The Humans Arrive

The year 2117 saw an Arcean probe arrive at Earth. Humanity had established a relatively united, prosperous planet benefitting from a wealth of energy provided by advanced fusion power. The Arceans saw the value in the humans’ exceptional ability for generating power and quickly transferred the plans for a stargate to them.

The Arcean stargate plan didn't include a way to easily turn off the stargate, however. In essence, once turned on, the Humans would not be able to turn it off without great effort. Whether the Arceans were planning to conquer Earth as the Drengin had done to the Torians or not remains unknown, because the stargate was never built.

Having studied the plans in detail, the humans saw that the stargate confirmed many of their theories on how the universe worked. The humans also concluded that the stargates were rather impractical and that it would make more sense to simply create a stardrive that would allow ships to travel through folded space (hyperspace) directly. This became the hyperdrive project.

The stargate was never built

The concept of hyperdrive was simple enough for anyone with an understanding of the theories behind the stargates, but its requirement of immense amounts of energy had stumped the Arceans, Drengin, and Yor for millenia. The advanced fusion power that the Humans had mastered on their own solved that challenge.

Research firms across the planet quickly concluded that a propulsion system could be developed using the theories from the stargate that would enable individual ships to travel on their own. Those same individual ships would also be able to travel much faster than they could through a stargate. A ship going through a stargate would still take months, even years, to go relatively short distances. With the new hyperdrive system, that time would be halved with improvements possible for even greater relative speeds.

Within a few years, humanity had a working hyperdrive prototype. In one of the most generous and costly mistakes in history, the humans did not secure the secrets behind fusion power or hyperdrive. Politicians and activists considered nearly unlimited energy to be a basic human right. Fusion power had nearly eliminated poverty and a whole range of other tragedies. With energy being free, food production, manufacturing, and transportation became far less expensive. It was decided that the hyperdrive technology (and the fusion power behind it) should be shared with the Arceans. Drengin spies on Arcea quickly stole this information, which in turn allowed it to leak out to the Torians, Altarians, and Yor.