Understanding Humanity Pre-Unification
Firstly, this blog counts years using the 'Atomic Age' which was the year-numbering system calendar era used by all of the Three Empires from at least the -103rd century. Because the First Empire rose around that time, this means that speaking of early Humanity uses some fantastically large negative numbers to count dates if using Galactic Unification as the beginning of our calendar era. Conveniently, year 1 of the Atomic Age is 12,000 years before the beginning of the Galactic Age, so at least it is not excessively difficult to figure out when Atomic Age events occurred in comparison to our current years.
Secondly, we have a significant drop off in first-hand accounts of life and history in the first centuries of the Atomic Age, which we now know was caused by a series of failures of digital information systems on Albashri, then in the midst of the Anthropocene Extinction, which cascaded to the then only six other colonized planets in the 'Human Universe,' all of which took place pre-first contact. Qalip records dating back to first contact note that humans rescued from the Parsin Infestation were extremely precious about maintaining their collections of relatively primitive data storage devices. Later Imperial institutions were quite diligent about maintaining a diversity of record types, still using paper and vinyl-magnetic tape in order to record information, allowing us to access records ranging from literature to newspapers, diaries to census data.
Lastly and most importantly, the concept of 'Empire' had a very different connotation among the first spacefarers. While today the concept is usually invoked as a foundational cosmopolitan concept, invoking an ancient and legendary heritage to many modern institutions, during the First and Second Empires especially, it had an explicitly anthrochauvist, authoritarian, and expansionist connotation. As the Abegellian Revival cultural movement increasingly glorifies the idea of Empire, it is worth sparing a thought to the often violent history of the word's connotation, however embarrassing it is for humans to speak on. After all, it wasn't until the so-called 'Fourth Empire' (formally the Galactic Federation) that a reformation movement was lead by non-humans.
















