In places where it is still taught, all human history before the industrial revolution is condensed as a savage and barbaric time, primarily due to the teachings of greater polities that would appear later. The cultures, struggles, and philosophies of that time are seen on the same level as hunter-gatherers and neolithic tribes. Try as they might to distance themselves from this time, its dim influence can still be felt, even if scarce few could know to trace their ways of life and thinking to this primordial source.

But in time, true order emerged. The first machines were created, and with it civilization as the peoples of today understand it. Each new innovation spurred the next, and by the time of the world-wide network humanity had become truly enlightened, or so it is claimed. As these connections grew, the once-separate nations of the world began to entangle in webs of trade, intrigue, and proxy warfare, for even in this golden age there was no truly peace. Even as the Homeworld sent its first colonists into the solar system and the orbital habitats of the void between the planets, it brought its old feuds with it.

Though these colonies were perilous frontiers, countless people tried to flee to them to escape what their home was becoming. Though climate change, civil wars, fuel depletion, financial depressions, water shortages, and the rise of countless extremist movements, the world went through a period of lethal imbalance cascaded beyond control, collapsing the old order. But for some, this was an opportunity. The wealthiest individuals of the era pooled their resources into securing networked city-states that, through a monopoly on advanced technologies and quality of life, grew to dominate much of the world. When it consolidated into a proper political entity, it set about subduing or annexing the rest of the planet, forming the core of what would become the Solar Empire.

Rare scraps of corrupted data remain of this period. Of the people, the nations, the histories, of the landmasses which hosted them. All long gone now. The Solar Empire yolked humanity to its very genes, and re-wrote them in its image; body and mind. Nothing of the past remains, or if it does, it is so far gone as to be irrelevant.