History
Around 6,000 years ago an unknown race moved a group of Mayan humans from Earth to the distant planet Raylicon. Then the kidnappers disappeared, leaving their victims, who later became known as the Raylicans, on their own.
The Raylicans developed star travel using the remains of three starships left behind by the aliens on their new homeworld. They reverse engineered the technology, allowing them to achieve spaceflight and colonize hundreds of planets. They also discovered the Locks, an ancient and sentient alien technology that allowed them to create the psiberweb, an interstellar network existing outside of normal space and time that transmits messages instantaneously.
However, their shallow understanding of space-faring technology, and possibly their corruption, led to the empire's collapse. This isolated the hundreds of planets in their empire from each other for thousands of years. Eventually, about 400 years ago, Raylicans re-achieved space flight, this time fully understanding the technology, and started to rebuild their empire.
At this time, however, the psions (and their genes) which had a strong enough KAB Rating to power the psiberweb had been all but lost. As a result, the Rhon project was created to genetically engineer the traits necessary to create the psiberweb. It was this project that led to the divergence of the two great empires in the series, the Eubian Concord and the Skolian Empire.
Read more about this topic: Ruby Empire
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“I am ashamed to see what a shallow village tale our so-called History is. How many times must we say Rome, and Paris, and Constantinople! What does Rome know of rat and lizard? What are Olympiads and Consulates to these neighboring systems of being? Nay, what food or experience or succor have they for the Esquimaux seal-hunter, or the Kanaka in his canoe, for the fisherman, the stevedore, the porter?”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“A poet’s object is not to tell what actually happened but what could or would happen either probably or inevitably.... For this reason poetry is something more scientific and serious than history, because poetry tends to give general truths while history gives particular facts.”
—Aristotle (384–323 B.C.)
“What is most interesting and valuable in it, however, is not the materials for the history of Pontiac, or Braddock, or the Northwest, which it furnishes; not the annals of the country, but the natural facts, or perennials, which are ever without date. When out of history the truth shall be extracted, it will have shed its dates like withered leaves.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)