What if we were the first in our part of the galaxy to discover the secret of faster than light travel? What if this discovery was 10,000 years before it was supposed to be? Our neighbors had been watching for centuries and were surprised with our early arrival into the Web of Worlds... The Year is 2166: To the people of Earth, the universe seemed to be a very lonely place. Astronomers have discovered tens of thousands of planets and many had indications of organic life. SETI had been searching for signals for over 200 years. There had been a few tantalizing bits of radio or radar energy received but nothing was ever proven to be of intelligent origin. But there was an alien civilization out there, in fact, many of them linked together in a Web of Worlds. They were watching us quietly, carefully and patiently. It had long been the prime directive of the Web that no developing civilization be contacted until that civilization made it into interstellar space on their own and that always took time, lots of time. Most civilizations took 1,000 years or more to go from steam to the atom and none had made it from the atom to an FTL drive in less than 10,000 standard years, so there was plenty of time to watch the Earth... What would happen if a beautiful engineer and a brilliant physicist accidentally discovered an artificial gravity field which would make a faster than light drive possible? This is a story of grand adventure and discovery but does not contain any space battles, lazer blazers or bug-eyed aliens in the ventilation system. It is a hard core science fiction where the diverse cast of characters matter at least as much as the tech. Earthrise: 2176 is the first novel in the Earthrise series.