A
Galactic History…
(what little we Terrans know anyway)
by Brad Wardell, 23rd century historian…
In the beginning…
In the 20th
and 21st centuries, a great deal of fiction was
written about future contact with strange and alien
civilizations. One thing that always came out was that there
were hundreds if not thousands of advanced sentient cultures
throughout the galaxy.
It came as something
of a let down in the early 23rd century when an
unmanned Arcean probe came within communication range of a
satellite we had put in place around the 4th planet
in the Alpha Centauri system. Not that discovering that we
weren’t alone wasn’t exciting, but to find out that instead
of there being thousands of different races of beings in the
galaxy that there might be a bit over a couple dozen total and
less than a dozen that were space faring.
It is, afterall a big
galaxy and humans had great expectations on a galaxy filled to
the rim with life.
What we humans failed
to realize at the time was our good fortune that it was the
Arcean Empire that discovered humans and not the Drengin Empire.
Not that we thought so at the time. The Arceans are a
proud and arrogant race who have shown utter contempt for humans
– at least at the beginning. But they had little desire to
conquer Earth or its “pitiful” Martian colonies.
And it was a good
thing because even in the 23rd century, ships were
unarmed other than navigation lasers. We clung to the naïve
view that any race advanced enough to travel the stars would
have put aside its warlike ways.
And boy were we naïve. It’s amazing how foolish we
were and how lucky we were. We put little investigation into the
Arceans when they asked if they could construct a star gate
between Earth and Mars. Star gates, by the way, used to be the
principle way in which ships could travel great distances
quickly.
Let’s talk briefly
about that since it’s very important to our history as you
probably already know. The speed of light can’t be broken but
as many have speculated, space can be folded provided you
generate enough energy to create the necessary relative
mass. What a star gate did was just that. But don’t get too
excited, star gates weren’t instantaneous travel to distant
parts of the galaxy. A ship didn’t enter one end and suddenly
appear thousands of light years away.
They merely made the trip much less long (a few weeks or
a few months or even hundreds of years in some cases instead of
thousands or millions of years).
Stargates had also
kept the peace in the galaxy for over 35,000 years. I forgot to
mention that but while we humans were still figuring out whether
standing up right was a neat thing or not, the Drengin and
Arcean empires were expanding into the galaxy.
When humans first figured that you should wash your hands
before doing sugery the Drengin and Arceans had figured out how
to eliminate aging and death from natural causes long before.
Both the Drengins and Arceans have incredibly powerful and
destructive ships (at least in comparison to what the human
races was capable of doing). So why no wars? Well, because of
the star gates, you see, both sides of the star gate have to be
operational in order to work. The Arcean home world is only 8
weeks away from the Drengin home world by star gate.
But it’s 92,000 years away through normal space. If the
two were to have gone to war, one side would simply have turned
off their star gate and that would be the end of it.
Star gates weren’t
necessarily forces of good though. Because of their expense, no
corporation could own one. So the governments gained massive
control and imposed massive trade barriers and such. In other
words, the star gates turned out not to help trade but basically
ensure it was a trickle of what it should be.
The humans though have
turned out to be a very unique race in ways we never would have
thought so back long ago. It turns out that we invent and use
technology much faster than other races. The Arceans had nuclear
fission masted nearly 70,000 years ago.
But they didn’t go into space until 50,000 years ago
and progress technologically has gone at a fairly linear rate.
The same is true of the Drengin.
But we humans just got off to a slow start because within
a few hundred years we went from figuring out how to fly to have
star bases.
The Drengin and Arceas
have noticed our rapid progression and both agree that the
reason is because we don’t think of the repercussions of our
technology will have. And given recent events with our dual
discovery of controlled gravity and hyperspace they may be
right. Because these two technologies have destroyed the fragile
peace that has existed for thousands of years.
Why?
Because hyperspace eliminates the need for star gates.
And controlled gravity allows for extended space travel and a
host of other technologies. Not that everyone’s at war yet,
but now war is possible. The hyperspace drive allows individual
ships to travel to other worlds even faster than the star gates
allowed. Of course, this means that interplanetary war is now
again possible. But it also means that interstellar trade is
possible too on a massive scale. It means that diplomacy is now
very important.
Of course, if you
believe the media, you’d think that none of things matter
because at the rate we’re progressing, we’ll be so far
beyond the other races in a short amount of time that they
won’t dare attack us. But I must warn you, this is not only
not the case but we may be on the losing side of a technological
race.
The major races, the
Drengin, the Arceas, and Altarians, the Torians and the Yor all
have massive advantages in their own areas that are not easily
overcome. The Drengin and Arceans may have historically
progressed slowly compared to humans but now that there is
pressure, that’s changing and their infrastructure for
research is massively larger than ours. The Yor are a cybernetic
race who already have some advantages over us in research and
the Altarians, who are very similar to humans research new
technology at almost the same rate as we do.
The Altarians, Yor,
and Torians we don’t know as much about. We do know that the
Torians used to be part of the Drengin Empire but successfully
rebelled. We assumed that the Torians would be natural enemies
of the Drengin but that has not proven the case. Their cultures
are similar enough that even though they had a bloody rebellion
they sometimes agree with the views of the Drengin.
The Yor are a total
mystery to us. They’re a cybernetic race. We have a few
theories on them. One is that some time in their past, on their
particular quest to become immortal (just as we 23rd
century humans are now immortal – i.e. we discovered how to
eliminate aging some time ago and thus live forever barring
violent death or accident) they found a way to transfer
consciousness into machines and did so. But that is just a
theory.
The Altarians are also
a bit of a mystery. They look almost identically to humans. They
aren’t identical but genetically speaking they are too similar
for it to be a coincidence.
Well, I shouldn’t say that because there’s a lot of
argument on the net about whether human-like creatures are the
result of any planet in which mammals become the dominate
species. But I think that’s a strawman argument because
mammals aren’t the dominate species on Altaria, but warm
blooded reptilian type kind of animal is the most common
advanced form with few mammals there. Also, Altaria has no
insects which means that their entire eco system is radically
different than ours. I could go on and on but it’s not an
important thing.
The bottom line is as
of today in 2265 our galaxy seems to be populated with 6
different space faring races. We can now send ships directly to
those races if we want. The biggest obstacle for humans,
however, is that we have not ever been to any of these worlds so
we don’t actually know where they are.
We always used the star gates controlled by the Arceans
or Drengin and were not allowed to bring navigational equipment.
In short, we know that
there are 5 other races, we don’t know where they are or where
their colonies are and we don’t know what exactly they’re
doing. We do know we’re at peace with everyone and we do know
that they know (all of them) where we are located and where all
the inhabitable planets are.
Predictions
I predict that we’re
going to see a colonization race. There are many inhabitable
planets out there. Now that we don’t have to first build a
multi-trillion credit star gate and then send it off to a
distant star system over the span of hundred or thousands of
years, the races are going to be sending ships to those planets
as fast as possible. They’ve
long since sent probes out to see where they are whereas we are
just starting. So we’ll definitely need to get going on that
end.
Secondly, I think
we’re going to see a lot of trade occur now that private
corporations can now trade. I also predict that other
governments will do like we did – license the hyperdrive
technology to private corporations in exchange for a “Cut”
of any trade that occurs.
And finally, sadly, I
suspect we’re going to see warfare. There’s never been an
intergalactic war before for the aforementioned reasons.
But now, there’s nothing stopping a fleet of Drengin
death cruisers from laying waste to some colony or even home
world unless they are stopped by defensive ships.
But only time will
tell if I’m right…