Four hundred years ago, humanity left the Earth behind. We'd already taken everything we could from under the ground, and we'd polluted the hell out of the air and water. The old dirt ball couldn't take anymore, so we just left it all behind. Sure, there were some die hard survivalists who stayed behind, but not that many. The vast bulk of the human race got on the damn shuttles and took the free ride to the space bases. Some went to the moon, others to space stations, but any government or corporation that could finance it was building a journey ship, so people had a choice about who they wanted lording over their lives for the next few generations.
My great-great-I-don't-know-how-many-greats grandfather got hired on as a hullman on one of the Mega-corp's ships, so his family was guaranteed a spot on their ship. He worked his ass off building this hulk, and then once it was moving out into the black, he got assigned as a hull maintenance worker. Anytime the ship encountered debris, even tiny dust particles, someone had to get in one of the few exo-suits and take a walk into the black to make sure the hull was still sound. That was what my great-great-grandad did, and its what our family has done since. Some smartass flunky about three hundred years ago decided that it made sense to require families to train their children in their own trade, to make sure that each trade was preserved. That also meant you could only marry within your own trade. With a single bureaucratic nod, that flunky created the castes we've got to live with today.
What they didn't expect were the wars. When our ship, the AmBanCorp, launched, five other ships launched in a parallel course. We were all aiming at the same damn star, because the scientists were sure it had an Earth-like planet orbiting around it. Six journey ships and one planet... well, it wasn't an easy situation. At first, the ships just ignored each other... that lasted more than a century. There was even talk of sharing the planet. That didn't last long. One of the ships figured out how to time launching the waste from their propulsion so it trailed directly into the path of a rival journey ship. The spent fuel was deadly for the ship and all its passengers. That first ship didn't have long to celebrate their victory, as the other ships banded together to destroy them.
With just four ships left, their attacks were small and petty things, mostly meant to slow down the competition. By common agreement, lethal attacks were off the table. Everyone knew that if one ship broke that rule, they would be destroyed by the survivors.
Eventually, the four surviving journey ships settled into a kind of peace. They'd moved far enough apart that they couldn't easily be attacked, but were still roughly tied in their race for the planet.
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