You’ve heard of the known universe – but what about everything else that’s out there? Welcome to the Unknown Universe, where humanity’s been busy.
UU is a fiction universe about all that space out there and what’s in it. At the moment, it mostly concerns robots (tronics) and musicians, but there’s plenty of room for expansion. Heck, there’s a whole galaxy’s worth of potential in there. Here’s the general gist of how it all started:
The 1960s saw Earth’s inhabitants take to space travel for the first time. Two parties (on the same planet, no less), USA and CCCP, fought not with guns and explosives, but with ideas and scientific advancement. This era has been christened the Space Race, and the crowning achievement of that era was Apollo 11 – the mission in which three people landed on Earth’s satellite.
Supposedly, the community of Earth lost interest in space travel fairly soon after Apollo 11. However, some unnamed and unidentified higher-ups from Earth’s various parties banded together to form the Earth Colony Project. They kept the project strictly under wraps, and used taxpayers’ money to fund research and development into advanced spacecraft, cryogenics and robotics. In the mid-1970s, the first pioneers set out for Mars, with more to come over the years.
Very quickly, more and more money was siphoned off to the Project. Most of it contributed to the development of faster-than-light travel – used today in the oft-maligned but seldom-challenged Bachman gates that provide interstellar travel to private spacecraft. By sharing their research with the newly-incorporated offworlders, explorers could be sent further afield to planets like Neptune and Pluto. Eventually, the first manned FTL jump was performed, and the first gate connected the Sol system with the Alpha Centauri system. Settlers travelled through, Centaurus was colonised, and from there we spread our influence far and wide.
Following this, the ECP declared the Sol system a no-fly zone. The gate that was built in the late 1980s is still there, and it still only goes one way. It’s almost a certainty that the people of Earth have no idea we’re out here. The ECP’s manifesto claims that they intend to return at some point, but I don’t personally see that happening any time soon.
So, that just about covers the intro. Keep those eyes peeled for further developments as they…er…develop.
