A Brief History of the Somewhat Distant Future

In Earth years it’s somewhere around 3,176 CE and humans are spread out in colonies, largely clustered in the Orion Spur, but also dotted in a number of places around the Milky Way.

Humans continued their expansion and exploration of their solar system, colonizing Mars and slowly developing terraforming technologies, both born from the innate human curiosity and desire for exploration and out of necessity.  Earth was crowded and fading, unable to sustain the mass of teeming human life. We can gloss over the strengthening of the United Nations, and a number of other catastrophic events in human history, before we get to the major breakthrough.

The discovery of faster than light travel, in 2581 CE, the ability to reach distant solar systems and earth like worlds in less than a life time.  This is called ‘Threading’, in technobabble speak it is the navigation of a subspace dimension in which time and distance are much more fluid to essentially locate the shortest distance between two points. Ships are described as gathering the fabric of subspace to find the shortest path. Ships require sentient pilots to successfully Thread subspace, though a sentient AI seems to be equally capable of this navigation. The possibilities of subspace travel are so complex that there is some weird luck and intuition that happens to make it work, computers just get overwhelmed and short circuit.

Since the discovery of threading (or invention, talk to a philosopher about the difference). Humans branched out into the galaxy and first contact was made. The first steps into inter species communication were rocky, meeting with the Anguilin and fighting over who got to terraform a planet. There were a number of skirmishes and conflicts, for example things did not go well on a planet where the Iratos decimated early colonists and support troops. It’s a big galaxy and over the period of about 100 years we made contact and established relationships with four major species: the Anguilin, Iratos, Saleer and Betids.

There are many more than 4 species in the galaxy, inhabiting a vast number of worlds that can sustain humanoid life. There are remnants of a number of long disappeared races, whose fates are unknown, perhaps they discovered FTL travel in a much younger galaxy.  There are worlds who have not reached the technological maturity for extended space travel, and worlds that contain life so beyond the human experience it remains unknowable. The five major races in the galaxy represent the dominant technological powers, and those that encountered each other at roughly the same time.

In an attempt to bring order, and sow the seeds of peace these groups and their representative governments formed the ICA (Intragalactic Civilizations Alliance), which has grown to be the central galactic government, with its own standing defense force, though member civilizations retain internal autonomy.

These races clustered in three major arms of the galaxy, and established the assembly of ICA near the core of milky way, on the Sagittarius Arm of the Milky Way.

The Sagittarius and Perseus Arms contain the core of known galactic civilization in many ways, it is space that is comparatively safe and protected, with increased Guardian presence and ICA regulation enforcement.  While the Centaurus and Norma arms are the frontier, the edges of civilization and beyond.

1. ↑ The definitions of the latin verb *invenire* are: find, discover, come upon. So, same difference? Disclaimer: the author of this note is no philosopher.