Editing SWADE the Last Parsec Setting (section)

==BASIC OVERVIEW OF SETTING==
The history of the Known Worlds is inseparable from the history of the mother world that spawned its most prodigious race. Earth is the ancestral birthplace of all pure-blooded humans; their DNA evolved in its oceans and spread to the
stars by their own ingenuity.

Other humanoids—bipedal sentients with vaguely similar physiology from other far-flung planets—do not share that distinctive legacy. Humanoid is an all-encompassing term in the Known Worlds that includes humans and many other independently evolved bipedal beings of similar size and basic physiology. All humans are humanoids, but not all humanoids are humans.

Earth’s pre-spaceflight history is a colorful pastiche of violent multiculturalism, now largely forgotten, its nations, religions, and economies
long vanished in the wake of unfolding science and interstellar expansion. Still, what Earth is today is built upon the bones of its formative 20th through 22nd Centuries, when the massive destructive power of emerging
technologies put humans and their fragile world to the test many times over. In those days, despots rose and fell, populations roiled and clashed,
philosophies wrestled with science and lingering mysticism. It was a bloody epoch that ultimately wiped the Earthly slate clean for more promising
times to come.

During those dark, violent centuries, uniquely human optimism clung precariously to the edge of the precipice. Foundations gathered resources
and minds and hid themselves away where they might survive and plan for a better future. Some governments did the same, the most forward thinking devoting a portion of their economies to science that might give them an edge against their enemies.

Idealists pressed on against the prevailing wisdom that humanity was doomed to its own foibles, convinced that their race’s future was in fact quite bright, and ultimately it would blossom beneath the warm light of distant suns.