Humans have pretty much always held the stars above them in a special place in their hearts. The earliest cave paintings depicting constellations are dated to around -100,000 BinCal, and nearly every culture has some ancient stellar myth.
The Obelisk of the Planets is the oldest recognized planetological document. A striking black monolith on a hilltop in the humid forests of upper Piprima, inscribed with a ptolemaic-like model of the motion of the three ‘inferior planets’, which it names as Dee, Daa and Gort and assigns mythical personalities to. It also postulates a model for the phases of the moon which turned out to be surprisingly accurate.
The Tammarong civilization also contributed to planetary traditions. They rightly guessed that Theshu was the largest planet, and named it after their deity of dreams and fertility. They saw Thesti as a companion to Theshu, so they named it after their healer deity. The names stuck, and are still used to this day.
Why do so many humans live in space? What makes the magical epoch magical? What is the meaning of life? Perhaps some of these questions will be partly answered here, probably not tho.
From about four million to twenty-two million seconds into the digital epoch, humans began conjuring very large explosions of supernatural origin (“yeet magic”) and using them to leave the solar system. It was not, at the time, clear to anyone why they were doing this - all actions were tangled with a haze of fear-saturated politics - and it is still not very clear despite much study. This process of moving towards the stars is called the stellar compulsion.
Here are the key events and dates with respect to Earth in the stellar compulsion:
The leading theory for the cause of the compulsion is that human passion is a sort of field relating the behaviors of consciousnesses (loosely analogous to mass in a gravitational field or charge in an electric field) and that some sort of wave in this field propagated outward from Earth around this time. The field theory of consciousness is itself widely disputed, however.
Building dozens of star-ships took a significant social and material toll on humanity. The decisions the PHEC had made regarding who to send to space drew criticism from myriad groups. Though the supply-chains for building star-ships had been distributed as widely as possible, there were still severe and disproportionate negative impacts. Environmental concerns became more and more pressing on Earth, and social orders had to reshape to respond. Regional wars broke out, some large states collapsed, and the mages who powered the star-ships disappeared mysteriously -but it seemed they left behind one last boon: a portal to Hell. This was not actually the only influx of clean, plentiful energy - in fact, it was just one of three vast sources that powered a recovering planet’s society.
Collective identities were finally becoming politically meaningful. Nation-states, collective-states, organized labor groups and corporations supplanted nobles’ power the world over.
Through all the upheavals and identity crises, a new kind of unity was emerging.
The starships were assembled and launched from the Moon, which required building a lot of infrastructure there. By the final launch, over a million people from dozens of nations were permanent inhabitants of Earth’s natural satellite. As more and more nations cut their funding for space programs, their lunar contingents by and large opted to become sovereign. Eventually, all lunar people were functionally independent from earth states.
So began the golden age of the United Federative Sovereign Realms and Republics of the Moon (a cumbersome name that reflects the disparate nature and complex relations of lunar society at the time of its founding), a period where uniquely unearthly art and culture proliferated, where a deep understanding of lunar science was formed, and in which infrastructure that would ultimately become critical to sustaining humanity in space sprung up on and around the moon.
This caused a unique cultural movement on Earth: the widespread emergence of conspiracy theory as a religious faith. Many nations did not want to accept that there could be a civilization so much more advanced than theirs, so they secretly spread propaganda that the Lunar civilization either didn’t exist, or was secretly a dystopia. While only a few states openly espoused these ideas, they gained a lot of cultural traction. Hundreds of thousands of people all across Earth attended “truth meetings” where they denounced Lunar media and canonized a long series of “revelations” about the motives of the “moon hoax”. Most earthlings, however, were content to watch the low-gravity lunar and space sports broadcasts, and they made their own cultural divisions around their favorite teams.
A series of advancements in food synthesis, and the foundation of “pan-human strategic biochemical reserves” on the Moon storing the “bottleneck chemicals” in these processes. Needless to say, the name “pan-human” was somewhere between aspirational and downright propaganda, as access to this resource became a means of Lunar hegemony as much as it was an empowerment of new worlds.
