the scale of lancer's setting is getting to me again- this time in the fun way
like, okay. here's what i understand of the known history of earth. we've got archaeology stretching back into palaeoarchaeology, and that's some of the only connection we have to cultures millions of years old. oral histories and similar go back tens of thousands of years, i think the oldest are around 50k years. written history is a younger discipline, considerably less than ten thousand years.
in lancer, you can stick another 11,000 years on top of that- at least. by that short estimate, on earth- one of the longer-term consequences of global warming goes off, vega is the new northern pole star, the northern-hemisphere seasons are aligned with the orbital seasons, barnard's star is just past its closest approach to the sun, and the sahara might be tropical.
eleven thousand years. on karrakis, that's something like- five hundred of pre-fall starflight, a lesser fall lasting perhaps seven hundred years, and nearly seven thousand years of starflight... before union contact, then two hundred of contact before some fuckery, then two thousand of post-union integration starflight. on earth/cradle, that's a thousand years in which at least ten starships were launched- one landing to found karrakis, two taking thousands of years to reach their destinations, one crashing, the rest vanishing into the unknown. then, the fall-stated to be practically a total reset on the people of earth. just under five thousand years of rebuilding and the new being forged atop the old, then rediscovery of starflight and tons of interstellar colonization and such.
i don't think it's possible to imagine what lies in... really, any of those periods... beyond the most big-picture things. Here's the thing that was really getting to me: how many times do you think writing was independently invented? Across a thousand worlds, and ten thousand years.
