Imagine being a person living on Europa · 11:16pm January 15th
Or rather, in Europa.
You live your whole life in water, between the firmament above and the firmament below. Your entire civilization has risen without once sparking a fire. You may not even know what light is; you might have other ways to see the world around you. Some days you wonder what might lie beyond the firmaments; perhaps there are other vast seas like your own, locked behind the walls of an infinite universe of solid stone and ice, and open liquid realms.
And then one day something new drills a hole through the ceiling. And you realize that this is from an intelligence both like yourself, and yet wholly unlike you.
And they tell you the truth of your universe.
They tell you that the sea you know as home exists beneath the surface of an icy sphere that they call "Europa" in their tongue. It, along with several other small worlds, orbits through a vast empty void they call "space", around a massive orb of swirling gases they call "Jupiter", which in turns orbits a burning hot something they call "the Sun". There are billions of things like the Sun out in the universe; the visitors call them "stars".
The visitors come from closer to the Sun, from a world they call "Earth". They call themselves "humans", and though they possess intelligence and thought like your own, physically they are about as alien as you could imagine, if at all. On Earth there is water in abundance, but the humans live in spaces that jut above its surface; they have no icy firmament above. They walk on legs, and breathe in gases instead of water. They navigate by "seeing", absorbing bouncing photons through organs called "eyes".
They are strange and alien...and yet, startlingly, like you in many ways. They love and hate, fight and heal. They grow. They learn. They explore.
Their universe has suddenly gotten bigger. And now, so has yours.
