The year is 21,000 CE. Thats Current Era not AD, but its the same for all you history buffs. Man made it to the stars, and outlived his own stupidity. For a while there it looked like the stupidity might not come back. But it did; boy did it ever. Making it to the stars ushered in a Golden era, because everyone was so far apart you couldn't fight a war.
They invented Faster Than Light (FTL) communications. Then for nearly 13,000 years there was no way to go faster than the speed of light. Man poked through deep space at near the speed of light, but fast enough to take advantage of relativity. Colonies sprang up everywhere. Every star system had plantes and man was willing to live everywhere. Any environment could be overcome. Then FTL travel was invented.
The Golden Era came to an end when Diplomats were able to move their soldiers fast enough. A war that lasted one hundred seventy-five years started and then ended over star systems. The factions that fought it, and the entity that ended it, all have their roots on pre-stellar Earth.
The war boiled down to one of location. When man got to the stars, he put colonies everywhere. It didn't matter (then) that a French Colony was next to a predominantly Scandanavian colony. They could send a ship and wait for ten years for it to get there. Though when you got Faster Than Light travel, it did matter. The Scandanavians stayed out of it (with Sweden). The Euro-German planets teamed up with their old ally the Americas to take on the Corporate Planets and PanAsiatic planets. These factions remain powerful to this day, espically the Corporate one. Also from the terresterial days is one thing called the Internation Alliance, though after this conflict it is know as just "The Alliance". They occupy the original core worlds out to about 100 pc from Sol (thats Earth.) It broke the conflict down, using new TL11 tech, and forced a cease fire and peace compact that ended the First Interstellar War. The date of the Armistice is known as year 1 of the Post War calander. Though it would only be five hundred twenty-six years of cold war until the next Interstellar war. This war only lasted one hundred years. It was brough about when the famous Alliance Spymaster Jacques LeFluer stole the Core secrets to TL11 technology. He sold it to all the factions and hasn't been seen since...
With the decimation from ISWII, a Long Night ensued in which the Core retreated behind it's borders and the Factions fell several tech levels because of their scorched earth policy and massive planetary bombardments. The attrition was horrible and it would take mankind over a thousand years to get his star legs again. When the Long Night ended it was because there was a huge influx of colonists. The core scientists had unravelled the human genetic code after nearly 30,000 years of only breeding in our improvements, now they could be bought.
This technology changed everything again. In all the time man had been in the stars, he had met no intelligent life. Thousands of life forms, but none of it intelligent. Now we created our own species. Homo-superior, Tek Rats, Cronos-man, Alpha, Beta, Eros, and dozens of other series of species were grown and engineered by man himself.
The date is 5300 PW (thats ~21000 CE/AD) and you're on the frontier. That is the edge of known space, beyond the faction planets that all lie beyond the Core border. Man has reached the galactic core and you face out down the spiral arm of the Milky Way. Your smallness in the universe has never been more pronounced, but your opportunities are as infinite as the space that stretches before you.