Future History of Humanity
Science fiction works best for me when it becomes more than entertainment—when it creates a world rich enough to think about civilization, politics, technology, religion, identity, and the fate of humanity.
My three favorite science-fiction series remain:
1. Battlestar Galactica
2. Dark
3. The Expanse
For me, these belong in a category of their own. Battlestar Galactica combines civilization, extinction, religion, destiny, politics, and recurring cycles of destruction and rebirth. Dark is perhaps the most disciplined treatment of time, causality, determinism, and identity I have seen on television. The Expanse gives the most convincing picture of humanity becoming a genuine space civilization.
Although Dark remains firmly in my top three, it does not enter directly into the future history developed below; that sequence is built around The Expanse, Foundation, and Battlestar Galactica.
Several others come close. Westworld is very good, though weaker toward the end. 3 Body Problem may yet become something greater. Foundation is excellent and almost belongs with my top three, though something still feels missing. Silo and Fallout are very effective entertainment, while Dark Matter is simply good. I could not initially get into Severance, though I intend to try again. I am now trying Pluribus, while Murderbot and Alien: Earth are also on my list.
I generally do not like Star Wars; The Mandalorian was a rare exception.
It was while discussing these series—especially For All Mankind, which I have not yet watched—that another idea emerged.
Its premise initially seemed too narrow to interest me: what if the Soviet Union had reached the Moon first? But the series apparently develops into something much larger—a continuing Space Race leading to lunar bases, Mars, space resources, permanent off-world populations, and eventually distinct political identities beyond Earth.
And then the thought occurred to me:
this sounds almost like the opening chapter of The Expanse.
Not canonically, of course, but as an imaginary future history the progression works remarkably well:
For All Mankind → The Expanse → Foundation → Battlestar Galactica.
I have not yet watched For All Mankind, so I would not place it in the title or judge it alongside the others. But conceptually, it provides a very attractive prehistory for the sequence.
From Earth to the Solar System
The Expanse begins with humanity already established as a true Solar-System civilization.
Earth remains the old center. Mars has become an independent political and technological power, while the Belt has developed its own culture, shaped by low gravity, resource extraction, exploitation, and marginalization.
This feels like the natural long-term consequence of the process that For All Mankind appears to begin.
Humanity does not simply move into space.
It becomes different societies.
Then the Ring network opens access to countless new worlds.
The Solar System ceases to be the whole human universe.
Humanity becomes interstellar.
Give that process thousands of years, and the world of Foundation becomes easy to imagine.
From the Solar System to the Galactic Empire
In Foundation, humanity has moved from one planetary system to the entire Galaxy.
Millions of inhabited worlds belong to a vast Galactic Empire, while Earth has become so remote that humanity has largely forgotten its own origin.
This feels like a natural conceptual continuation of The Expanse.
In The Expanse, Earth still defines Mars and the Belt.
In Foundation, Earth has become almost irrelevant.
One can imagine the Ring network as one of the first steps toward this enormous dispersal, with the political world of The Expanse becoming the distant prehistory of the Galactic Empire.
But Foundation is not ultimately about the triumph of civilization.
It is about its collapse.
Hari Seldon's psychohistory predicts the fall of the Empire and a long dark age. The Foundation is created to shorten that interregnum and prepare a Second Galactic Empire.
What If Psychohistory Fails?
Perhaps Seldon's Plan succeeds, and the civilization emerging from the dark age eventually becomes the distant ancestor of Battlestar Galactica.
But a more interesting possibility is that psychohistory ultimately fails.
The collapse of the Galactic Empire could deepen into economic disintegration, isolation, war, demographic collapse, and technological regression, until almost all the human worlds once filling the Galaxy disappear.
Humanity had occupied millions of planets.
Thousands of years later, only scattered remnants remain.
Kobol could be one of them, eventually giving rise to the Twelve Colonies.
Then Battlestar Galactica is not the story of humanity beginning its expansion into space.
It is the story of what remains after a vast Galactic civilization has already risen and disappeared.
