Thoughts:
- Stardwellers, Union, Logicians.
I can imagine the Logician society remaining unchanging for that entire time, except slow incremental improvements in efficiency.
The Union needed to spend some time as a non-Union civilization. Once it went Union, it probably stabilized, but I suspect that it’s been going through steady social revolutions since then (albeit incredibly peaceful ones). There’s no way they started at cutting edge Metatech when they first formed the Union (the backstory is inconsistent; they wouldn’t have had criminals in the classic sense if their meta started that high). So, as their Meta steadily advanced, they’d have repeatedly redesigned their society to take advantage of the new advances. I can imagine their history looking like a series of psychohistorical debates between philosophers.
There is absolutely no way the Stardweller civilization has stayed anywhere near constant that entire time. Theirs would be a turbulent history dominated by continual social, technological, ethical, and physiological revolutions, punctuated by vast discoveries and the occasional charismatic character who yanks swaths of society in various directions.
- Masquerade, Replicants, Stored, Daoine
These are some of the more stable, “sane” societies. Most of them would feel like a continuation of our history up-to-date, with suitable social trends in each case.
Except the Stored. In SA 1.0, the Stored were a relatively new civilization, only a few generations old. As such, they were hitting a cultural divide; younger Stored were splitting away and becoming more digital as the older stored were trying to keep true to their more organic past.
If the Stored start all the way back here, then they’ve had a lot of time to settle down. On the other hand, if this is just the beginning of the society that would later birth the Stored, that’s different. But, well, if the Stored have several thousand years of digital history behind them, they wouldn’t look or behave very human by the time we reach the “present”.
Yeah, I can see the Roamers starting as a Tao milieu, and slowly drifting apart from their parent civilization. This feels like the right place for the Mechanicans, kindof. The fact that the Mechanicans never managed to have a civilization-crushing military revolution is a little surprising (low meta). It’s possible the T’s were poking them carefully to keep them from wiping themselves out, or maybe they were just lucky.
If the CAPP have been around for about a thousand years, they’ve had a lot of time to test, verify, and refine their pattern. Given its age, and their seriousness, it’s probably at least reasonably accurate.
Wee! Given their (relatively) late start date, I’d assume this is starting once the (initial) “terra”forming of their homeworld was finished. Prior to this, they were spending most of their time in cryogenics. This implies that they’re probably behind in the Metatech race, having spent substantially less time developing society.
I can’t quite visualize the Dreamer history over long periods. Dominated by cyclic events? Presumably, this marks the dawn of the Dreamer tech, as opposed to the start of the society that lead into becoming the Dreamers.
Disciple Anchorages need wormhole tech to make sense, although the religion could have started without that. Which begs the question, what sort of civilization did they start from? I could see it being a Spacer cult, as they are closest to the void to begin with. The other possibility is that it was a more conventional colonized solar system, similar to a cargo cult except without the loss of technological knowledge or worship of tech that implies. They’d hang out in the void orbiting their star, or somesuch. A third possibility is that they are a Stardweller offshoot, but this would imply unusual things about their physiology.
Starting this late? That seems odd. While the Independents are defined by their refusal of the Transcendentals, they still need a lot of time building a civilization and tech base to even be able to refuse them.
Late Wraiths/Builders implies their civilization hasn’t had much time to evolve as it is now. While the wraiths may be elders, they aren’t that elder. Only a generation or two at most. Given that, the biotech revolution (with contact with the other civilizations) may be rather terrifying to them. Their society is too fragile to have immortality introduced to it without shattering. They’re likely desperately trying to hold off such a revolution, which will make interactions with the other civilizations tense at best.
