Shotgun approach: anywhere we think we might have even a remote hope of colonizing, prioritized and weighted (in terms of number of passengers) by likelihood of success.

It's amusing to think on two such populations of this human diaspora surviving to eventually reunite one day, probably tens of thousands of years after the original colonization event faded from their collective cultural memories.

Reunite? Knowing humans they'd likely battle to mutual annihilation because their toenails were different colors.

One would hope having one's solar system murdered by a rouge star might help a species grow up but right now I'm skeptical.

This is almost the plot to the Killzone franchise: as in, separate populations of human colonists at war with each other, long after they forgot their common ancestry.

That is also the plot to all of actual history. It's a pretty general plot.

Good point. Here I was thinking I stumbled onto something novel...

This was a Star Trek plot that helped explain why most of the aliens were humanoid.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Chase_(Star_Trek:_The_Next...

> After studying the ambiguous number blocks for hours, the discovery is made that these fragments are compatible DNA strands which have been recovered from different worlds all over the galaxy. The crew eventually believe that they have discovered an embedded genetic pattern that is constant throughout many different species, and it is speculated that this was left by an early race that pre-dates all other known civilizations. This would ultimately explain why so many races are humanoid.

Pretty sure if today's scientists had access to a dozen alien populations, DNA analysis would be one of the first things they set about. I'm not a trekky, but I would think that this should have happened chronologically much earlier in the canon.

>I'm not a trekky, but I would think that this should have happened chronologically much earlier in the canon.

Unfortunately, that was a two-part afterthought and the canon in that respect was never really explored. You could set an entire season or series around it, and Star Trek had a lot of dropped ideas with potential like that.

Well, that is not standing in the way of a good story. Interstellar solved that problem already.