Editing Бpoнeпeхoтa/A Brief History of Humanity (section)

===Vanishing of Earth===
The first experimental ships were quite unreliable; the jumps so inaccurate that it was possible to reemerge in hundreds of lightyears from the initial target. Most scouting missions of the early waves never returned, having most likely had their energy reserves depleted by frantic attempts to get back home, every single one of them unsuccessful.<br />
Creating the hyperspace beacon net (years 2420-2440) was the first step of galactic exploration; unmanned probes, intended to reemerge somewhere far away and transmit signals, became the basis for manned ship triangulation.<br />
Mass expansion started in 2437, with UN transformed into the United Government of Earth, and former militaries into the Scouting Corps - a half-military, half-scientific organization with the mission to discover and study habitable planets. Colony transports, each carrying 70-80 cold-sleeping thousand humans of similar nations and languages, followed the scouts; the relatively inexpensive nature of FTL ships allowed Earth to launch about 500 such "passenger ships" yearly.

Over the following 500 years, the human population of Earth became four times smaller, with hundreds of thousands of planets turned into new homes for millions of ex-earthers. With centuries passing, the colonies were gradually stopping to communicate with the ancestral planet; despite the beacons being a cheap and reliable communication solution, it was far from everyone who wanted to be reminded of their past. There were even instances of planetary governments disabling their own beacons to start their lives and histories from scratch - and the UGE, of course, had neither the ability nor the desire to monitor thousands of worlds and beacons themselves.

And the humanity has turned into a patchwork, with every piece unlike its neighbours.

In year 2862, the first crisis occurred, dividing the humanity further. Hundreds of years of exploration had turned the Scouting Corps from an amorphous international amalgamation into a self-sustaining organization. Seeing the failure of the UGE to control the expansion, the Corps leaders decided to separate themselves from the rest of civilization; joined by their relatives and anyone willing, they took a remote star cluster on the outer rim of inhabited space for themselves and turned all neighbouring beacons off. The UGE couldn't do anything with such a desertion (and didn't try too hard anyway); a desertion that costed them hundreds of best scout ships and crews - and therefore the ability to inspect and keep most beacons in check.<br />
And in deep space, even the most reliable devices eventually cease to function.

In an attempt to restore control over the colonies, the rulers of Earth ordered to develop an entirely new interstellar drive with utmost haste.<br />
According to theory, it was entirely possible to build an engine able to move a whole planet. The benefits seemed obvious: why build thousands of FTL ships, if you can instead move Earth itself to a suitable world and colonize it directly? Such a "Traveling Earth" would even prove itself the master of the galaxy once more - imagine a remote corner, not supporting beacons and not paying taxes for three or four hundred years, to suddenly have Earth with all its space forces appear in!

It took almost a century to build a planet-scale FTL drive; the road included testing the tech on Mars, Venus, and several Jupiter satellites to change their orbits and terraform them - and devoting all resources to it, putting all other colonization attempts to an end (and it's not like the Scouting Corps could've been replaced anyway).

Year 2960. The long-awaited day of the launch of Earth has come.<br />
With a press of the button, Earth has disappeared from the Sol system...<br />
...and was nowhere else in the galaxy to be found.

Following the initial shock, various explanations appeared. Some said that Earth was destroyed in a drive malfunction; some said that it was transported into a parallel universe; some said that it was just lost somewhere in the unknown space, like the beaconless scouts of old. None of these hypotheses were proved, there was now only the fact - the ancestral planet of all humans was no more. With generations, Old Earth became a legend - and Mars and Venus, not having the resources to support Sol beacons, left them to stop working.<br />
From that moment, the entire Sol system was now off-limits for the rest of humanity.

Year 3001 A.D. The Human Dominion - the entire space inhabited by them - has no center, no unifying force.<br />
Earth has disappeared, Sol is unreachable, the Scouting Corps have isolated themselves long ago, and there are still no known nonhuman civilizations, so you can't even unite against the xenos.<br />
As it commonly happens, an absence of reasons to unite became a reason to argue. Small-scale wars were roaring all over the Dominion - "small-scale" in terms of the entire galaxy, of course; continents were turned into radioactive glass lakes, planets were made hostile to all life. Empires, federations, reach's appeared and disappeared over the same centuries during which the hyperbeacons decayed, making interstellar communications less... and less... and less reliable.