters thirty-five times that year. And Star Trek wasn't something I discovered on my own — it was something my dad and I watched together, for years, the two of us equally invested in a fictional future where humanity had somehow figured out how to get along with itself long enough to meet everyone else.
That's the part that stuck with me the longest, actually. Not the ships, not the aliens, not the battles. It was the idea that we were still learning. Every Star Trek crew, every Foundation-era historian, every wandering Asimov robot was operating inside a bigger system than the one they started in — figuring out the rules of a galaxy that didn't care whether humans were ready for it yet.
I think that's exactly where we are right now. Not at the end of anything. Not experts. Freshmen — still early in our education about the universe, still working through the syllabus, still hoping we get invited into a bigger classroom eventually. One that teaches us about everyone else out there, human and not.
That belief is what's actually behind the Galactic Federation University Crewneck Sweatshirt. It's designed to look like something you'd dig out of a campus bookstore — if that campus happened to orbit somewhere else, and the curriculum covered a few more species than ours does. It's for the same reason I've been reading this stuff since I was a kid: not because I think we've figured it out, but because I like imagining the day we get to enroll.
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