
[2820-2852  Time of Exploration]

Before the development of the hyperdrive, traversing the space
from one star to another was a monumental undertaking, requiring
horrendous investment and years of patience. So difficult was the
task that many star systems which were judged unlikely to harbor
habitable planets were never explored. Once the hyperdrive came
into being, however, this suddenly changed, and people began
investigating these systems, hoping that perhaps some garden
world had been overlooked. As it happened, a few choice planets
were found, but what astonished everyone even more was that one
of them had neanderthal sapiens already living there. The
neanderthal society had never progressed beyond the stone age,
but from the fossil evidence, they seemed to have been
transplanted some fifty thousand years earlier for reasons
completely unknown and by a spacefaring race which was also
completely unknown.

   The discovery led, not unexpectedly, to a resurgence in the
idea that humanity was not alone in the universe after all,
however, who the transplanters had been and where they went
remained a mystery. In order to solve the puzzle, the IPF, once
it was created in 2830, undertook a massive exploration effort.
What was discovered were several sentient alien species, however,
none of them had progressed up the technological ladder as had
humanity. In one case, the race in question possessed sufficient
intelligence to make it to the very edge of the industrial era,
however, a lack of fossil fuel deposits on their world prevented
further growth, and without the ability to mechanize their
economy, the emerging society soon drowned in an overpopulation
crisis and subsisted in a state of rampant disease and incessant
warfare. It was a Malthusian nightmare, if there ever was one,
and had been their status-quo for hundreds of thousands of years.

   Finally, around the middle of the century, the IPF had a lucky
break. One of their ships had detected low level power emissions
in an asteroid belt from what, when it was finally recovered,
appeared to be some form of signaling device of alien origin. How
long the thing had been there was impossible to tell, however,
the fact that it was there at all proved that the ancient
precursor civilization had not wiped out all traces of its
existence.

