Player Reference: Timeline

Abridged History (see SWN pg 121 for more):

2100s - Humans invent the spike drive, enabling system-to-system travel in mere days by drilling through metadimensional space. 

2100s - First wave of colonization populates most habitable planets within a year’s flight of Earth. 2200s - The Terran Mandate is founded to exert Earth’s authority over all of human space. 

2200s - Roughly 1 in 10,000 children of space travelers develop Metadimensional Extroversion Syndrome (MES), a terminal illness that induces psychic powers. 

2200s - The Psionic Authority succeeds in training psychics to use their powers without risking certain death and/or madness. 

2300s - Humans slowly make contact with aliens at various levels of technological and social development. 

2300s - Psychically modified materials give rise to Pretech, miraculous golden age technology that breaks the limits of nature. 

2400s - Further research gives rise to Psitech, powerful Pretech that works miracles when psychics channel their power through it. 

2400s - Psitech Jump Gates operated by master psychics shorten starship travel routes that took years down to just days. 

2400s - The second wave of colonization sends humanity so far and wide that the Terran Mandate can’t effectively govern everyone. 

2500s - Miracles of medicine, genetics, technology, artificial intelligence, and more are common. War is virtually unknown. 

2600s - The Scream, an apocalyptic psychic overload, erupts across the whole galaxy. Psychics everywhere die or go mad. 

2700s - Without psychics, the Jump Gates and Pretech/Psitech fabrication are left inoperable. Worlds dependent on Pretech and imports collapse into ruin, misery, or extinction. Better equipped worlds limp along for centuries in isolation called The Silence. 

3000s - The most productive worlds re-establish a manufacturing base sufficient to fabricate spike drives. 

3100s - With no remaining link to the original Terran Mandate, new stellar unions form independent of Earth’s influence. 

3200s – Present day.