The Twelve Colonies are not the beginning.
They are the residue.And this is where the connection to Battlestar Galactica begins.
Earth: From Planet to Myth
This also makes the role of Earth fascinating.
Already in Foundation, the original home of humanity has largely disappeared from collective memory.
Now imagine another ten thousand or twenty thousand years of collapse, migration, isolation, and technological forgetting.
Earth would gradually pass through several stages:
historical location → ancestral memory → religious tradition → myth.
And this is exactly how Earth appears in Battlestar Galactica.
The survivors are not merely searching for another habitable planet.
They are trying to recover a forgotten origin.
Humanity has become so old that it no longer remembers where it began.
The God of the Cylons
Perhaps the most intriguing connection concerns R. Daneel Olivaw, the ancient robot of the Foundation universe who survives across immense stretches of human history and helps guide humanity’s future.
Suppose Daneel—or some descendant of such an intelligence—survives the collapse of the Galactic Empire. Humanity forgets the Empire, Earth, robots, and psychohistory.
But the machine remembers.
Tens of thousands of years later, surviving humans encounter an intelligence that knows their forgotten history, influences events across generations, and possesses powers beyond their understanding.
They would probably call it God.
This suggests an intriguing interpretation of the mysterious God of Battlestar Galactica: perhaps it is not God at all, but the last remnant of an unimaginably ancient artificial intelligence.
That would also make one detail especially amusing: the entity apparently does not like being called God.
Perhaps because it knows perfectly well that it isn't one.
From Psychohistory to Providence
Psychohistory works by predicting the statistical behavior of enormous populations. But after the Galactic collapse, humanity may have fallen from millions of inhabited worlds to only a handful of surviving colonies.
At that scale, psychohistory would become increasingly ineffective.
Individual decisions would begin to matter enormously.
By the time of Battlestar Galactica, only tens of thousands of humans remain. The ancient intelligence could no longer guide history through populations alone.
It would have to intervene through individuals:
Baltar. Six. Roslin. Adama. Kara Thrace.
What the survivors interpret as divine providence could therefore be the distant descendant of psychohistory.
At the height of Galactic civilization:
guide populations.
Near the extinction of humanity:
guide individuals.
Humanity Invents Artificial Intelligence Again
And then comes what may be the greatest irony.
Long before the Galactic Empire, humanity had already created robots.
Machines such as Daneel had existed for tens of thousands of years.
But civilization collapsed.
Human beings forgot.
Eventually, one surviving branch of humanity invented artificial intelligence again.
And it created the Cylons.
Humanity therefore repeats something it had already done in an age so remote that nobody remembers it.
The oldest surviving machine from humanity's first age of artificial intelligence would then find itself trying to save humanity from the machines produced by its second invention of artificial intelligence.
Now the central statement of Battlestar Galactica acquires an enormous historical meaning:
“All of this has happened before, and all of this will happen again.”
Perhaps human civilization does not simply progress.
Perhaps it expands, collapses, forgets, and reconstructs the same ideas again.
An Imaginary History
The speculative chronology is then roughly:
Humanity leaves Earth → The Expanse → Solar-System civilization → the Ring network → interstellar expansion → Foundation → Galactic Empire → collapse → Seldon dark age → psychohistory fails or only partly succeeds → most of humanity disappears → Earth is forgotten → Kobol and the Twelve Colonies survive → humanity creates AI again → the Cylons → Battlestar Galactica → the survivors search for mythical Earth → an ancient intelligence, remembered as God, guides them there → humanity forgets everything once more.
Thousands of years later, on our Earth, humans rediscover science, build computers, and begin creating artificial intelligence again.
The whole imagined history can therefore be reduced to:
Expansion → Solar civilization → Galactic civilization → Empire → collapse → forgetting → rebirth → repetition.
Perhaps this is why Battlestar Galactica remains, for me, the greatest science-fiction series I have watched: it does not merely ask what humanity will become, but whether humanity can ever escape itself.
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