Science fiction doesn't seem to touch on "first generation" all that often. From the video games perspective, in Mass Effect you're at least three generations o

Science fiction doesn't seem to touch on "first generation" all that often. From the video games perspective, in Mass Effect you're at least three generations out from first contact, which was initiated by the military, although corporations quickly started exploiting planet systems for resources and became very wealthy, improving humanity's standing in the galactic community by the time of Mass Effect. You also have Dead Space, where corporations crack planets to get at their resources. It seems to be a general theme in space science fiction that big companies mine resources to become very wealthy, but you don't get stories of big companies financing space expansion a la East India Company.