Background information
World War 3- world war 3 erupted in 2020 after more than a decade of economic regression and stagnation. The first shots were an artillery barrage launched by North Korea against South Korea that killed 30 and wounded dozens more. This sparked an invasion of North Korea by the ROK. This inadvertently triggered the second American Civil war, when the federal government, under the Jacobin administration, refused to condone the war. After independent states attempted to support the war, Jacobin ordered the military into those states in order to impose control. This split the military and began the war. The rebels were called neoconfederates in a Whitehouse press release, and the name stuck. The war civil war lasted only six months, but drug in seven countries, and killed almost a million people. In the chaos caused by the war, China invaded Siberia in order to gain vital fuel reserves and space, in order to support their massive population. India invaded China in response to this blatant aggression. Pakistan, which had fallen under a hard-line Islamist regime, used this opportunity to attack India, beginning with a nuclear strike against New Delhi. Iran nuked Israel after an Israeli air strike against Iranian nuclear facilities. War engulfed the Middle East as a result.
After seven years of fighting, and more than a billion casualties, the wars ended. China was defeated by a Russian, American, Indian coalition. Outer and Inner Mongolia were united, Hong Kong and Macao were given independence, and Russia was given Manchuria. North and South Korea were united after Kim Jong-un detonated a nuke in Pyongyang, killing seven million. The Pakistan-Indian war ended after a military coup removed the radical government. And the Middle Eastern conflict ended in a stalemate between Iran, Syria, and Saudi Arabia, and Iraq, Israel, Jordan, and Egypt.
World war 4-after a decade of rebuilding, another world war broke out. This one sparked by a United Nations attempt to create one world government. The attempt was resisted by the powerful American, Russian, Indian alliance called the Troika. Their resistance, sparked resistance in many other countries across the planet, in the form of relatively bloodless revolutions, rebellions, and insurgencies. Unable to govern seven billion people, the UN collapse.
The Martian discovery- five years later, a massive sand storm revealed something as Mars' southern pole. Initially believed to be a strange rock formation, satellite imaging revealed it to be an artificial construct. This discovery sparked a mad rush to get a man on Mars, with every country with a space program launching missions to the red planet. The ultimate winners were the Troika, with a joint mission that discovered the Prothian archives. Within two years, the first FTL jump was attempted. Within two more years, the Charon relay was discovered and the race was on to colonize as much territory as possible.
Colonization-with Earth's population approaching 8 billion, there were no shortage of volunteers to explore the stars. And with the fierce competition between various countries strong, no stone was left unturned. This competition drove humans to colonize many planets that would have been passed over by any other species. With humans building vast underground or underwater cities when the atmosphere was inhospitable, or huge mobile factories, where the sun was too hot. Humans also attempted the most ambitious terraforming attempts in history, with the most famous arguably being the "gas pump" of Venus, where they attempted to thin out Venus' atmosphere in order to cool the planet. During this time, the human population skyrocketed, with tax incentives to have more children. Eventually, the population of Earth alone grew by a billion every five years, only to have a similar number emigrate in the same time.
Over the next 50 years, Human technology advanced at breakneck speed, if at an odd angle compared to other races. The Omni-took was never invented; however, they developed a way to build their own mass relays.
Then came first contact.
