more stuffes

So, yesterday I wrote a broad swath of history that left us a billion years in the past. The next billion years were an interesting time.
A billion years ago, your ancestors had already worked out the trick of using oxygen to digest each other. They hadn't quite managed the trick of moving about on land yet, and most of not all of them were struggeling with the whole multicellular organisim thing.
A billion years ago, almost all of the lifebearing planets within of the galaxy were in a similar state. Most of the worlds with higher lifeforms had been sterilized by one of the combatants in the great war "just in case."
The Aldoni came back from their extragalactic retreat to find everything they had known dead and more importantly, no sentient specuies to shepherd into maturity. There was also a great big hole in the center of the galaxy where their hyperdrives wouldn't work.
As a race, the Aldoni don't really have an expansionistic drive at all. They picked a nice round number of dead worlds to rebuild (fifty if you were interested) and settled down to wait. Generations were born and died, though some few picked immortality in the form of personas transfered to the Aldoni Worldbanks. Some of them are still there, playing teacher and librarian.

Of course, that's not what I'm here to talk to you about today.

Today I want to start talking about the various intelligent races that are of import to this particular slice of galactic time.

Of most interest to you and me are the members of humanity. Throughout the centuries covered by the timeline, the descendants of Terra have become a bunch garrulous divisive noisy cantankerous mean lot. They are also capable of over coming all of that to make some really wondrous advances and leave spectacular monuments to why one shouldn’t just destroy all of the sentient life forms in the galaxy. Pretty much the same as they are today, but on a bigger scale. Also, you may want to notice that we are not unique in those attributes. Pretty much anybody who has survived a couple billion years of undirected evolution and formed a group society is going to need those traits. That’s about all I have to say about them today. You know what a human is. I’m assuming that you belong to the club.

I’ve already mentioned the Aldoni. They are watchers and guides. They have a tendency to try to be puppet masters as well. This has gotten them in a little trouble from time to time and eventually lead to the end of their position as the most powerful race in the galaxy. That is what they were designed for though, so it is all good. They haven’t changed much in the billions of years since they were created. After all, they didn’t go through the whole genetic evolution lottery and came pre-equipped with the desire and the tools maintain stasis. It also helps that the majority of Aldoni that are born are born not from sexual coupling but computer aided design. They have an incredible suite of skills and talents, a fine control of their body systems that is not present in any of the evolved races, and the ability to exist in any one of dozens of physical forms. They are also not very creative, at least technologically. There is no general physical description of an Aldoni. If they are incapable of reforming their body into a given shape through an extended act of will, they have the biotech to do so artificially.

Next on the list are the Sarthaki. They are the second most important race in humanity’s early history. They evolved on a heavy water world circling close to a G8 star. With a surface gravity 1.2 times that of Earth and an atmosphere rather a bit denser than ours, their homeworld is a wet hot place. It has about three times the surface area, but less than half of the land, and most of that is in a belt of mini continents and large islands straddling the equator. It also has a ring system that was created by two retrograde satellites passing within their world’s Roch’s limit. The Sarthaki themselves are descended from a smallish pack-hunting arboreal reptiloid. They tend toward aggression and their governments tend to be small. Their rings formed relatively recently. The first one did so some 45 million years ago. The second did during their early nuclear age. The devastation almost knocked them back to the Bronze Age. The planet’s ecosphere was badly damaged by repeated debris impacts as the moon fell apart. This provided an impetus for the Sarthaki to form a single world government in order to best use their resources to reverse the damage. Two hundred Terran years after the near collapse of their ecosphere, they had a thriving warm planet again. Four hundred years and they had colonies around other stars. This was about three thousand years before we made it into space. They did not lose any of their territorial instinct or their aggressiveness, and when humanity expanded out of the 20 light year radius “protected zone” mandated by the Aldoni, the Sarthaki wasted no time starting the first of Humanity’s interstellar wars. They won, though they were stopped far short of Terra. Later wars with humanity did not go so well for them which forced them into a grudging respect that lead to them becoming some of Humanity’s closest allies during the Horde Wars.

Tomorrow I’ll talk about the Malar and their cousins the Mabalan. I’m off to do some math to design them a planet.