GALACTIC ENCYCLOPEDIA: HISTORY

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…