The human federation is the collective name for mankind and all of it’s colonies under the Sol Council.

The Sol council was Originally formed when humanity was just relative to the Sol system, with colonies on and around mars, jupiter, venus, Mercury, and Saturn. Since then, Humanity has expanded to many nearby systems, including Alpha centauri, Luhman-16, and epsilon eridani. They’ve even established some more remote colonies as far out as in Gliese 412.

Originally designed so that each planet would have an ambassador to represent them, the density of the colonies in the inner systems means that they had a much higher representation than many of the outer colonies, despite the fact that many ‘occupied’ planets in the Sol system were purely industrial. (IE: Mercury is mainly used for mining, and saturn for it’s natural gases, as neither is particularly suited for human life.) They were however, granted seats on the council, which lead certain powerful corporations to have a massive influence in politics.

Meanwhile, many of the far reaching colonies have been strictly terraforming and urbanization efforts, with many reaching billions, sometimes trillions of inhabitants. In recent years, many planets have become dissatisfied with the council’s rule, and have acted increasingly independantly. The Sol council still maintains galaxy wide systems such as keeping track of surplus resources, flights between planets, and inter-system communications.

The human federation has done quite well for itself, all things considered. As it turned out, the first step off of earth was the hardest, and once the first successful mars colony was established, interest in space skyrocketed. Thousands left earth for the first time to live life on other planets, and these colonies grew more and more, becoming self sufficient. With more people pursuing scientific breakthroughs, Humanity advanced quicker than ever. It wasn’t entirely a smooth process however, the rapid progress brought with it instability, and many wars broke out over territory, resources, ideology… The usual things. But all that changed with the invention of a large scale terraformer by a martian scientist named Rupert Korstov. Humanity exploded across the system, and for the first time, they weren’t confined to domed facilities. They terraformed entire planets to mimic Earth’s natural biomes. This process wasn’t cheap however, which led to several mega corporations dominating and blowing out all competition. This has carried over to today’s time, where there is no longer any competition, but massive companies that hold monopolies over one or more areas of industry. As you can imagine, many of these companies are not well liked.

The second biggest breakthrough for humanity was the discovery of faster than light travel, which allowed them to reasonably make it out to other solar systems. Using massive colony ships, the journey still often times took years, leaving the outer colonies, for awhile, isolated. Eventually this problem would also dissipate, as faster than light long range communication technologies started to appear in the market. The messages could be relayed much faster than even their ships could fly, taking just months to travel from the farthest systems back to earth. While not entirely ideal, it was massive progress, and allowed the outer colonies to join the Sol council. Though much information was still delayed.

This brings us to the current day, a few centuries after that, where we’ve managed to work communication time down to minutes, and space travel to mere days. Humanity seems to be stronger than ever, with many of the mega corporations investing in heavy research and development, each one wanting to be at the front of the next huge breakthrough.