Centuries ago, Earth's scholars puzzled over the lack of evidence for advanced intelligent life in the universe. After much thought and debate, some proposed an event common to the development of all sapient species called the Great Filter: that which determines whether a civilization will achieve starflight or collapse into oblivion. The ancient Hemerans show us the sobering truth: only cooperation will see us through the Great Filter, because cooperation is the Great Filter. We must take to heart the lesson which those magnificent starfarers did not survive to learn: if we do not forge our path through the stars with goodwill and camaraderie, all that awaits us is the end.— Dr. Erin Burke, author of The Lost Starfarers
Ten thousand years ago, the world ended
nearly one hundred times at once. Far more, in fact, if one counts the tens of thousands of shattered stations and constructs that lay scattered across the expanse of more than three dozen solar systems. These ruins are rather ubiquitous across a broad swathe of known space: thirty-six known systems bear the remains of
skgri presence. The existence of these ruins has served as a grave warning to many of the modern starfaring civilizations:
humans,
shyxaure, and
ziirpu all encountered the destroyed legacy of the skgri'i before contact with any other sophont. Over time,
Coalition scholars have begun to understand the history of
skgri civilization... and how it came to a horrible and absolute end.
Archive Data
CONFLICT STATISTICS
Duration
est. 13 metric years
Participants
- "Inner Colonies Faction"
- "Outer Colonies Faction"
Weapons of mass destruction used
- antimatter-catalyzed fusion bombs
- relativistic kinetic impactors
- ultra-relativistic electron beam (possibly)
- bioengineered pathogen (possibly)
DESTRUCTION STATISTICS
Sophont deaths
est. 5 trillion (all skgri'i in existence)
Planetary sterilizations
- Prometheus (Proxima Centauri)
- Athena (Olympia)
- Demeter (Olympia)
- Osiris (Ra)
- Yhxriil (Sycasim)
Planetary mass extinctions
Non-terraformed planetary bombardments
79
Megastructures destroyed
est. 600
Prelude
The skgri'i finally reached beyond the atmosphere of their homeworld,
Hemera, an estimated twelve thousand years ago, and rapidly achieved
superluminal travel. Over the following two millennia they spread across the stars, developing their science and technology to heights that the civilizations of the Coalition, even the
rimor, still have not matched. And yet, somehow, the skgri'i did not fully shed their primordial divisive nature. This was ultimately their undoing.
Leading theories on the exact details of the Apocalypse that rendered Hemeran civilization utterly extinct tend to agree on a rough timeline. First, there appears to have been some sort of major ideological schism, though its nature is not well-understood. Most evidence points to divisive opinions on the independence of newer colony worlds, but there is some mention in recovered text and digital files from the period of a moral divide related to the creation of eusapient
artificial intelligence. Modern scholars agree that the civil unrest was likely caused by a combination of both factors. This eventually escalated into a full-on civil war... on the interstellar scale.
Conflict
What ensued was the most cataclysmic war in known history; so absolute in its destruction that it has been simply dubbed "the Apocalypse." We know very little of the conflict itself, or of the terrible weapons with which it was fought. Radioisotope dating and analysis of recovered records indicate the war spanned under ten Earth years, but precise dating is difficult to ascertain due to the enigmatic nature of Hemeran timekeeping.
Comparative impact geology and precise isotope counts indicate that the first world to fall was
Prometheus, followed shortly by the mass extinctions on
Victoria and
Veritas. Next came the sterilization of
Athena,
Demeter,
Osiris, and
Yhxriil.
Aldakaur nearly had its biosphere erased as well, but a tiny fraction of hardy organisms survived. The final worlds to suffer mass extinctions were
Hushen and
Mushen, in the
Tiandi system. To this day, the scars remain to let us see plainly the cost that was paid: trillions of souls eradicated by the actions of a few; thriving global ecosystems turned to dust in mere seconds; planets left scarred with radioactive craters and unnatural volcanic glass. Most worlds in space are simply dead, inert from their birth... but can you fathom looking upon a world which was
killed?
Aftermath
When the dust had settled at last, the Apocalypse had caused a total of five
complete planetary extinctions and five more planetary mass extinctions of over three-quarters biodiversity loss. More than
eighty percent of the planets they had terraformed were nearly or totally sterilized. The vast majority of their planetary and orbital infrastructure was destroyed as well; a rare few constructs, like the
Tellus Ring, survive intact to this day. But how does an entire sapient species, with hundreds of millions of spacecraft, space habitats, and planetary habitats, completely disappear? Surely, even after the bombs have dropped and the beams have burned, there must be survivors?
This is where the trail goes cold. Some posit it was a pathogen of some kind, genetically engineered by one side, that got out of control. Some suggest sufficiently advanced nanotechnology would have resulted in much the same outcome. A few believe the survivors of this legendary Apocalypse simply could not bring themselves to live in the ruined civilization they were left with, and instead uploaded themselves to a virtual universe within some server bank that remains undiscovered. The truth continues to elude xenoarchaeologists, but there is one thing we know for sure: no one can ever go to war again, because doing so would bring about the destruction of all extant civilization.
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