About the United Colonies of Earth

The United Colonies of Earth (UCE), also known as the Union or the Colonies, is an interstellar polity located primarily in the Inner Band of the Milky Way Galaxy, between the Norma-Outer Arm and the Galactic Center, directly over the astrographical Orion-Sagittarius Junction at the center of the namesake civilizational complex. It includes over 650,000 colonized systems and over 5 million colonized planets primarily located within 20,000 lightyears of the Solar System within the Milky Way’s disc and galactic halo, and is administratively divided into not only these astrographical divisions but 38 sectors and 384 subsectors. Its de facto capital is located on Mars in the Sol System, in the city of Antemeridias, though the Colonial Legislature and the Executive Council regularly meet in New York City on Earth. Antemeridias and Mars are the most populous city and planet in the UCE respectively. The UCE’s population is the fifth-largest known in the galaxy, although it controls the second most planets.
The UCE emerged in the late 22nd century as the culmination of a steady unification process among the human beings of Sol which had been underway for the past century, and which accelerated when the system was annexed in 2126 by the Kathnus Domain of the Vell Hegemony. Human resistance to this and to the Domain’s local enforcers, the cyborg-led United Nations, coalesced around members of the Neorevolutionary movement who had, on Earth, fought and defeated the UN in the late Oil Age and early Interplanetary Era, as well as the former UN Supreme Commander Julian Agricola-Nordstrom (2091-2204). In 2169, the human interplanetary colonies and the Homeworld Federation on Earth declared independence jointly as the Union, beginning the Colonial Revolutionary Wars that lasted until 2189. Despite being vastly outnumbered and outteched, exploitation of internal divisions among their adversaries—primarily the Vell domains loyal at first to Kathnus, and then to the Vell Hegemony—and the support of a vast, multispecies alliance of those opposed to the Hegemony’s rule ensured the Union’s independence and expansion throughout the Orion Arm under the auspices of a democratic humanocentrist ideology, enshrined in the Constitution ratified in 2177, that imposed a new, Pan-Colonial identity that gradually subsumed former ethnic and racial identities in primacy, while opposing cybernetics, economic liberalism and personal gene editing.
Post-Independence feuding between two strains of genetically altered humans, the F- and H chromosome-carriers, resentment of the Atlas Consortium’s economic dominance, and hostility to the New Ghibalbian cultural movement combined with the sufferings of Colonists in the trailing and rimward Orion Arm colonies in the wake of persistent piracy to lead to the Colonial Civil War in 2260. Over a thousand colonies refused to recognize the authority of the Union government on Mars and established a parallel one. Backed by two-thirds of the UCE Navy, which saw the use of unreliable Vell and Vedilian privateers as a threat to humanity’s security, they soon invaded the Gliusor Imperial vassal of the Interstellar Federation of Nations, triggering an intervention by the Empire, and committed genocides against the “human-traitor” New Ghibalbians and H-carriers. Sensing weakness, the revanchist Vell remnants invaded in 2262, starting the Orion Arm Wars. The UCE formed the Orion Arm Pact in 2268 to resist the Vell invasion and defeat the Gliusor’s renegade UN allies by 2281, with its internal political system reformed by the creation of the United Colonies Movement (UCM) in 2265 by Sheev Ackerson, President from 2266 to 2278.
The Atlas Consortium’s economic dominance continued, the New Ghibalbians were fully accepted as fellow Colonists, and the inter-hermaphrodite feuds diminished during the early 24th century after the Orion Arm Wars. The UCE, after making peace with a reformed Hegemony in 2280, began to colonize new worlds with its aid in the Perseus Arm as well as the Sagittarius and Scutum-Centaurus Arms. In 2332 the Accelerandium, a remnant of the United Nations, attacked the Union, using cyberwarfare and plagues to trigger an economic collapse and kill billions. The Accelerandium was defeated by 2337. In 2338, the Neoliberal movement began in the interstellar colonies to end Atlas’s and by extension the Sol System’s monopoly on the economy. They introduced the first federal welfare programs and inaugurated the second-largest expansion of wealth in human history. They also proposed increasing the inclusiveness of the Union to nonhuman species as a whole. This goal would be attained in the early 25th century under the resurgent UCM through the ratification of the Twelfth Amendment or Autochthons Amendment of the Colonial Constitution.
