Timeline:

2020 AD - A pair of Gyropulser Starships are built and launched. These starships corkscrew through space using centrifugal force to convert the energy of nuclear weapons into thrust. They travel in opposite directions away from Earth. Within a few months they reach cruise velocity at 10 percent of the speed of light, retract their outriggers, and coast for a 5 year journey. Their first payload is an array of infrared interferometer telescopes that will be spread out over a lightyear of space, half a lightyear in either direction. They will form a gigantic synthetic aperture holographic planet imager that can - at a glance - image the entire hemisphere of an alien planet 10's of thousands of lightyears away, with a resolution of 1 meter. The preliminary calibration of the system involved imaging the planets of several dozen star systems in close proximity to our own, within a mere 12 lightyears. The following image is a 3-dimensional representation of all the star systems within 12 lightyears of the Sun.

Timeline:

2026 AD - This preliminary calibration of the telescope produced an astonishing thermal image from a planet orbiting Groombridge 34, just 6 lightyears distant from Sol. The image is of what appears to be an extremely large arachnid measuring 10 meters in size.

Timeline:

2036 AD - Exhaustive studies of Groombridge 34 finally losing the public interest - "All we ever see are spiders!" - gave the astronomical community enough incentive to do similar searches of other nearby star systems. Several turned out to be devoid of any life, but then to their surpise, the following image from a planet orbiting star system L726-8 was produced. This star system is 10 lightyears away from Sol, but it is also 10 lightyears away from Groombridge 34. The scientific community was baffled by the similarity of the species in two different star systems.

Timeline:

2040 AD - Continuing scans of planets of surrounding star systems have found virtually identical arachnid lifeforms inhabiting Lalande 21185, Ross 128, and Procyon. These star systems are on opposite sides of Sol, up to 20 lightyears from planets where these creatures were first observed. What is more disturbing is that Sol is right in the middle. Then astronomers produced the following image from a planet orbiting 61 Cygni, which appears to show some sort of mechanized transport. This appears to be a machine of some sort, but scientists say they still haven't been able to find any evidence of other kinds of life on the planet.

2050 AD - A new fleet of gyroulser starships have been built to deploy additional observatories specifically to image planets further away. It is anticipated that eventually we will discover an advanced civilization and learn about their "machines" by remote observation techniques as well.