“Welcome to New Morocco”, the security agent said as I passed through the security checkpoint. That was such a great trip. I had saved my leave until I could take the time to travel somewhere truly novel to my previous experiences. The trip did not disappoint. This is not to say that everything went as planned. As an ancient Earth philosopher once said, a good traveler does not rely on a fixed itinerary. Any trip worth its time and effort ought to include at least a bit of an adventure. For example, not only was I able to travel to a planet I had dreamt of visiting since childhood, but there were wonderful mishaps along the way. Okay, they were wonderful in retrospect. Getting lost in the four-millennia-old medina on my own was a bit disconcerting (Reason + Conn, Difficulty 3). And there was that night when I mistook the cultural context when that local asked me if I was interested in seeing the spires (Control + Command, Difficulty 2). But looking back on these past weeks, I wouldn’t trade the sum total of those experiences for anything.

The Federation is a truly remarkable thing. Spanning thousands of cubic lightyears and seemingly countless planets, there are more than one hundred sentient member species. That’s not including more than a thousand other sentient species beyond our borders! Sometimes it feels as if the Galaxy is teeming with life and populated by an inconceivable number of peoples. And each of those peoples manifests its own unique and valuable cultural history. When I think of my own upbringing and how many different ethnic and social backgrounds were flourishing on my own, single planet, my mind struggles to comprehend the sheer, beautiful enormity of diversity across and beyond the Federation (Reason + Science, Difficulty 5). How fortunate are we that, at least once in a while, we can travel to experience cultures and interact with people who are entirely new to us? Every trip offers us the potential to grow, to be a little bit more and a little bit better than we were before the journey.