The history of the universe

Thousands of lifebearing worlds have been found, but it seems that what humans would consider "higher" life forms are very rare. And no independently evolved expansionistic technological civilization has ever been contacted; it would seem that the first such civilization to evolve within a galaxy is bound to fill the galaxy. However, some few planets have been found to harbor the remains of technological civilizations which apparently destroyed themselves, and there have been several discoveries of quite bright but nontechnological alien species -- as well as some potential techno-species (even a couple of cases where the aliens seemed to be on their way to a toolmaking culture -- locally developed technologies on a level equivalent to what paleolithic Homo sapiens could show for himself).

Thousands of planets have been terraformed (usually more or less from scratch) to become new homes for humanity -- it is often seen as ethically preferable to avoid settling on worlds that might one day see the evolution of intelligent native life if they're left alone (and anyway, it is mostly easier to establish an entirely new planetary ecosystem than to first have to remove an entire planetary ecosystem and then establish a new one, which is usually the alternative). Millions of habitats have been built with artificial environments, both as O'Neill-type microworlds and on/beneath the surface of hostile worlds. Humanity itself has diversified and is now technically an unknown but large number of different biological species -- genetic engineering has in many cases been used to create variant human species better suited to various marginal environments or various specialized tasks, or just because it was thought that the end result of said engineering would be aesthetically pleasing. "Uplift" projects have been undertaken with both Terran species and true aliens as their subjects; some have been successful (so there are now truly intelligent aliens in the galaxy -- but none have developed without some form of human influence). In fact, many entire *planetary cultures* (not to mention ones on smaller than planetary scale) have been established to various specifications for no other reason than aesthetics. Many more have been established for various religious or other ideological reasons, not least of all for the sake of nostalgia. There have been ersatz Roman Empires, for instance, created upon the surfaces of new worlds, and then left more or less to their own devices. Some such created cultures have even performed more or less as expected, while many more have collapsed, been taken over by technologically superior neighbors, or changed gradually in unexpected ways.

There have been wars and disasters causing mass extermination. In fact, there are probably at least two or three really big interstellar wars raging somewhere within human space at any given time. Entire planetary surfaces have been sterilized, and many billions of humans have suffered violent death. Many planetary societies have been literally bombed back to the stone age; many more to a pseudomedieval level. Many of these have struggled back to space on their own, or been helped back; many have sworn off advanced technology altogether (for various values of "advanced"). Many star systems have, accidentally or deliberately, become isolated from contact with others. There have been cases where large regions have been utterly devastated, leaving perhaps one inhabited star system surviving in the middle of a vast wasteland. There have even been cases where a human culture has bootstrapped itself from such complete ruin that it has taken the development of "modern" archaeology and biology for them to realize they were not natives of their homeworld. And of course, many human cultures have more or less vanished from humanity due to massive self-alteration -- a hint of the Vingean singularity, although not all technology keeps an exponential growth rate indefinitely (sigmoid curves turn up more often). In fact, it's sometimes hard or even impossible to determine whether a given intelligent (tool-using and communicating) creature is "human" in the sense of descending from Terran Homo sapiens, or not. There are cultures where such a bewildering variety of shapes and forms is expected among your friends and neighbors that practically nothing would attract attention. However, many star systems (indeed, entire regions) are populated by "genetically pure" humans, about whom nothing general can be said since even they live in more different types of society than ever existed upon Earth. It is quite common, though, for "pure" humans to fear and/or hate those that are other than "pure" human -- for all the historically known reasons, and then some.

The region where Daufesk lies is pretty much one such area. While some of the worlds in the region do have "non-human" populations (if the word "human" is restricted to members of old-style Homo sapiens), the region is dominated by "pure" H. sap. It is relatively sparsely connected by jumpgates, and a larger proportion than usual of its inhabited worlds are populated by descendants of various idealistic colonists -- it used to be a sort of "dead-end frontier" area, it has suffered at least one massively destructive conflict in the distant past (leaving many terraformed or half- terraformed worlds abandoned, some of which have later been resettled), and now it's a bit of a backwater. It borders unsettled space in several directions, just because nobody has ever bothered to settle further along in those directions. In fact, the "Daufesk" region (called thus by the citizens of the P.S.T.R. of Daufesk, and hardly anyone else) includes within it my own personal interpretation of most of the worlds described in GURPS Space Atlases 1 and 4 (I felt I had to get some use out of those) as well as several dozen other inhabited worlds. There is relatively little contact between worlds in the Daufesk region and the rest of humanity, since the region is sort of weakly connected to the rest of settled space (many jump-gates have been blown up since the region was first settled, and getting to more densely settled space requires that one pass through several "dead" systems).

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