Federation Human

The United Gaian Federation is one of the newer interstellar nations on the galactic stage, being established in 2191 CE. While far from the youngest nation in the galaxy, it is the youngest full member of the multinational alliance that is the Galactic Assembly, having been accepted as a full member in 2248.

Native to the planet Earth, Humans occupy every major landmass on their home planet. Because the biosphere on Earth is relatively tame in terms of competition, Humans tend to value ample amounts of personal space, and spread outward more than upward as their population increases; Human cities have been shown to occupy 34% more land area on average than xeno cities with similar population sizes.

Milennia of warfare between countries on Earth has given Humans strong martial traditions, similar to the Ixaran Directorate. However, unlike the Directorate, Humans value personal freedoms above all else (in many cases to the point of non-compliance with the government), and most Humans tend to be flexible in regard to their beliefs and habits; something that has expedited their integration into the Galactic Assembly.

Physiology
Humans are a mammalian race. They usually stand around 1.5 to 2 meters tall, and so are among the shorter races on the Assembly. Their two hands each have five digits, including one opposable thumb, with each finger being tipped by a hard keratinous nail. Their similarly keratinous but thin skin is stretchier than the skin of races like the Goxi or the Pogron Vol, and allows them a greater degree of flexibility.

Humans are built to be endurance-pursuit hunters, as opposed to Goxi or Novarians that are primarily ambush hunters. Their highly efficient respiratory systems, coupled with their ability to cool down their bodies with sweat, allowed primitive hunters to pursue their prey to exhaustion. Even today, Humans tend to have higher average scores than xeos in endurance tests.

Human skin tones can range from white all the to very dark brown, and their eye color can be any combination of brown, green, or blue. The hair on their head, one of the few places where their mammalian fur has remained, is often black, but can be blonde, brown, or even red.

Due to the decline of conservative beliefs in recent decades, interbreeding between ethnicities has become commonplace. While serving to increase genetic diversity across the species as a whole, this has also slowly homogenized the population's outward appearances. Pale skin, for example, once common in districts like the United North American States and the European Union, has become a minority next to tanned skin. Red hair, a recessive trait, only exists in 0.4% of Earth's 13 billion people, and is virtually nonexistent in the colonies.

The Climate Crisis and the Rush to Colonize Mars
By the early 2040s, the rapidly worsening effects of the climate crisis had submerged many of Earth's coastal areas under meters of rising sea levels, resulting in millions of deaths worldwide. Despite this, many of the largest economic powers, both public and corporate, were slow to adopt the ever-frantic policies that sought to remedy the problem.

Many of Earth's space agencies to fund increasingly expensive projects to establish a colony on Mars, starting with an artificial magnetosphere around the red planet. From the base on Luna, a satellite was launched, bearing a strong magnetic dipole shield. It reached Mars and deployed in high orbit on Christmas Eve 2048, generating a magnetic field that sheathed Mars from the solar wind and, over the next decade, stabilized its atmosphere and opening the planet up to the first manned missions by the late 2050s. On August 2109, the first permanent settlement, Elysium, had been established in an expansive underground cave system with around an underground aquifer, dubbed the Elysian Caves. It held a population of over 1500 scientists and engineers.

Meanwhile, back on Earth, the rising oceans and increasingly severe weather swings prompted a new flood of refugees into the developed world on a previously unseen scale. Countries like Indonesia, the Philippines, Hawai'i, and others saw their populations drop drastically as millions died, and hundreds of millions more were displaced. By the time Elysium was established, an additional 15% of Southeast Asia's dry land had been submerged.

In addition, the disruption of Atlantic ocean currents caused noticeable temperature drops across northern Europe, prompting many to move south

First Contact
On New Year's Eve 2179, an anomalous energy pulse was detected somewhere in the Asteroid Belt. Powerful orbital telescopes around Mars and Jupiter were hit by a quick burst of gamma radiation that disappeared the instant it arrived.

Sensors stationed across the Sol System were repeatedly hit by sweeping radio waves in a pattern experts soon recognized as scanning.

The signal, it turned out, belonged to a Novarian exploration team. To them, Sol was an unremarkable uncharted system, and they were merely there to document the system in their star charts and move on. It was a big surprise to them, then, when they discovered artificial satellites orbiting many of the planets they scanned. Even more surprising was the small fleet of primitive spaceships that intercepted them.

After a tense exchange of incomprehensible words and gestures, the Novarians retreated back through the Gateway. This exchange, which had been broadcasted live to Earth, caused a storm of media coverage. Until this point, the only alien organisms found were microbes on Titan and Europa, but now Humanity had encountered intelligent alien life. A year of silence followed the momentous event, during which the governments of Earth scrambled to bolster their military fleets and linguists worldwide attempted to translate the broadcast.

Finally, on the 25th of February 2180, another fleet, this time sent by the Galactic Assembly, emerged from the Gateway, bringing with it several small diplomatic ships tailed by a huge cruiser-class warship (presumably to cow any attempt at aggression), arrived through the Gateway. The resulting diplomatic exchange lasted several months, during which time Humanity was introduced to various new technologies such as fusion power and Gateway travel.

As a gesture of goodwill, the Assembly accelerated the terraforming of Mars: installing an atmosphere stabilizer in the ruins of Olympus City in 2183. The first recolonization efforts followed soon after. By the early 2200's, Mars had once again become the site of major human presence.

The assistance of the Assembly, as well as the new FTL-capable ships they had built, allowed them to rapidly expand into neighboring stars. By 2230, the newly-named Federation of Man had established two extrasolar colonies: Garden in the Tau Ceti system and New Hubei in the TRAPPIST-1 system.

Iziran War
Main Article: Iziran Incursions of 2234-2240

Kilauea Supereruption
On December 13, 2270, a series of earthquakes underneath Hawai'i preceded Mount Kilauea's largest and most violent recorded eruption to date, releasing nearly 100 million metric tons of ash and debris into the atmosphere.and the Pacific Ocean. The resulting caldera sunk most of Hawai'i's Big Island into the ocean. The eruption would end up claiming the lives of over 30,000 people, but more than 70,000 more died when the caldera collapsed into the ocean. The worldwide ashfall would go on to claim another several ten thousand.

The volcanic winter that followed would drop global temperatures by as much as 2 degrees Celsius, causing crop failures worldwide. This would provide the impetus for a minor exodus, as hundreds of thousands of people would flee the volcanic winter to the colonies, particularly the two newest ones: Shin-Nihon and Datu.