End of Aquarius

After centuries of struggle and strife, the Terrans of Earth reached upwards to touch the stars. But when they did, they discovered that they were by no means the first to do so. Finding themselves pressed up between The Intra-Galactic Cooperation Council's slow expansion down-arm, the territories of the violent and bloodthirsty Hss'kar, who themselves had been raiding Earth for millennia - the United Terran Powers nonetheless managed to thrive, growing slowly through exploration and subsequent stabilization of gravroutes and wormholes.   While at first the Terrans were loosely homogenised under a single banner, various wars, cosmic cataclysms and political secessions over the past two millennia have left the Terrans splintered and fragmented. The United Terran Powers are no more, replaced by the Capitalist Terran Commonwealth, the human-supremacists known as the Sovereignty of Man, and the Soviet Union, which itself triggered the eventual collapse of the United Terran Powers when it withdrew in the late twenty eighth century. Further still are several smaller human factions, many of which have democratically voted to join the ever-expanding Cooperation Council.   In the two millennia since the Terrans have left their cradle, they have shocked and terrified most other alien life. The sheer rate of their expansion, as well as the brutality of their history and almost unparalleled levels of endurance have led to some to consider them vermin, and lobby for their destruction. Nonetheless, they have persisted, making both allies and enemies as they spread throughout the stars.