Project Anaximander
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Project Anaximander is an ongoing exploration/scientific effort, led by the Confederacy of Humanity, to chart the entire Milky Way. It is the largest of such efforts ever known to humanity in terms of the number of participants and resource allocation.
The project was launched on June 7th, 9964 by then-leader of the Confederacy John-Thust Praful.
Nomenclature
The project was named after the Ancient Greek philosopher Anaximander who is believed to have made the first map of planet Earth.
Several other names were also proposed, including Susong Initiative and the Brahe Exploration.
Background
By the 99th century, humanity had settled in or colonized tens of millions of systems and colonies (9841 estimate: 24,600,000 systems, excluding planetless stars and interstellar colonies) spread across the Milky Way. About one-fourth of those have their major bodies fully charted, with various levels of charting for the rest (over a million 'colonized' systems was simply passed by starships going somewhere else). Other space-faring civilizations also controls some areas of space, with an estimated total of nearly 100,000,000 systems charted in various degrees of detail. This pales in comparison, however, with over 400 billion solar systems in Milky Way alone.
During the First and Second Galactic Wars, the invaders had managed to build bases within 1 kiloparsecs from Earth without detection from the Confederate forces. In fact, the Giokans was first encountered within 1000 light-years (<300 parsecs). This have raised major issues in the Confederacy Senate.
After the discovery of the wormhole and the Battle of Hathia, some members of the senate, particularly those with scientific/exploration/colonization corporation background went together and proposed a bill for a project to create a detailed chart of Earth's near-space (a sphere stretching 1,000 light-years away from Earth) which was then only partially completed. Due to post-war situations and destroyed colonies, this project failed to pass in the senate initially.
Some of the proponents didn't give up, however, and turned to the public. In 9954, senate member Miro Vranchev from Alcaya and astronomer Roeland Latuheru from Titan made a public declaration regarding the project.