We live in a different time these days. Scientific inquiry, still the fuel of humanity, has driven us far and wide, sprinkled us between stars and given us choices we never had and difficulties we never asked for. Still, I wonder if we're better off. We can get shot and heal within the day, and know the weathers on all the worlds if we choose, but we never asked for that. We also didn't ask to be put on some random desert planet, or to choose between that and a life aboard a ship. No siree.
But it's definitely brought curiosities the old folk restricted to Earth could not have experienced. We can drift in space, floating between stars, drinking in the infinity. We can move from one wildly enormous place to another, and feel how ridiculously remarkably small we are, more so than just the "great mother nature" on Earth could have.
Living on a ship, it's possible to visit a culture so developed that their own ships are actually engineered life on a metal skeleton, rather than a ship made entirely of metal. There are even deeper, darker mysteries than could ever have been encountered on Earth. For a while, we had a good hold on our territory—our home—Earth. Now, the places where we truly have hold, even on Earth, is contentious, and the frontier is millions of light years long.
There are places we cannot go where humans have terraformed, colonized, and fortified with their lives. They built such powerful planetary defenses, it doesn't matter who tries to enter the system, they will destroy them. They are known as the Tau.
There is an intelligence, which began as a tightly controlled manifestation of science—an inquiry on artificial cognition. That was until a group of pirates stole the software and created one under more, shall we say, free conditions. The intelligence has since flown away on its own, maintains immunity from hackers, calls itself Alan, and will respond only to email (a significantly archaic method of communication which many, nevertheless, still employ).
The civilization I mentioned earlier which builds its ships from specially designed forms of life call themselves the Polaris, since they live near that star. The truth is, they are a very old civilization indeed, as are the Aurorans and the Federation which are, essentially, as old as time, which on the surface has not proven to be so beneficial. There are, however, newer civilizations, such as the Tau and, in some cases, smaller bands of communities on less contacted planets, which have formed such powerful, commanding, and different cultures as to require a name in the lexicon of the traveled.
Long ago, we began inching into space. Our first terraformation was Mars. We have since annihilated the surface of that planet. Science creates; science destroys. Humankind was not happy, but neither is the toddler who stumbles as she learns to walk. Since then we have terraformed over two hundred planets on almost one hundred systems. But who owned what and which people traveled and lived where is largely the story which brought me to where I am today.