Background on the Human Species - Story Related

Just a warning to my readers: This contains spoilers!  While the book isn’t published or even done, what follows might ruin it for you one day in the far-flung future as you read my book curled up around a holographic fire.  BE WARNED!

Some information on Humanity in the story

Where do Humans Come from?

     The story is set in a variety of genres.  On the largest scale, the story is science fiction pulp (or operatic) and on the smallest scale the story is a healthy mixture of Steampunk and Fantasy.  Reconciling these disparate sub-genres is not an easy task, but is possible.  Here we go!

     There are two distinct varieties of Terrans (Terran, of course, is a blanket term for earthlings): Pre-stellar colonial Terrans and Diasporic Terrans. 
     Pre-stellar Colonial Terrans (or Colonials for short) represent those worlds and populations who have, since founding their worlds, forgotten the origins of their species and have yet to redevelop interstellar travel.  These worlds can exist (and do) at or below the technological levels of current Earth.  The majority of Terran worlds fit into the Colonial category, as Terran colonial efforts for several centuries occurred at or below the speed of light, and could take a very long time (for example, using a pulsed propulsion system could accelerate a ship to 10% the speed of light, and would still take sixty to seventy years to reach Alpha Centuari, more so on Earth due to relativity).
     With these massive distances, and no way to make return trips (set amounts of fuel were usually stored for one trip, one way) Colony ships were equipped with everything the first population needed to get themselves started, and left very little room for error, with no real buffer zone for rations, machinery, and housing (including a gross error in calculating for population growth in transit).  While there is no significant research into the early founding worlds, evidence suggests that 80% of them would become Pre-stellar and remain so for many generations.
     The main world in our story – Taleasia – is an example of a Pre-Stellar Colonial World, where the fight to survive outweighed the desire to keep things like computers, data storage devices, and electronics functioning.  What value does a portable music device have to a subsistence farmer anyways?

     Diasporic Terrans represent two separate but equal groups.  The first are the rare 10% of early founding worlds that were able to quickly gain a footing in stellar travel.  Most of these colonies maintained their ship as a fortress or base of operations (where as Colonials were usually forced to scrap the ship for metal).  These worlds then, have continued the spirit of Earth, and are a far brighter light in the sky (proverbially) for other worlds to find.
     The second group of Diasporic Terrans come from a time period referred to as The Second Founding.  Earth, still under the constant population pressures, have begun developing FTL (Faster than Light) engines and colony ships, developing worlds at greater distances from Earth, and maintaining communications with them (using what’s called a nano-pin relay).

A Note on the Human Genome Variants

    When Earth began its push into space (to cope with overpopulation and resource shortage), it was akin to infants leaving their mother’s custody for the first time.  They were entirely ignorant of the real threats in the blackness of space, and even more ignorant of the impact of their own act of playing God in tandem with the unknowns of space.
    While Engineers and Scientists designed each Colony Ship to withstand known levels of radiation from the pulse propulsion systems and from cosmic interference, they could not possibly prepare a ship for levels of radiation, or for the closed gene pool and several generations of reproduction.
    Couple these levels of radiation with the penchant of pre-Diasporic bio-engineers to attempt to alter human populations so as to reduce any given factor, and you have a broad spectrum of potential genome variations at the destinations.
    For example, some Diasporic Terran worlds have reported, from their earliest years, cases of lycanthropy in the population.  Originally dismissed as folklore and campfire stories by scientists, some credence has been given to these stories.  The genomes associated with Congenital hypertrichosis (ed: look it up here, I’m not making this up) causes a wolf like appearance, and social ignorance might have caused individuals affected to revert to a feral survival state.
    Essentially, there is little limit to the variety expected on Colonial/Diasporic worlds, and some researchers have proposed, that with time and breeding, new varieties of distinctly unique sapiens species might have developed (ed: Yes, Elves might appear and they might be genome variant 3LF).
    
ed: I'm working on more content as we speak, but I wanted to post this bit of juiciness for you right now, because I got excited and wanted to see some other people's opinions