Compared to the solar system, the Altair System was still far too young.
Its stars burned fiercely, its orbits were unsteady, and its skies were filled with the restless debris of creation — a newborn stellar nursery still wreathed in chaos. Even now, dust and shattered rock swirled through space like drifting embers, colliding, fusing, and breaking apart again.
When the solar system had first formed, it too had passed through such a violent, uncertain age. In fact, this early turmoil was not an accident of nature, but an essential process — a cosmic crucible where countless impacts sculpted planets from clouds of gas and rock.
Without those collisions, Earth and the other great worlds would never have taken shape.