Lunar civilization made most of the space progress during this period, establishing the first lasting outposts in the inner system and asteroid belt. This means that culturally, the Moon has more in common with the rest of the solar system than with earth. Although Earth nations have since embarked on colonization efforts, the foundations of the biggest solar system civilizations are derivatives and adaptations of Lunar civilization.
As the Asteroid Belt settlements grew from small outposts to burgeoning societies of their own, Lunar society became more comfortable, sedentary and regulated. The belt was seen as a place of opportunity, and so tended to attract the most egomaniacal people from the Moon.
The insular nature of asteroids lent itself to the proliferation of grandiose monarchies, feudal societies and empires, which were unsurprisingly prone to conflict. A mining base would occasionally throw a rock at a hostile ship, and a few cargo ships were outfitted with missiles as a deterrent, but when the asteroid Vesk was found to be made of precious metals, speculative squabbling reached a new level. Over the next gigasecond or so, a series of skirmishes known as the First Belt War occurred among a few dozen of the belt polities. Stations and mineral rights changed hands rapidly, alliances shifted frequently, etc. Ultimately, it turned out Vesk was too far out for shipping raw precious metals sunward to be profitable, making the stakes of the conflict turn out to be a lot lower than everyone had thought. The First Belt War fizzled out gradually.
Photon sailing ships really began to take off between the Moon and the Inner System, enabling the construction of the famed Cloud Cities of Gort, Crawlers of Daa, and solar foundries of Dee.
The rise of the Space Rats’ Guild transformed commerce and politics in the Belt. Superintelligent rats had been sought-after ship hands for years, but it wasn’t until gigasecond 9.5 or so that they gained any collective representation.
The first outposts around the outer planets became autonomous societies in their own right, with vigorous art, folklore and culture movements in their largest hubs seeking to differentiate themselves from Lunar and Asteroid civilization in every way possible, creating societies that would seem alien and strange to every other human civilization.
Whereas nations had previously exerted indirect control over political entities off earth through monetary aid and investments, they could now interact directly. Unsurprisingly, this started some wars. The earthlings, with vast capital but scant launch vehicle capacity at their disposal, innovated space warfare by necessity: Whereas Moonicipal and Translunar spacecraft were operated by crews of a dozen or more people, Earthlings, though clever combinations of genetic engineering, miniaturized robotic repair systems, and life support automation, were able to operate comparable ships with only one or two crewmembers.
A brief spate of spacecraft engagements called the Second Belt War led to the transfer of several asteroid and dwarf-planetary stations to the control of Earth nations, most notably Ullane, Tiradelfa, and Great Zod. The Second Belt War was not itself hugely destructive, but its knock-on effects further out in the system continued for gigaseconds in a vague, slow-moving conflict known as the voidwar.
The new earthlings were alien to those then endemic to space. Earthling space pilots were genetically modified and adapted for the task, with bulbous, EM-sensitive eyes, leathery skin, short stature and the ability to plug into computer interfaces. Many of the earthling political and business elite were cosmetically GM’d, with glowing skin or multiple eyes on enlarged heads or grotesquely long fingers. Many of the ordinary earthlings had four arms or extra ears or facial features shaped like those of no human ever seen before. Stranger still, some among them were not of hominid descent at all - they were orcs and hammerheads, entirely new sapient beings the spacefolk had never seen in person, only heard tell of. Humans of space had coexisted with - and even depended on - sapient rats for a long time, but this was a culture shock nonetheless.
Large earth nations seizing their own asteroid territories led to greater consolidation of inter-asteroidal factions. While before nobles had presided over small handfuls of rocks, there now arose federations spanning scores if not hundreds of the tiny worlds, maintaining deterrent forces and overseeing construction projects larger than anything before. Most notably, the entirety of Shoy and Thellei was unified from forty different feudal domains into a single collective-state.
Moonicipal sovereignty was cemented more than ever by the Second Belt War. The Moonicipal Space Corps had a closer relationship with the Space Rats’ Guild than any other faction, allowing them to maneuver and supply massive space stations that won battles with the power of sheer scale. All the innovation on Earth doesn’t mean much when your ship can be hit by ten guided slugs the size of refrigerators from megameters away.
