By the way, there's another part of the history up next. Then it's story time.
An excerpt from The Hystoryes of Man, fourth edition, published in NC 12530, taken from the Menhattyn Lybrary.
In a time before space travel was possible, humanity was confined to the Earth, a dirty planet mostly covered by water and a natural, irremovable layer of smog and pollutants. This was the world upon which man was born, and the first in a long series of worlds to be emptied of life and destroyed by man. Earth it was that spawned the most arrogant of races, and Earth it was that ultimately saw to our downfall; cosmic harmony in action.
The New Calendar was formed when the former timetable of annuities, called the ‘Christian’ calendar, a relic from the Age of Religion, became so outdated as to no longer have a single subscriber for anything more than convenience. The Lord of War at the time, a man whose name has been consigned to the annals of oblivion, brought in a new calendar to make things simpler for his own people, making the old form obsolete virtually overnight. The New Calendar became the most common form of dating throughout the human realm, at the time expanding to contain several systems, some now lost, some still remaining somewhere in the void that was once full of sailors on the great empty ocean of space.
Mankind felt it ruled the land, the sea, the sky, and now space, the final frontier. The only thing standing between humanity and total universal domination was time. Time and an unseen foe, coming closer all the time. Possibly the saddest thing about this great enemy of man was that we had created it ourselves, effectively bringing about our own quintimation. Over two hundred billion lives were lost, approximately one-fifth of all human life in the galaxy, life which could so easily have been spared, had humanity been willing to trust itself. The impeccable system of checks and balances that kept power in the hands of those who would most abuse it fulfilled every aspect of itself, maintaining the egotistical plutocratic hyperarchy and its beloved status quo. With such a system in place, bloody revolution and war was almost inevitable. Ultimately, it was the few remaining inhabitants of the Earth that incited the first conflict, ridding themselves of the Terran Diarchy, executing the rulers and paving the way for the rest of the human empire to do the same. If the people of Earth had hoped for a galactic revolution, they would have been most pleased by the results of the next seventy years.
After the fall of Earth to anarchy, the closest colonies followed suit. Mars, Europa, Ceres, Titania and the entire Sirius system all removed their ruling classes, banishing or executing them. Other systems fell to blood-soaked anarchy, killing millions in the process. The great swathe of destruction was not to hit humanity until sixteen years after the end of the last major revolt. Without government, trade fell off, piracy rose dramatically, criminals thrived in worlds without policing, farmers lost their crops and disaster after disaster struck the unregulated planets and satellites. The eventual lack of food, clean water and deterrents against criminality ended the lives of far more than the revolutions could have accounted for, even at the worst estimates. The decline in trade and output from the farming worlds gave rise to mass hunger throughout the human territories, leading many to riot in their search for the simplest of fodder. More and more people were killed, more and more governments were toppled, eventually bringing about the destruction of the fibres of empire; humankind was left far apart on separate worlds, unable to travel between them but for a few hardy vessels and pirates. Desperate citizens fled aboard the illegal craft, seeking out their loved ones, often only to find that they were already dead.
