Human(s)

Humanity, the conquerors of Terra and the Sol system, are the third most influential and fourth most common species in the modern galaxy. Today, they are controlled by the Terran Colonial Republics and its Parliament capitaled out of New York City, where the former headquarters of the United Nations was located.

Biology
With an average height-weight combination at roughly 1.7m and 80kg, humans are stout, heavier sapient creatures with a sturdy frame and powerful bodies. Eyes capable of viewing 380nm to 750nm makes humans the average among Galactic species, as does their audio range (20Hz to 20kHz) which places a human subject in the forefront of xenobiology as a comparative from which all new species are judged from. Before their entry into Galactic society in 2157 CE, the  Astelli people were the basic lifeform from which all others were viewed, but thanks to the much more sturdy and versatile body of the human, the Astelli were soon placed on the backburner.

Human skin pigmentation ranges greatly due to the exposure to multiple light sources on Earth, Mars, and other planets that are colonized by humans, but the most common human skin pigmentation is typically olive in color. Highly active nervous systems act as the most important part in a human’s sensory awareness. Touch, sight, and sound all react together as a way to allow humans to react quickly to changing environments. Visual memory is strong, though the most trustworthy of human memories is their Haptic memory systems, unlike Citinians or Isonians  which rely heavily on Iconic and Echoic memory respectively.

Culture
The most dominant culture on Earth and indeed humanity as a whole in the modern era, is that of the "Unified Front". Humans today are typically very species-centric, viewing the rest of the Galaxy as a whole as something that should be defended against. Though they do not openly seek hostilities with any civilization they do openly, they do have a very active military. Expanding their picketting lines, readying their civilians to defend the colonies, and openly disliking large swaves of alien races, humans are sometimes seen as a blight on the Galaxy. Languages of the most dominant nation-states that still remain on Earth are spoken across the Republic, though the lingua franca is a divided front between the ten most common languages of the human species:
 * 1) Mandarin Chinese
 * 2) English
 * 3) Hindi
 * 4) Spanish
 * 5) Russian
 * 6) Arabic
 * 7) Portuguese
 * 8) German
 * 9) French
 * 10) Vietnamese

Religion among humans is rare after the discovery of alien species, and so, most humans today are very scientifically aware. That being said, the average intelligence quotient (IQ) has risen over the past 400 years as a Galactic Species from 124 to 151 making humans the fourth most intelligent species on average in the entire Milky Way.

Prehistory
Genetic measurements indicate that the ape lineage which would lead to Homo sapiens diverged from the lineage that would lead to chimpanzees (the closest living relative of modern humans) around five million years ago. It is thought that the Australopithecine genus which were likely the first apes to walk upright, eventually gave rise to genus Homo. Anatomically modern humans arose in Africa about 200,000 years ago, and reached behavioral modernity about 50,000 years ago. Modern humans spread rapidly from Africa into the frost-free zones of Europe and Asia around 60,000 years ago. The rapid expansion of humankind to North America and Oceania took place at the climax of the most recent Ice Age, when temperate regions of today were extremely inhospitable. Yet, humans had colonized nearly all the ice-free parts of the globe by the end of the Ice Age, some 12,000 years ago. Other hominids such as Homo erectus had been using simple wood and stone tools for millennia, but as time progressed, tools became far more refined and complex.

At some point, humans began using fire for heat and cooking. They also developed language in the Palaeolithic period and a conceptual repertoire that included systematic burial of the dead and adornment of the living. Early artistic expression can be found in the form of cave paintings and sculptures made from wood and bone. During this period, all humans lived as hunter-gatherers, and were generally nomadic.

The Neolithic Revolution, beginning about 8,000 BCE, saw the development of agriculture, which drastically changed the human lifestyle. Farming permitted far denser populations, and they, in time, organized into states. Agriculture also created food surpluses that could support people not directly engaged in food production. The development of agriculture permitted the creation of the first cities. These were centers of trade, manufacturing and political power with nearly no agricultural production of their own. Cities established a symbiosis with their surrounding country-sides, absorbing agricultural products and providing, in return, manufactured goods and varying degrees of military control and protection.

