Old Core Worlds
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Old Core Worlds |
Ancient, conservative backwaters, quaint and politically irrelevant, home to many rare and anachronistic clades that have long died out everywhere else, the Old Core Worlds were the first outposts of spacefaring humanity, during the heroic age of early interstellar colonization. For about a thousand years, from the middle of the first millennium After Tranquillity to the mid second millennium, they were the hope of humankind, the torch of civilization during the nanoswarm dark ages in SolSys, the first opportunity for not only clades to diverge and evolve on their own (that had happened often enough during the interplanetary period), but for entire cultures and civilizations, and powerful regional polities, some of which even spawned further subcultures. One of the reasons the First Federation was as successful as it was because its superbright human and hyperturing ai administrators were able to skilfully blend the colonies with established society of SolSys, creating a vibrant culture and protocol-based civilization that flourished for some centuries.
But new singularities, new toposophics, and new empires spelled the end of the age of the Old Core Worlds, and by the late second millennium they had become increasingly irrelevant and marginalised. New civilizations bloomed around the emerging gods at Fons Luminis, Aleph Absolute, Djed, and elsewhere, and by the early centuries of the third millennium the Old Core Worlds either joined the new Sephirotic empires, or maintained an uneasy neutrality, while their inhabitants and rulers dreamt nostalgically of earlier centuries where hu and ai still ruled side by side.
Some archailectologians and transapientologists are convinced that the only reason the Old Core Worlds have been allowed to retain their independence to the extent that they have is because they serve as nature reserves, zoos and societums preserving a glimpse of a by-gone age.
This theory however is made more dubious by the fact that almost all the Old Core Worlds are connected to the Nexus, even ancient SolSys itself, and combined, the traffic to and fro amounts to many billions every metric year. Perhaps these crusty old worlds and their ossified and traditionalist clades, entrenched Houses, and incompetent local polities really do serve some higher purpose in the galactic ecology.
But if they do, no-one can agree what it is.
