House Davion - Amazon Web Services

HISTORY
INTRODUCTION
It took Humankind some 200 years to evolve from a relatively
primitive, planet bound race to a spacefaring empire of
over a thousand colony worlds. The greatest irony of the Succession
Wars is that, in a mere two centuries of warfare, the
Human Sphere has taken enormous strides backward instead
of forward.
The roots of the five Successor States and dozens of Periphery
states go back to primitive rocketry experiments during
World War II in the 1940s. In the following decades, two victors
of that war, the United States of America and the Union of Soviet
Socialist Republics, competed to see who could explore “outer
space” more quickly. Though these early space probes only carried
explorers about a hundred miles into Terran orbit, these tentative
efforts would one day lead to full-scale colonization.
[EDITOR’S NOTE: It has also been remarked that the end
of Terra’s feasibility as home for the entire Human race began
when the names of nations got longer and longer. At that time,
there was even a country called the People’s Democratic Republic
of South Yemen, but ComStar researchers have been unable
to find its location on any ancient map of Terra.]
In the 21 st century, political alignments on the Terran
homeworld began to shift drastically. After the Second Soviet
Civil War (2011-2014), the Western Alliance (America and Europe)
became the preeminent world power. The Western Alliance’s
highest priority was peaceful scientific research and development
to overcome disease, hunger, overpopulation, and environmental
damage.
Meanwhile, in 2018, one of the greatest scientific breakthroughs
of the ages occurred when two theoretical physicists
named Takayoshi Fuchida and Thomas Kearny found a slight
anomaly in the work on prototype fusion reactors. Extrapolating
from this, they postulated that it was possible for mass, in short
bursts, to exceed the speed of light. Fellow scientists ridiculed
Kearny and Fuchida’s work, and drove them from the profession.
As a result, their groundbreaking discovery would remain
forgotten for almost a century.
Meanwhile, other scientific breakthroughs such as asteroidal
mining, recombinant DNA organisms, and free-floating space
factories (which permitted industrial procedures impossible in
an atmosphere or under gravity) ensured a standard of living
higher than ever before. Without enough food to feed people on
the ground, however, famines became increasingly widespread
among the world’s population.
[EDITOR’S NOTE: Indeed, the most famous artwork of the
21st century may well be Alessandro Mekam’s Threnody, a portrait
of a child dying of hunger as she watches an early holovid.
It is greatly to be regretted that so much technology, even of the
21 st century, has been lost in the Succession Wars.]
A GREAT LEAP
By 2050, Alliance scientists were using the first fusion drive,
developed 24 years earlier, to spearhead the Magellan Program.
Under the auspices of this project, automated probes were sent
to dozens of neighboring star systems to seek out habitable
worlds. The probes discovered three such planets in the Tau Ceti,
Epsilon Eridani, and Epsilon Indi systems. In retrospect, this event
dwarfs even the most important political event of that era, the
replacement of the old Western Alliance with the Terran Alliance,
in 2086.
In 2102, two separate teams of research physicists surprised
the world by simultaneously announcing their findings that Kearny
and Fuchida had been right. It was theoretically possible to transport
mass instantaneously to a spot several light years away if a
sufficient energy field could be generated to do so. The new research
led to the Deimos Project, whose goal was to develop a
working faster-than-light (FTL) hyperpulse drive. The Project was
a success, and by 2108, the Terran Alliance had succeeded in
launching the TAS Pathfinder, the first manned interstellar vessel
using the Kearny-Fuchida FTL drive. The Pathfinders maiden
voyage to Tau Ceti allowed scientists to survey that planet for
future colonization.
A mere eight years later, the first Human colony in space
was officially established on New Earth (Tau Ceti IV) in 2116.