Game History

The history of the New Diasporia starts near the beginning of the twenty third century. The worst fruits of the Progressive Era have started to pass. China has nearly recovered from its century of Communist/Oligarchy Capitalist despotism, whose death blow was the unbalanced male/female population ratio caused by its one-child policy. The destruction of European civilization, which contracepted and aborted itself to oblivion has result in a relatively stable Islamic state in Northern Europe balanced by a Catholic/Orthodox Christian state in the south, in Spain, Italy and Greece and to the east in the Russo-Balkan Confederation. In the New World the Hispanicization of North America has resulted in a stable Christian democratic republic, with a strong minority Mormon population. Africa remained a battle ground between Christian and Muslim.
The triggering event of the great human diaspora was a result of the collaboration of the world renown Jesuit physicist Fr. Borland Barnes and the equally obscure graduate student Joesph Gutierrez.
Man space flight had become extinct in the middle of the twenty-second century, deep in the collapse of the Progressive Era, when even the struggling Russian Republic could no longer afford the cost of sending people into space for no reason other than to say they had. Robots continued to investigate the solar system, but no human had been in space in a generation.
This was a problem for Gutierrez. As a boy he had eaten and slept Asimov, Straczynski and Norton. He studied all of the twentieth century manned space data from both the American and Soviet-Russian programs. He wanted to go into space. Intellectually he knew that he was unlikely to ever fulfill his dream. In his soul he rejected that.
Fr. Borlan Barnes S.J. shared that dream. He was determined to free humanity from the single globe that God had placed them on. Working at Argonne National Labs, while teaching at the University of Chicago, Barnes was attempting to overcome the greatest hurdle to manned space flight, the cost per kilo of lifting mass off of his planet.
His goal required that he solve the greatest mystery of physics, the so-call theory of everything, a unified field theory which would explain why the Standard Model did not work and how relativity and quantum mechanics fit together. This was a mystery that physics had been seeking the answer to for two centuries.
Gutierrez worked for Barnes at Argonne. A brilliant mathematician, Gutierrez was very good at seeing the relationship between the high level mathematics and physical experiments necessary to prove the physics. Even so, he always claimed that the idea for the product of this famous collaboration, the Barnes-Gutierrez hyperspace engine, came from a dream.
The B/G engine's most immediate effect was as a reactionless engine. That is a device that would produce thrust without mass. It did this by reacting with the multidimensional subspace below normal space. Once beyond the gravitational pull of a planet it allowed direct access to subspace itself.
This opened up the stars to mankind. Moreover it was cheap. Cheap in require power and cheap in construction costs. For the price of a private plane anyone could build a star going spacecraft.
As could be imagined the reaction of government was not favorable. But once out of the bottle the genie could not be easily returned.
So started the great human diaspora. In a year humans had reach every star within the solar neighborhood, while governments had barely been able to get a working arrangement in the solar system. Within five years humans were spreading out in a globe 250 light years across. Government was lagging a thousand light years behind. Within a century Humans had traveled to the edges of the galactic arms and beyond, and civilization was far smaller.
Any group, practically, could put together a colony ship and head out for the wilds. Some were dissidents, other just explorers. Some running from the Church, others from governments. Where ever they went they found planets and systems, some dead as space others teaming with life, some alien, some as familiar as an Earthen forest or jungle. What they did not find was intelligent life. Silentium Universi.
The Fermi-Hart paradox asks the question "where is intelligent life?" The B/G engine answered the question quite firmly. Only on Earth. At least until mankind dispersed among the stars.
At the era of the game, the early twenty-fourth century, mankind has had interstellar travel for approximately a century. Known Space can be divided into three great spheres, representing significantly different levels of technology and social interaction. Each of these will be covered in the next posting.