I see the words tossed around here and there but I I don’t fully understand the impact of the “shattering” does fragment of humanity wander space, or something comical like everything went ape sh*t the moment humans enter the galactic alliance? -- Anon Guest
Many don't understand what the Shattering is, how long it took, and what it did to Human history. For a start, it's named as if it's one event, but it's actually an era in Terran history. When the abundance of 'deep time' one-way wormholes in the Sol system were discovered, there followed an era of rapid-fire colonisation. In order to go deep, the colonists had to gather and take with them a certain amount of mass.
This included many surviving historical artefacts, landmarks, and so forth. That is, when the colonisers didn't use other forms of mass to form the critical closure of the wormhole gateway. Most of which was obtained from the asteroid and kuiper belts. After all, the last thing a group of like-minded people needed when busy making a world in their own image was serial kibbitzing from the very world they just escaped.
The delayed result was chaos. History as Terra knew it... shattered. It was a slow dissolution, working over cycles during the centuries following the discovery of one-way wormholes. The assorted lunatic fringes, weirdoes, and cultural pockets decided that life would be so much better if they built a world of their own, or the controlling mainstream concluded that life would be so much easier if they didn't have to deal with the aforementioned fringe. Either way, parts of civilisation as it was known went down through time and space to sink or swim on a world of their own making. The relevant parts of history went with them, thus making it easier for the remaining fragments to pretend that the fringe never existed in the first place. In this, it is certainly true that those who fail to learn from the lessons of history are doomed to repeat them.
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[Shown here: A clump of hair on some grass. There is definitely enough there to make a cat]