From the palm-fringed beaches of Isolatia you could see several other islands on the horizon. Standing on top of the island’s highest mountain you could see even more islands. It seemed like Isolatia was part of a large archipelago. Were there people living on the other islands? Looking through a spyglass, there were no buildings or smoke or any other signs of habitation to be seen. But the Isolatians didn’t know for sure, because nobody had ever been there.

There was one tiny little island just off the Isolatian coast. It was merely a barren piece of rock, just a few hundred meters from the beach. Thirty years ago, a young guy braved the dangerous sea currents to win the heart of a pretty girl. He swam to the rock, planted a flag there and came back. You could still see what was left over of the flag but nobody else had gone to the rock ever since. People still went swimming but they stayed close to the beach.

Some people suggested it was possible to go to the other islands, by cutting some trees and using them to build something they called a boat. With a large piece of cloth, a sail in their terminology, you could catch the wind and move across the waves.

One of the other islands in the archipelago was a little bit closer than the other ones and it looked quite interesting. “Let’s build a boat and see what’s there”, they said. They didn’t have the money for such an expedition, so they had to convince their fellow Isolatians and the local government to help them.

They build a small experimental boat and tried to navigate it on a little lake in Isolatia’s interior. This gave them some valuable learning experiences; it also attracted a lot of attention and aroused a lot of discussion. It turned out that not everybody shared their view that it was a wise thing to leave the safety of Isolatia on an uncertain quest for new lands.

“What is it good for?” some people asked. “We have everything we need on our own island. Isolatia is so big that you need a full week to walk around the coastline. Life’s too short even to see every tree and every flower on our own island, so what do we need other islands for?”

“People weren’t meant to sail the sea”, others said. “It’s megalomania to try and cross the boundaries of nature”. They even talked of severe punishment by the gods should such an insane enterprise be carried out.

“This expedition is too expensive”, quite a large number of people said, “let’s solve the problems on Isolatia first”. And if truth be told, the island did face some major problems. The population had been growing rapidly over the last century and not everyone on the island was as well nourished and well housed as they deserved to be.

“We don’t need to risk human lives to learn more about this other island”, yet another group of people stated. “We can simply build better spyglasses. Everything a human explorer can do there can be done much safer by looking through a big telescope on our highest mountain. It’s much cheaper too!”

The people from the Other Island Society, as they had started to call themselves, thought they had some pretty convincing arguments to disprove the objections from their fellow islanders. “By visiting this other island”, they said, “we might learn things to help us solve our problems. And though it may cost some money, we’re not throwing coins into the sea. We’re spending the money here on the island on the wages of people who build and test our boat. Besides, building a sailing boat is an interesting new challenge for our craftsmen. And before we even reach the other island, we may already gain some unforeseen profits; sailing boats can be used for other things, like offshore fishing or simply for leisure.

Most importantly, they said, by going to other islands we can find out things about ourselves. We can get to know how big the ocean is and whether we are alone in it. We may meet other people somewhere from which we can learn. We may discover animals we don’t have here. It may even be possible that we find out that our ancestors came from somewhere else.

Did a ship from Isolatia finally set sail to the neighbouring island? Did the Isolatians find out if theirs was the only inhabited island in the whole sea? Did some of them migrate to other islands? Was a flourishing sea trade eventually established between different parts of the archipelago?

We can’t tell you yet. This is not a traditional fairy tale, in which everyone lives happily ever after. The outcome of the story is still undecided. You're part of it and you can help giving it a happy ending…