Human Struggle

A bit of lore from my ongoing sci-fi project called Masters of the Future.

What does it mean to be human, and more importantly, how can one not be? At the dawn of time, that is — human time, humanity was a family. The word by which you distinguished members of your own family meant “human”, meant one of us, one like us. Members of other families were something other, alien, dangerous, evil.

But then curiosity, a curiously universal human trait, overwhelmed some members of some families, and compelled them to find out the true nature of the “others”. They sought them out, observed, learned new languages, and talked. Sometimes they discovered others to be different or evil, but no more than people from their own families could become, and overall, not any more often.

Much later a new idea appeared, that the measure of humanity is in how you look or sound. There supposedly was a way of being more bestial than human, and terrible crimes and wars were commited in the name of this demonstrably false assumption, masquerading as revelation and science.

Ultimately, however, and perhaps inevitably, those judged less than human prevailed against their oppressors, first by showing they have all the same human faculties, the same power of spirit, and for a second time, when they didn’t become oppressors of their former oppressors, having learned the lesson themselves.

In the end, all that each individual human appeared to desire above all else, was the freedom to choose their individual identity, or at least to be granted respect for the one given to each human by their family, their city, their state, their church. Same code of life in all of them, yet instilling a drive to differ.

It is perhaps no wonder then that after humankind finally reached hard-fought unity in diversity on their own homeworld, the discovery of faster than light travel shattered it to a million pieces again. If you give everyone freedom to choose, respect for their choice, and then a vast empty galaxy to play with, what is stopping each “family” from establishing their own world?

Old nations bound by history, faith, or language set out first in all directions, the territorial size of each on Earth suddenly meaningless in determining how big of an impact they will make on space. Space is for all human intents and purposes infinite, and teeming with resources that can be turned into life and homes to shelter it.

After each nation of old gained a foothold in some nearby corner of the galaxy, new nations emerged, based on progressive principles, lifestyles or even fashions. At the end of this era, humanity almost lost a common tongue and meaning as a concept. There was no unified communication network, due to the difficulties of sending information in real time over the tremendous span of human controlled space.

And when it takes an information years to cross all civilization from one end to another, it becomes nearly impossible for any single human to visit every place where other humans live, much less influence its development in a meaningful way. Unsurprisingly, it took an existential threat to all sentient life, total war of mindboggling proportions, and godly advances in communication (and all other) technology to unite humanity again, if only in the spirit of universal human freedom and dignity.

The nations that became the first large interstellar empires were mostly those that had the greatest technological affinity, history of invention and discovery, or well educated and highly skilled citizenry. That mattered much more than any initial position of Earthly power, achieved through conventional military might, size of population, financial wealth or even planetbound resources.

The asteroid and comet belts in the Sol system held much more resources than all rocky planets combined, and at the time of the discovery of practical interstellar engines, each state in the United Nations of Earth had an equal claim to these resources. There were literally more resources than what humans of that time could mine in thousands of years, and orbital elevators made space missions affordable even to moderately affluent individuals.

There could have been some conflict over who gets to settle on terraformed Mars or Venus, eventually, but since the FTL travel became possible before the terraforming projects were even close to finished, there was no need for conflict. The first FTL engine had a practical range of about ten to twenty lightyears, which was enough to always make another jump to a neighbouring star, where you can recharge for another jump, if you find no place worth terraforming or colonizing.

By the time the entire local cluster of stars surrounding Sol was mapped, the technology improved by an entire order of magnitude, alowing for jumping between clusters, opening up the infinity of space. War over territory became entirely meaningless, you only needed to select a direction and keep on going long enough. This also meant that the first colonizers didn’t necessarilly get the best systems, unless you count Earth as being best simply because it is the homeworld. In many ways, Earth was quite used up by the time humankind had spread to the stars.

The conflicts that later escalated into planetary or interstellar wars were motivated largely by principles or personal ambition, rather than practical reasons. As the United Nations of Earth, mostly under control by an alliance of Israel, Scandinavia, and German and French speaking nations, struggled to keep humanity under a single leadership, they eventually did prevent any single nation from usurping the local Sol star cluster.

However, as the humanity spread further, united multi-national humanity seized to exist beyond its borders. And since the UNE controlled only a single star cluster, the one in the center of human expansion, it became boxed in from all sides by national empires with no room to grow and cut off from newly emerging nations or those that got to find their new homes later.

The first wave of national empires surrounding the Cradle cluster (as the homeworld cluster came to be known) included the virtually unopposed (or universally opposed, depending on the point view) English speaking Merico (an ironic amalgam of former United States of America and Commonwealth), mutually very competitive Asian empires of Nihon (former Japan and Korea) and Zong (former China and Vietnam), equally opposed Arabic Salaam and colorful Indian Bharagana, and finally, two Slavic empires, also mutually at odds, Czek for western Slavs and Rhus for eastern ones. As much as these directions make any sense in space.

The remaining nations of central and South America, Africa, oceanic islands or other small and remote states moved further away and settled in the next and final wave of expansion, which was ultimately much to their advantage. If you are expanding into space in a sphere, the more removed you are from the center, the more space you have to expand to the sides, while the empires you left behind leave you with smaller space to protect on the border with them than you need to worry about on the border with the frontier of expansion.

The first wave leaves the first empire locked in, the second wave leaves the second empires surrounded from all sides by potential enemies, but if you happen to be expanding in the third wave with no wave to follow, you have the best balance of borderspace that needs defending to openspace into which you are free to expand. That late into the game, you are also not out to prove that you’re better than some other nation you’ve always hated, next to which you would have consequently ended up as an easily irritable neighbour.

You just want to leave all strife and oppression behind you and create a paradise of your own, and since Milky Way was strangely devoid of any other intelligent lifeform, humans could do so in peace. Which is why, in the end, the greatest human empires were built by the last to the table — the Green Communion. It was called the great rennaisance of Africa, the birthplace of humanity now achieving the greatest heights of human civilization.

The nations of South America and other regions did not present a threat to the Green Communion, firstly because they had no major historical quarrel with Africans, and secondly because they never really formed an empire, either settling into isolated system-states or remaining eternal travelers and explorers of the great space frontier, pushing forever forward.

Sad as it is, the incredible achievements of the Green Communion probably caused this age of human history to end in tragedy. Unbeknownst to all humans but one, who was at that time busy stranded in a neighbouring galaxy trying to save it from this very threat, there was a ruthless intelligence hidden beyond the stars, watching for any signs of sentience, so that it can reach in and root it out.

As the humanity was so fragmented at that time, the news of the initial encounter with the Godhand did not even reach the inner empires before the fall of the outer empires had already taken place. That doesn’t mean that all humans (and trans-human species) in the outer empires were already wiped out, only that all interstellar coordination had collapsed. But even so, the situation was already beyond dire. So terrible were the news, in fact, that the inner empires found it hard to believe.

They were better prepared to defend themselves, since the national empires had much more experience with fighting, but because of that, they were also not inclined to cooperate on a scale which would be necessary to face the new threat with at least a remote chance of success. Hoping that the news was exaggerated, the inner empires prepared for war as they were used to it and waited for the new enemy to make a first strike, hopefully against one of their less favourite neighbours and not them.

Much to their surprise, the Godhand struck everywhere around the outer border of the human sphere of influence simultaneously AND with overwhelming force. The remaining inner empires reluctantly united under the leadership of the Cradle, stalling the enemy’s advance as the humanity’s home cluster, safe for the moment, provided support and started devising a radical solution to halt the onslaught, or at least survive it.

If you enjoy my writing, sponsor me via PayPal.