Early civilizations arose first in lower Mesopotamia (3500 BCE), followed by Egyptian civilization along the Nile (3300 BCE) and the Harappan civilization in the Indus Valley (in present-day Pakistan; 3300 BCE). These societies developed a number of unifying characteristics, including a central government, a complex economic and social structure, sophisticated language and writing systems, and distinct cultures and religions. Writing was another pivotal development in human history, as it made the administration of cities and expression of ideas far easier. As complex civilizations arose, so did complex religions, and the first of their kind apparently originated during this period. Inanimate entities such as Sol, Luna, Earth, sky, and sea were often deified. Shrines developed, which evolved into temple establishments, complete with a complex hierarchy of priests and priestesses and other functionaries. Typical of the Neolithic was a tendency to worship anthropomorphic deities. Among the earliest surviving written religious scriptures are the Egyptian Pyramid Texts, the oldest of which date to between 2400 and 2300 BCE.

Antiquity
​The Bronze Age, for some parts of the world, describes effectively the early history of civilization. During this era the most fertile areas of the world saw city states along with the first actual civilizations develop. These were concentrated in fertile river valleys: the Tigris and Euphrates in Mesopotamia, the Nile in Egypt, the Indus in the Indian subcontinent, and the Yangtze and Yellow River in China. Sumer, located in Mesopotamia, is the first known complex civilization, developing the first city-states in the 4th millennium BCE. It was in these cities that the earliest known form of human writing, cuneiform script, appeared circa 3000 BCE. Written on clay tablets, on which symbols were drawn with a blunt reed used as a stylus, cuneiform made the administration of a large state far easier. Transport was facilitated by waterways—by rivers and seas. The Mediterranean Sea, at the juncture of three continents, fostered the projection of military power and the exchange of goods, ideas and inventions. This era also saw new land technologies, such as horse-based cavalry and chariots; these technologies allowed armies to move faster.

These developments led to the rise of empires. Such extensive civilizations brought peace and stability over wider areas. The first empire, controlling a large territory and many cities, developed in Egypt with the unification of Lower and Upper Egypt circa 3100 BCE. Over the next millennia, other river valleys would see monarchical empires rise to power. In the 24th century BCE, the Akkadian Empire arose in Mesopotamia; and circa 2200 BCE the Xia Dynasty arose in China. As complex civilizations arose in the Eastern Hemisphere, most indigenous societies in the Americas remained relatively simple for some time, fragmented into diverse regional cultures. During the Formative stage in Mesoamerica, (about 1500 BCE to 500 CE), more complex and centralized civilizations began to develop, mostly in what is now Mexico, Central America, and Peru. They include civilizations such as the Olmec, Maya, Zapotec, Moche, and Nazca. They developed agriculture as well; growing maize and other crops unique to the Americas, and creating a distinct culture and religion. These ancient indigenous societies would be greatly affected by European contact during the early modern period.

Beginning in the 8th century BCE, the so-called "Axial Age" saw a set of transformative religious and philosophical ideas develop, mostly independently, in many different locations. During the 6th century BCE, Chinese Confucianism, Indian Buddhism and Jainism, and Jewish Monotheism all developed. In the 5th century BCE Socrates and Plato made significant advances in the development of Ancient Greek philosophy. In the east, three schools of thought were to dominate Chinese thinking until the modern day. These were Taoism, Legalism and Confucianism. The Confucian tradition, which would attain dominance, looked for political morality not to the force of law but to the power and example of tradition. Confucianism would later spread into the Korean peninsula and toward Japan. In the west, the Greek philosophical tradition, represented by Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, was diffused throughout Europe and the Middle East in the 4th century BCE by the conquests of Alexander III of Macedon, more commonly known as Alexander the Great.

Posclassical Era
The Postclassical Era is named for the more Eurocentric era of "Classical Antiquity" but "the Postclassical Era" refers to a more global outline. The era is commonly dated from the fall of the Western Roman Empire in the 5th century. The Western Roman Empire fragmented into numerous separate kingdoms, many of which would be later confederated under the Holy Roman Empire. The Eastern Roman, or Byzantine Empire survived until late in the Middle Ages. The Postclassical period also corresponds to the Islamic conquests, subsequent Islamic golden age, and commencement and expansion of the Arab slave trade, followed by the Mongol invasions in the Middle East and Central Asia.

