Times of Yore
16 Apr 2022Iridium Nova
Things weren't always like this. 150 years ago, the galaxy was a much better place. Sure, we still had pirates, and there were still minor wars, but they were nothing like they are today. The only real war was the one between humanity and the bugs, and GalCop kept things in order pretty well, despite what their detractors claimed. Quirium was the backbone of society, economy, and liberty. Back then, the microcredit was worth almost as much as the credit is today, and prosperity was everywhere. It was the last true golden age. And then it all went to shit.When GalCop had their post-shutdown hissy fit, they fragged Quirium and everything that depended on it, which was pretty much everything. The resulting collateral damage was enough to send humanity back to the Solar Age. Fortunately, INRA had quite a collection of skeletons in their closet (most of which were Thargoid skeletons), and were able to slap together some timely solutions to keep humanity from collapsing entirely. But, sure enough, it was the end of an era, and much of what made humanity great had been lost.
In the post-Quirium age, humanity seems lost, fragmented, and quarrelsome. I suppose that's just human nature really. Quirium allowed GalCop to suppress that side of humanity, to a point. Without it, we're free to wallow in our own crapulence. Of course, technology is trying to make a comeback, but it's mostly been military technology. Social and economic development declined throughout the post-Quirium age, as cities and factories were destroyed by increasingly devastating weapons, and interstellar relations were strained by lengthy travel times and slow communication.
This state of affairs has persisted to this very day, for the most part. Only within the last decade or so has humanity shown real progress in moving away from the cesspool of the last century, but it's been slow and difficult, full of conflict and chaos. Most of the progress is either directly or indirectly related to the invention of the frameshift drive, which has at least proven comparable to the Quirium drive in terms of travel time, but has failed to provide a suitable replacement for other aspects of Quirium technology. And we still have a long way to go if we're to recover from the social wasteland that has dominated the bubble since the GalCop era ended.
I suppose there's no easy answers here. Humanity is it's own worst enemy, and sometimes it loses that fight. I was never a big fan of GalCop. I found them a little too authoritarian for my taste, but one couldn't deny how effective they were, if a little brutal. In my idealistic days, I wanted to believe that there was a better way, but history has shown me what happened to all the other people who thought the same way. They're either dead or they ended up contributing to the chaos of the last century. GalCop was something special. They had the secret of Quirium, something that, with time, might have fixed the fatal flaws in humanity, but they took it to their graves. Maybe that's for the best. Maybe chaos is human nature, and GalCop's zero-tolerance golden age was too restrictive. In retrospect, it seems impossible that it could have lasted any longer. It's rather amazing it lasted as long as it did.
I wonder what that says about humanity.