But let’s not focus too much on the wars: greater things were achieved when old and new people worked together. New bioengineering techniques and biochemicals from Earth, coupled with the good old fashioned mechatronic know-how of the Belt, produced wonders that would be renowned for many gigaseconds to come!
The terraforming of Entoormedon began a generation after the second belt war, though it would take many generations to complete. Comets were crashed into the dwarf planet’s surface, greenhouse gasses were cracked from its rocks at mind-boggling scale, engineered lichens cultivated the growing atmosphere into something almost breathable, and among it all vast garden domes fed an ever-growing population and bred new strains of crops and trees and creatures to flourish in this paradise to be.
It was in this period that the Heavenly Gardens were constructed. Intended as a less “earthbound” answer to Entoormedon
The Sky-Orc Exodus to Gort was one of the last defining events of the Earthling Space Renaissance. Tens of thousands of a sect of orcs who believed that their life on the surface of earth was a curse and that they would one day return to the skies of a new earth departed en masse to ornate new cloud cities in the upper atmosphere of Gort.
As the Earthlings re-entered the central solar system and created a maelstrom of cultural change, the settlers around the giant planets Theshu and Thesti were forging an ever-more-independent culture of their own. Technological advances enabled construction projects previously only dreamt of - the artificial magnetosphere of Reethar, the vast spaceport of Telbitzi, the terraforming of Telbi, and the underground cities of Sebzevaan, to name only a few!
Leaps and bounds were made in the field of cybernetics around this time. With just a few surgeries, a human could now talk directly to a computer, or control extra arms, or transplant their brain into a spaceship - and no mucking around in genes required! Well, maybe a little. Thanks to these advances, spacecraft with human brains began flying themselves around the Theshu system, and the first iceworms moved into the rings of Thesti.
Unique art movements were seen as vital acts of cultural sovereignty - especially around Thesti where there wasn’t quite as much tech or organization as there was around Theshu. Sintering sculpture was taken to such heights that it became synonymous with Thesti. Odes to the motions of the moons proliferated (especially among brain-ships), including to alignments and conjunctions and perturbations that wouldn’t happen until hundreds of years after the poems were written. ‘Scraper Songs’ became a widespread form of folk art among the rugged spacefarers who traversed the rings of Thesti in search of strange and valuable rocks. Chamber music of old Earthling empires was revived and reimagined for the courtrooms of the wandering palace-ship Arravesh.
The gas giants have always been wonderlands of planetary science, but discoveries in this era were unlike any before. The almost lifelike filaments of Thesti’s moon Beele yielded strange new insights and raised countless new questions. Proliferation of data collection on Theshu’s moon Iscu provided a wealth of information on the rare occurrence of a spherical body being pulled apart by gravity. Atmospheric probes brought back readings from further inside the gas giants than ever before, unlocking secrets of these vast worlds but mostly just finding more things to be confused about.
The population of the gas giants grew mostly by birth, but there was a significant amount of immigration as well, mostly from the belt. The gas giants became a refuge to many a beltling or moonling reactionary who wished they had never seen an earthling.
You thought the gas giants were weird? wait till you hear about the outer planets!!
Posthumanist neo-feudalism flourished on the moons of Ashta, where cyborg kings and fiefs ruled over peasant farmers and artisans.
The discovery of life endemic to Essenai was a big deal!
As cultures and technologies of Earth and Moon intertwined in a synergy of savvy, mortal beings began to undertake perhaps the greatest act of hubris imaginable: living on the Sun!
The mineral resources of Dee were transformed on a scale hitherto unseen to create a Dyson Swarm - thousands of heliostatic platforms that essentially float on photon pressure [IS THIS FEASIBLE?] and beam vast amounts of solar energy to collecting stations
Voyager Penelope arrived at the Solar system in [YEAR], introducing two societies which had become wholly alien to one another. I need to flesh out everything about both Earth and Linuria before I can tell how that goes.
world ship! planetoid with a giant fucking engine and a mini-sun orbiting it, traverses vast distances across space over hundreds of years