The history of Islam concerns the Islamic religion and its adherents, known as Muslims. "Muslim" is an Arabic word meaning "one who submits to God." Muslims and their religion have greatly impacted the political, economic, and military history of the Old World, especially the Middle East, where its roots lie. From their center on the Arabian Peninsula, Muslims began their expansion during the early Middle Ages. By 750CE, they came to conquer most of the Middle East, North Africa, and parts of Europe, ushering in an era of learning, science, and invention known as the Islamic Golden Age. The knowledge and skills of the ancient Middle East, of Greece, and of Persia were preserved in the Middle Ages by Muslims, who also added new and important innovations from outside, such as the manufacture of paper from China and decimal positional numbering from India. Much of this learning and development can be linked to geography. Even prior to Islam's presence the city of Mecca had served as a center of trade in Arabia, and the prophet Muhammad himself was a merchant. With the new Islamic tradition of the hajj, the pilgrimage to Mecca, the city became even more a center for exchanging goods and ideas. The influence held by Muslim merchants over African-Arabian and Arabian-Asian trade routes was tremendous. As a result, Islamic civilization grew and expanded on the basis of its merchant economy, in contrast to the Europeans, Indians, and Chinese who based their societies on an agricultural landholding nobility.

Europe during the Early Middle Ages was characterized by depopulation, deurbanization, and barbarian invasion, all of which had begun in Late Antiquity. The barbarian invaders formed their own new kingdoms in the remains of the Western Roman Empire. In the 7th century, North Africa and the Middle East, once part of the eastern empire, became part of the Caliphate after conquest by Muhammad's successors. Although there were substantial changes in society and political structures, the break was not as extreme as once put forth by historians, with most of the new kingdoms incorporating as many of the existing Roman institutions as they could. Christianity expanded in Western Europe and monasteries were founded. In the 7th and 8th centuries the Franks, under the Carolingian dynasty, established an empire covering much of Western Europe; it lasted until the 9th century, when it succumbed to pressure from new invaders – the Vikings, Magyars, and Saracens.

During the High Middle Ages, which began after 1000, the population of Europe increased greatly as new technological and agricultural innovations allowed trade to flourish and crop yields to increase. Manorialism – the organization of peasants into villages that owed rents and labor service to nobles – and feudalism – a political structure whereby knights and lower-status nobles owed military service to their overlords in return for the right to rents from lands and manors – were two of the ways of organizing medieval society that developed during the High Middle Ages. Kingdoms became more centralized after the decentralizing effects of the breakup of the Carolingian Empire. The Crusades, which were first preached in 1095, were an attempt by western Christians to regain control of the Holy Land from the Muslims, and succeeded long enough to establish some Christian states in the Near East. Intellectual life was marked by scholasticism and the founding of universities, while the building of Gothic cathedrals was one of the outstanding artistic achievements of the age.

The Late Middle Ages were marked by a number of difficulties and calamities. Famine, plague and war decimated the population of Western Europe. The Black Death alone killed approximately a third of the population between 1347 and 1350. It was one of the deadliest pandemics in human history. Starting in Asia, the disease reached Mediterranean and Western Europe during the late 1340s, and killed tens of millions of Europeans in six years; between a third and a half of the population.

Modern Era
During this period, European powers came to dominate most of the world. One theory of why that happened holds that Europe's geography played an important role in its success. The Middle East, India and China are all ringed by mountains and oceans but, once past these outer barriers, are nearly flat. By contrast, the Pyrenees, Alps, Apennines, Carpathians and other mountain ranges run through Europe, and the continent is also divided by several seas. This gave Europe some degree of protection from the peril of Central Asian invaders. Before the era of firearms, these nomads were militarily superior to the agricultural states on the periphery of the Eurasian continent and, if they broke out into the plains of northern India or the valleys of China, were all but unstoppable. These invasions were often devastating. The Golden Age of Islam was ended by the Mongol sack of Baghdad in 1258. India and China were subject to periodic invasions, and Russia spent a couple of centuries under the Mongol-Tatar yoke. Central and Western Europe, logistically more distant from the Central Asian heartland, proved less vulnerable to these threats. Geography contributed to important geopolitical differences.

The Scientific Revolution changed humanity's understanding of the world and led to the Industrial Revolution, a major transformation of the world's economies. The Scientific Revolution in the 17th century had made little immediate impact on industrial technology; only in the second half of the 18th century did scientific advances begin to be applied significantly to practical invention. The Industrial Revolution began in Great Britain and used new modes of production — the factory, mass production, and mechanization — to manufacture a wide array of goods faster and using less labor than previously. The Age of Enlightenment also led to the beginnings of modern democracy in the late-18th century American and French Revolutions. Democracy and republicanism would grow to have a profound effect on world events and on quality of life.

