(Follow-on from the tramp freighter pilot finding Earth)
What really excited the scientific and engineering community was the 'build-your-own' educational manuals from [Space SCA] - centuries out of date tech for the pilot's society, but theory backgrounds and detailed instructions on how to build everything for a number of tech levels with tools from a number of tech levels, some of which we can build the tools to build the tools for. -- RecklessPrudence
Galrax had left it behind by mistake, in the bottom of one of the crates that held a disorderly heap of 'cool room' superconductors, interesting cables, and other random ephemera that would not be missed by the Galactic trader. It was in Galstand, which didn't help, but it did contain copious pictures, which did.
Galrax the humble trader would get a lot of the blame, just for accidentally leaving behind his hardcopy of How to Escape a Wild Planet, which included instructions for building the arsenal of tools necessary to build the arsenal of advanced tools that made building an intrastellar space vessel possible.
Humans are pretty clever at figuring things out. They colonised their solar system inside of four years. Only the distance between their star and any others prevented them from bursting out into the Galactic Alliance as a whole. The vessel in the instructions was designed to carry a cogniscent as far as the next wormhole where, it was assumed, the occupant could hook into the Galactic Alliance info-nets. And from there, call for a rescue.
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