After just 100 days since the 453 hand-picked space colonists' departure from Earth, the travelers received news that the United States was forced to declare war on China. It would be the last communication they would receive. Two hundred fifty years later, another hand-selected group born several generations after these men and women landed on Mars left the red planet on a return mission to Earth. The Earth they would find when they arrived was not the Earth their ancestors left - far from it.