Earth (Solar Harmony)

Earth is the third planet of the star Sol, and the homeworld of Humanity. As such, its primary inhabitants are Humans, and the species holds the planet in a very high regard. It is one of the eight Capitol planets of the Civilized Collective, and as such its Human leaders act as the primary representatives of their species on the Civilized Collective High Council. It is the celestial body housing the most Humans, as of 2475 having a population of roughly 6.5 billion. Earth has a single moon, Luna, which is also heavily inhabited by humans. Besides being the homeworld for one of the eight species of the Civilized Collective, Earth is also notable for being the planet with the most rewilding programs performed in recorded history.

Like the other homeworlds of sapient species, Earth is an incredibly prominent piece of Human culture across the stars. It is an incredibly popular religious and tourist destination as a result, with almost every human to ever live making a pilgrimage or vacation to the pale blue dot that they originated from.

History

Earth has held life almost since its very inception, about 4.5 billion years ago. Although limited to single-celled life for around 3 billion of those years, complex multicellular life did emerge. Thus began a fierce evolutionary arms race, culminating in the evolution of the planet's first known sapient species: Homo sapiens. Humanity would spread across the globe, inadvertently changing the wildlife and landscape wherever they went. Once agriculture developed, and humans started to settle into villages, towns, and cities, their ancestral tribalism began to intensify. Now they had territory to defend from outsiders, and resources to protect. This innate sense of tribalism would unfortunately cause some of the worst atrocities the Earth has ever seen.

Throughout most of the 20th and 21st centuries, humanity entered numerous wars known as the World Wars. This period is known by the presence of over 160 nation-states across the entire globe, all of which were independent and often at each other's throats. Perhaps the worst aspect of these wars was the rapid technological advancement humanity was experiencing at the same time. Airplanes were invented and quickly saw use in the battlefield, as well as armored assault vehicles, larger and more armored boats, chemical warfare, and even nuclear weaponry were all invented in just 25 short years. Such unstable and rapid growth of technology accompanied with the spread of warfare is something that often destroys fledgling sapient species before they can achieve interplanetary travel.

After the third World War that occurred in the late 2030's, the major global powers all laid in ruin. Much of the conflict was so fierce that few records of the exact nature and scale remain in the modern day. However, the aftermath of this conflict is what truly mattered. Humanity was able to come together, with much difficulty, and finally form a true united world government. This government would allow humans to pull together the resourced to achieve reliable and safe interplanetary travel, ushering in a golden age of exploration within the Sol System. The last remnants of the ruling class before the war attempted to seize the bountiful resources of the Sol System for themselves, attempting to create new corporations to settle the planets in the 2080's. With lessons learned from the last World War, and the nearly endless resources offered by asteroids in the system alone, the citizens of Earth and the surrounding planets did not allow this to continue. Without any proper workforce or funding, the last corporations died while independent and government run operations thrived. The harvesting of the asteroid belt ushered in the beginnings of a post-scarcity world, in which resources could not be hoarded or withheld from anyone due to their sheer abundance.

In the early 2100's a major breakthrough was made in gene editing and cloning which not only allowed the cloning of egg-bearing animals, but also the proliferation of easily constructed artificial wombs. This caused a cascading slew of rewilding programs to restore the damage that Humans had caused to the planet over the past 13,000 years. Among the species to be revived and rewilded were the Thylacines, Orangutan, Blue Whale, Wooly Mammoth, Indian Elephant, Florida Panther, Dodo, Passenger Pigeon, Whale Shark, Quagga, and the White Rhinoceros to name a few. Ecosystems were restored, animals revived from extinction, and pollution cleaned from the surface and waters on a scale never before seen. This has been to date the only successful terraforming project conducted.

In the modern day, 2475 A.D, Earth boasts a population of around 6.5 billion people, the most populated planet in the Sol System. It features the first space elevator ever constructed, as well as a network of orbital habitats and spaceports to facilitate living and trade. It is the crown jewel of Human Controlled space.

Luna

Luna, informally known as 'the moon' or simply 'moon', is the only natural satellite of Earth. It has been the subject of human worship for millennia, and has been featured in nearly every mythology in human history. Formed due to the collision of a primitive Earth and another protoplanet named 'Thea', the Earth and Luna share the exact same chemical composition. It is tidally locked to Earth, the same side facing the planet at all times, and it also plays a significant role in the stabilization of Earth's orbit, rotation, and tidal system. Due to it's orbital inclination, Luna only eclipses Earth's surface rarely, making it a notable event whenever one occurs.

Luna was first visited in 1969 by astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin, which marked the beginning of its colonization. It took quite some time, with a large gap in Lunar missions in between the 1970's and 2020's, however after international conditions stabilized post WW3, and the unified government of earth was established, Luna was swiftly colonized. It was the first celestial body outside of Earth to be permanently settled, and retains a population of around 970 million humans in the modern day. On a clear night without obstruction from the clouds, the lights of the Lunar cities are clearly visible from the surface of the Earth.