This morning's prompt was 'she was yar', a phrase from the philadelphia story.

I failed at Juno Sector, let's reboot, yet again! 8-P

Why? Why am I doing this to myself? This is a very good question and I really should figure it out, but all I want to do right now is make some sort of strange old world for space adventure! Which involves specifications which will imply things about the setting, dongma?

So, what specifications?

Aliens, strange old living worlds (alien home worlds, human and alien daughter worlds, etc.). Why didn't some alien civilization colonize Earth and wipe out Humanity, or at least make us a subject race? (Maybe they did?)

Easy double talk FTL travel, with starships. Starships are common and easy to get. Why?

Easy FTL and aliens don't go well together, unless there's some reason why the galaxy goes fallow frequently. Something there is which hunts the dawn...

Humans only Easy FTL is basically Isaac Arthur's Foundation. Hunters of Dawn and aliens with easy FTL implies incompetent bad guys. All in all, I think I'll go with speciation and uplift of a Terragen Clade sweeping out into an empty galaxy and the universe...

Not quite empty, though. There are rare strange old living worlds, one percent of one percent is a hundred million in a galaxy of a trillion or more worlds. That and a rise and fall of starfaring civilizations leads to something like Star Wars; I have always had a personal head cannon of thousands or millions of terraformed worlds and that the force is actually interacting with the terraforming tech... 8-P

A cubic light century is a million cubic LY, with less than ten thousand star systems and one or two living worlds. If there are an average of two rock balls per system and, say, 150,000 systems within 200 LY of Sol, that's 30 living worlds including Earth. There are probably an order of magnitude to two orders of magnitude more worlds which might be terraformable, and that may be what this future history holds for us. At 1 LY/hr this is a sphere of influence a few weeks across, and it would be a herculean feat to trek from one side of the galaxy to the other, 11-12 years...