In 2460, the expansionist and genocidal Kuntoin Comeliorate attacked the Union and the Gliusor Empire, commencing the Crisis of the Twenty-Fifth Century. Colonial unpreparedness led to more than two trillion deaths between 2460 and 2498 and shook the Colonies’ military dominance in the Perseus and Outer Arms, as spacer-led Vell revanchists joined in the onslaught. Joining forces with its Orion Arm neighbors, the Gliusor, and the humanocentrist UN remnant known as the Brainish Empire, the Union would ultimately emerge victorious from the Fourth Comeliorate War in 2498. Humanocentrism resurged politically in the 26th century, manifesting in the 2499-2500 electoral victories of the Human Defense League and escalating opposition to the Autochthons Amendment. This opposition also increasingly included first-generation hermaphrodites, who are on course to become the majority of the human race in the future, and took increasingly violent actions to express its hostility to the citizenship of nonhumans in what they saw as the nation-state of humanity alone. A UCM resurgence in the mid-26th century under the moderate Sam Munroe would attempt to quell the violence and crushed a major revolt in the Outer Colonies, the Hostenian Crisis. The namesake of the Crisis, Kuntoin and Hegemony War hero and ex-Sector Admiral Daniel Hosten, would become a living martyr for humanocentrism and in 2560 was elected President in a landslide, supported by humanocentrists and moderates alike. That year, war broke out on all fronts of Colonial space.
The Union is one of the Orion-Sagittarius Junction’s most powerful polities, alongside the Gliusor Empire (together known as the Central Powers), and for both humanity and the Junction alike represents a pinnacle of economic, technological and military power. While it has a developed and advanced economy and has incorporated many technological advancements, both of human derivation and which were inherited from the Hegemony, it is poorly integrated with galactic commerce due to humanocentrism-driven autarkic policies, making it one of the smallest trading powers in the galaxy. Its per-capita GDP is only the fifth-largest, though it has the fourth-largest economy. The UCE holds the third-largest share of wealth in the Junction after the Interstellar Federation of Nations and the Gliusor Empire and is the second-largest energy user. It is a leading state in manufacturing, biomedical and computing technologies and is the galaxy’s third-largest attractor of migrants.
The Union is a federation of its component sectors, subsectors, systems, planets and member states (though the latter two are largely synonymous) ruled at all levels through democratic and sortitional elections under largely immutable constitutional laws. It is a directorial federal constitutional republic, which is constitutionally established for the benefit of all human beings and ruled through a twelve-branch system of government headed by the Executive Council and the largely primus inter pares figure of the President of the United Colonies of Earth. Humans, defined as members or descendants of the species Homo sapiens who have not willingly altered their genetic makeup to favor computerization, make up 81% of the population, with one third of all humans being F-carriers, a quasi-cybernetic, genetically modified subpopulation created in 2087. The other 19% of the Colonial population is comprised of nonhumans who have been naturalized or granted citizenship at birth, as well as various nonhumans in the citizenship process or who are transiting through its space. The UCE ranks low on measures of body-modification and economic freedom but otherwise is esteemed highly for its level of political freedom, gender and sexual equality, quality of life, ease of business formation, and educational statistics, and is considered one of the least corrupt governments in the galaxy. It also has one of the lowest levels of income or wealth inequality.
In international affairs, the UCE is a founding member of the Orion Arm Pact and allied with the Gliusor Empire as a trucial and amicable state. It is also an ally of the Brainish Empire and the United Colonies of Novasta, and a hereditary enemy of the Accelerandium, the Lenutherian Hegemony, the Kuntoin Comeliorate and the Monocerotian Confederacy.