Brief history of the space-faring human race[]
Before I begin, I would like to make clear that no individual fact, figure, or event in this account is necessarily accurate, and the best evidence available is hearsay, corrupted data from ancient memory banks, and supposition. Our history is lost to us, shrouded by war, disaster, and by great distance. Still, such Fragments as your humble author has been able to assemble are presented here to you.
Several thousand years ago (more than two thousand, less than fifty) the human race occupied much of this arm of the milky-way Galaxy. Spreading out exponentially onto colony worlds, separated one from another by great gulfs of space. The region of space known as Vivacitas is far in toward the core of the galaxy, where stars are close together, and matter is plentiful in space, and was surely one of the last areas to be colonized. Travel between colonies took centuries, owing to the truly enormous distances between the stars, and a voyage from one end of Human space to the other could take hundreds, if not thousands of years. And yet humanity flourished. It is known that hibernation was used often, to make the long voyages endurable, but also suspected that the average lifespan of a human being was over a thousand years.
In this age, humanity was all one polity, known as the "Terran Hegemony" Governed from Terra herself, the colonies could send a planetary representative to vote on issues related to them in the grand assembly. The system was imperfect, as a message would take many years to reach terra, even aboard the fastest ship, but it was the best that could be arranged. Small groups were constantly breaking away and rejoining the Hegemony, and many small wars were fought, so humanity in general was only mostly united. To the average citizen, interstellar affairs mattered not a bit.
It was around this time that another interstellar polity contacted ours. In a process taking about a thousand years, a nonhuman race expanded into our region of space. Where they came from, is unknown, as is what they looked like, how they spoke, and much else about them. The documentation compares them often to insects, and occasionally to fungus. The documentation also implies strongly that they were hostile, dispite apparently, requiring nothing that humans posessed. It could be that Humans started the war out of territoriality, or any other cause, but there was a war, the greatest ever seen by humans.
No one knows what weapons were used by the aliens in this war, but we do know what the humans used, thanks to recent archaeological afforts. On their ships, humans used a beam of coherant light known as a laser, which used thermal transfer to apply a small ammount of heat to objects. In addition, rockets and bombs loaded with small ammounts of antimatter were thrown ship to ship. There are no reports of humans attacking aliens in person, or how that might have been accomplished. Human ships generated power by means of Nuclear Fission partical reclamation, and thrust by means of induced fusion not suitable for power generation.
The war was very long. Not only did it take many years to marshall fleets, but intelligence on enemy acitvity was always far out of date. Great were the losses on both sides, although it is also implied that humans suffered on an exchange basis with the aliens, but outnumbered them greatly. Eventually, both sides resorted to wholesale destruction of entire systems, culminating in forcing entire stars to nova. The records indicate that this was enacted on the alien home system, although no information was given to indicate how we knew this, or indeed what the result was. Human losses by this point were also extreme. Terra is believed to be lost, as no official word has EVER reached the colonies that remain, or the remnants of the fleet. Every major staging post, and fleet command headquarters was likewise destroyed, and the systems that served them.
Today humanity is a thousand pockets of civilization, scattered over a thousand light years. We have issues enough at home to prevent us from venturing out into the dark, and the things that come in from other systems keep us here, guarding our families. Once in a great while, some brave soul will travel from one civilized area to another, always with stories of the long journey, and always glad to return to somewhere with people. Lunaris and Solaris may have our issues, may be surrounded by separatists and anti-government factions, but we are a beacon of civilization. One spark of humanity's flame, burning in the endless night.