Humans

Art by Railroad-blues

The newest species to enter the galactic stage as of 2182, **Humans** are also one of the most rapidly expansive cultures that the Citadel Council has come across in its millennia of existence. As their own saying goes: *"For every ten humans you've got, there are eleven different opinions".*As diverse a culture as could be imagined, humanity is by far the most intellectually divided species known to the Milky Way galaxy.

Hailing from the planet Earth, they independently discovered a Prothean data cache on Mars in 2148, and the mass relay networks shortly thereafter.

## History

### Leaving Earth

Human space exploration began in earnest in the late 21st century. In 2069 CE, Armstrong Outpost in Shackleton Crater on Luna was founded as humanity's first extraterrestrial settlement. In 2103, the European Space Agency established Lowell City in Eos Chasma on Mars, paving the way for additional settlements and scientific outposts throughout Sol, such as Gagarin Station near Pluto, which was under construction by 2142.

In the early years, however, some were dissatisfied with the pace of official exploration, leading to a series of private ventures. In 2070, billionaire Victor Manswell began funding his own extrasolar colonization endeavor. The Manswell Expedition, as it became known, successfully launched five years later with 300 cryogenically-frozen colonists bound for the Alpha Centauri system, but communications with the expedition's ship were soon lost and the colonists classified as missing.

### Discovery of Mass Effect Physics

In 2148, human explorers on Mars uncovered a long-ruined Prothean observation post, with a surviving data cache that proved Protheans had studied Cro-Magnon humans millennia ago. While religions tried to assimilate this discovery into their doctrine, a global rush began to decipher the petabytes of data from the outpost. Discovering information on a mass relay orbiting Pluto, explorers managed to open the Charon Relay and discovered it led to Arcturus. With the help of the fledgling Systems Alliance, humans expanded to other systems, opening any mass relays they could find.

### First Contact

Humans first came to the attention of the galactic community after a brief but intense conflict with the turians, known by humans as the First Contact War, begun in 2157. The conflict began when the turians attacked a human fleet attempting to activate a dormant mass relay (illegal under Council law) and then occupied the human colony of Shanxi.

Led by Admiral Kastanie Drescher, the Second Fleet then launched a massive counter-attack, which caught the turians by surprise and expelled them from Shanxi. The conflict caught the attention of the Citadel Council, which wasted no time brokering a peace, thus introducing humans to the galactic community. As a consequence of the Alliance's swift and decisive action during the First Contact War, the Alliance became the representative and supranational governing body of humanity. Since then, humans have rapidly risen in prominence.

### Invitation to the Galactic Stage

In 2165, humanity was granted an embassy on the Citadel in recognition of their growing power and influence in the galactic community. The timing of this achievement, less than a decade after first contact, caused some friction with other Citadel races who had waited decades for such recognition.

Humanity continued to expand to unclaimed star systems on the edge of Citadel space, which eventually led to competition with the batarians. When the batarians tried and failed to convince the Council to declare the Skyllian Verge "a zone of batarian interest", they closed their embassy and withdrew from Citadel space. Viewing humans as the cause of their fall from grace, batarians frequently came into conflict with human colonies, especially batarian slavers. Tensions between humans and batarians, as of 2182, had persisted for decades.

## Biology

Humans have a fairly robust physiology. Their internal makeup and reproductive processes are typical of most bipedal mammals, and their size and proportions give the appearance of being strong, fast and agile. In comparison to the Council races, humans are roughly physically on par with turians (as a human in or around peak physical condition can overwhelm a similarly fit turian, making them near equals in a hand-to-hand combat situation), and less agile than asari (whom they closely resemble). Humans would appear on average to be stronger than salarians but not as fast, due to the extremely elevated metabolisms of the latter. Like most organic races, humans are also capable of producing biotic individuals. All cases of biotics in humans are the result of pre-natal exposure to element zero, which carries a high risk of medical complications.

Humans can live to about 150 years, and recent medical advances have eradicated almost all known diseases that afflict them. Humans reach physical maturity at approximately eighteen years of age, at which point they have usually finished their academic education and either directly enter the workforce or begin training for a profession.

It has been noted that humans are unusual in the galactic community because they have far greater genetic diversity compared to other species with more peaks and valleys. This makes human genetic material useful in biological experiments, as a control group.

Despite the substantial genetic diversity of humans, certain physical traits have been becoming more rare ever since the 19th and 20th centuries, when the mixing of different Earth ethnicities, due to social progression and acceptance, became more commonplace. To this end, with the merging of genetics, certain traits have declined in frequency. Recessive physical traits like blonde and red hair, as well as blue and green eyes, are even less common in the 22nd century.

## Culture

> "*Diversity is about all of us, and about us having to figure out how to walk through this world together." -* Jacqueline Woodson
>
>

Humans are generally seen to be very intelligent, abnormally ambitious, highly adaptable, individualistic and thus, unpredictable. They have a powerful desire to advance and improve themselves, and do so with such assertion that the normally staid Council races have been taken aback by their restlessness and relentless curiosity.

Earth's economy, while much smaller than any of the Council races, is very powerful relative to their size, and their military prowess is amongst the greatest in the galaxy, despite the fact that only 3% of humans volunteer for the Alliance military, a far smaller proportion than other races. Their ability to engage the turians in the First Contact War demonstrated graphically the potential of human military strength and is therefore a subject of concern for many races, who fear the consequences of another human-turian conflict.

The discovery of the Martian ruins fundamentally united the inhabitants of Earth, resulting in the swift and sudden culmination of the pan-global cultural identity that had been slowly but steadily developing since the 21st century. Upon the foundation of the Systems Alliance, humans began to see themselves as a single, collective group: human as opposed to alien.

Religion was, and to an extent, still is a major part of human culture, despite the fact that society is largely secular by the 22nd century. The discovery of the archives led to a series of commotions among those belonging to fundamentalist faiths, which ultimately resulted in the disintegration or revision of these religious beliefs.

Humans have been emulating and assimilating aspects of culture from each other since the dawn of civilization, and the trend continues well into the present day with the growing prevalence of nonhuman civilizations to examine. People who have taken an obsession with dressing like asari, behaving like asari, and fetishizing other hallmarks of the race have been derisively labeled "bluepies", an insult widely known across human space except on the frontiers.

## Further Lore

### Governments

* Governments of Earth
* Systems Alliance

### History

* Human Colonization Timeline (List of Human planets)