After Europeans had achieved influence and control over the Americas, the imperial activities of the West turned to the lands of the East and Asia. In the 19th century the European states had social and technological advantage over Eastern lands. Britain gained control of the Indian subcontinent, Egypt and the Malay Peninsula; the French took Indochina; while the Dutch cemented their control over the Dutch East Indies. The British also colonized Australia, New Zealand and South Africa with large numbers of British colonists immigrating to these colonies. Russia colonized large pre-agricultural areas of Siberia. In the late 19th century, the European powers divided the remaining areas of Africa. Within Europe, economic and military challenges created a system of nation states, and ethno-linguistic groupings began to identify themselves as distinctive nations with aspirations for cultural and political autonomy. This nationalism would become important to peoples across the world in the 20th century.

During the Industrial Revolution, the world economy became reliant on coal as a fuel, as new methods of transport, such as railways and steamships, effectively shrank the world. Meanwhile, industrial pollution and environmental damage, present since the discovery of fire and the beginning of civilization, accelerated drastically.

The 20th century opened with Europe at an apex of wealth and power, and with much of the world under its direct colonial control or its indirect domination. Much of the rest of the world was influenced by heavily Europeanized nations: the United States and Japan. As the century unfolded, however, the global system dominated by rival powers was subjected to severe strains, and ultimately yielded to a more fluid structure of independent nations organized on Western models. This transformation was catalyzed by wars of unparalleled scope and devastation. World War I destroyed many of Europe's empires and monarchies, and weakened Britain and France. In its aftermath, powerful ideologies arose. The Russian Revolution of 1917 created the first communist state, while the 1920s and 1930s saw militaristic fascist dictatorships gain control in Italy, Germany, Spain and elsewhere.

Ongoing national rivalries, exacerbated by the economic turmoil of the Great Depression, helped precipitate World War II. The militaristic dictatorships of Europe and Japan pursued an ultimately doomed course of imperialist expansionism. Their defeat opened the way for the advance of communism into Central Europe, Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, Romania, Albania, China, North Vietnam and North Korea.

After World War II ended in 1945, the United Nations was founded in the hope of allaying conflicts among nations and preventing future wars. The war had, however, left two nations, the United States and the Soviet Union, with principal power to guide international affairs. Each was suspicious of the other and feared a global spread of the other's political-economic model. This led to the Cold War, a forty-year stand-off between the United States, the Soviet Union, and their respective allies. With the development of nuclear weapons and the subsequent arms race, all of humanity were put at risk of nuclear war between the two superpowers. Such war being viewed as impractical, proxy wars were instead waged, at the expense of non-nuclear-armed Third World countries.

The Cold War lasted to the 1990s, when the Soviet Union's communist system began to collapse, unable to compete economically with the United States and western Europe; the Soviets' Central European "satellites" reasserted their national sovereignty, and in 1991 the Soviet Union itself disintegrated. The United States for the time being was left as the "sole remaining superpower". In the early postwar decades, the African and Asian colonies of the Belgian, British, Dutch, French and other west European empires won their formal independence. These nations faced challenges in the form of neocolonialism, poverty, illiteracy and endemic tropical diseases. Many Western and Central European nations gradually formed a political and economic community, the European Union, which expanded eastward to include former Soviet satellites.

The 20th century saw explosive progress in science and technology, and increased life expectancy and standard of living for much of humanity. As the developed world shifted from a coal-based to a petroleum-based economy, new transport technologies, along with the dawn of the Information Age, led to increased globalization. Space exploration reached throughout the solar system. The structure of DNA, the template of life, was discovered, and the human genome was sequenced, a major milestone in the understanding of human biology and the treatment of disease. Global literacy rates continued to rise, and the percentage of the world's labor pool needed to produce humankind's food supply continued to drop. The technologies of sound recordings, motion pictures, and radio and television broadcasting produced a means for rapid dissemination of information and entertainment. Then, in the last decade of this century, a rapid increase took place in the use of computers, including personal ones. A global communication network emerged in the Internet. One-way mass media gave way to individual communication in what has been called a shift from the fourth to a fifth civilization. The century saw several man-made global threats emerge or become more serious or widely recognized, including nuclear proliferation, global climate change, deforestation, overpopulation, near-Earth asteroids and comets, and the dwindling of global natural resources (particularly fossil fuels).

The 21st century had been marked by economic globalization, with consequent risk to interlinked economies, and by the expansion of communications with mobile phones and the Internet. Worldwide demand and competition for resources rose due to growing populations and industrialization, mainly in India, China and Brazil. The demand caused increased levels of environmental degradation and a growing threat of global warming. That in turn spurred the development of alternate or renewable sources of energy (notably solar energy and wind energy), proposals for cleaner fossil fuel technologies, and consideration of expanded use of nuclear energy (somewhat dampened by nuclear plant accidents).

A Galactic Empire
COMING SOON