Zubonian Emissary Inhetiezgeret Tselek's speech on the Eight Gifts, January 20, 2040

Zubonian Emissary Inhetiezgeret Tselek's speech on the Eight Gifts,

January 20, 2040

My fellow…

Well, right there, I have to stop and explain. Almost everyone hearing this, at whatever remove, will be a fellow of mine, but not a fellow citizen, or even a fellow Earthling. A fellow human, though. For, as most of you will already know, we Zubonians are not from Earth, in the sense of having been born here. But we are human. Homo sapiens in your parlance. Our genes originated on your world, the descendants of the bioevolution of this planet, which is our original home as it is yours. How that came to be true is a long, complicated story which will become clear in time. So, who am I? My name is Tselek, more fully Inhetiezgeret Tselek, in our common language, which we maybe a little arrogantly call Egtis Olyarese, which means “universal speech.” We don’t all speak this language from birth, but everyone in the Zubonian culture learns to speak it. A lingua franca, if you will. But back to who I am. As a somewhat arbitrary fact, I am the first man not born on Earth ever to set foot on this planet. Wow. That’s something.  

I was, in fact, born on a world, a planet, not so very different from Earth but much younger, so far from here it is quite literally beyond imagining. We, and you, can only just adopt a frame of thinking about it, not really understand it the way you understand that Earth, or Zubos, are globes. Zubos is impossibly far. Too far for light from there to ever get here. Turns out that’s actually normal in the space travel game. A little more about that later. Our world is not like yours in one very important respect, though. It is not a natural home for humans, or the life of Earth, but one which was transformed artificially, thousands of years ago, from a nonliving world into a planetary home for people who originally came from… right here. Earth. This world. Many of you already know this amazing fact, which is the opening of a long, fascinating story most of you will eventually become at least somewhat familiar with.

Now, you may already know that not all of us live on the planet. This is an interesting fact about life in advanced spacefaring civilizations. Most people, or other smart beings, don’t live on planets. More about that later. But some do, and planets are useful as stable depositories where life can more or less sustain itself on its own. Sort of insurance against big system breakdowns. Although, as you’re finding out right now in your history, even planets can have complete system failures if you don’t know how to take care that they continue to be stable and sustainable.

So much that’s strange to you, and to us, as well, in my being here, now, talking to you, the natives of the Urbos, the “original world,” the Kwento Lunlan, “Home of Man.” Earth. But I am beating around the bush, as I think you say in English. I think of English as almost your “egtis olyarese,” universal language. Sorry if that offends anyone, but the time for truly global communications is a bit overdue, so you may have to get used to it. Anyway, I do have a very serious purpose in addressing you today, so I will get to the point. I am what you might call an ambassador, an emissary. Sent to Earth to communicate and coordinate. I have pretty much mastered your language, or at least I hope so, and I’ll stick to it. So, to the point:

We come in peace for all mankind.

No, seriously. We do. For you, the people of Earth, and for ourselves, as denizens of a civilization. With all that may imply.

And so do our patrons, the Aiyonzhiseler. The real aliens. We are human, but they are not. They did not originate on this world or ours, and their form, mental processes, and language are all very different from yours, or, for that matter, ours. I’ve noticed that some of the journalists of your world are already taking to calling them Ionians, because of the similarity of the sound to the name of an ancient Greek tribe. Of course, Aiyonzhiseler is our word for them, not theirs. They do not speak in the way we—or you—do, and it is quite simply impossible for us humans to “pronounce” their language or their “name” for themselves, although even that concept doesn’t quite fit. Now how all that came about is a really long and complicated story! But here I am, digressing again. There is so much of importance to say, and so much that it is unfamiliar. One wants to just chat about this and that. Get familiar. Become friends. But, enough. I’ll just say that you are unlikely at any time to have direct personal encounters with Ionians, but I urge you to learn what you can about them, because their advent on this world is probably the most important thing that’s happened here since cells figured out how to use sunlight for energy. Really. I mean that.

We, as human clients of the Ionians, have come here because your world is in its worst crisis in several hundred million of your years. Some of your scientists had already more or less figured that out before we burst on the scene, just a couple of months ago. This realization, which was already beginning to manifest itself before our arrival, is the first of what are probably the three greatest shocks to the human civilization of this planet in all of your history.

First, the realization that the planet is so fundamentally and gravely stressed by recent environmental changes usually somewhat simplistically referred to as the “Climate Crisis,” or even “Global Warming,” that the continued survival of human beings beyond just a few centuries or even decades is not only threatened but actually rather unlikely. Calling such a grave threat “global warming” is almost comical. Anyway, the near certainty of extinction is what would happen without intervention and remediation which is almost certainly beyond the technological and scientific ability of present terrestrial civilization to cope with. And that is the reason for the second two big shocks. Both of which, I hope, in time, people here will come to view as a tremendous boon, a stroke of incredible good fortune, quite literally a chance at planetary salvation.

The second shock, of course, is that you are not alone. There are others in the universe, as some people, both sensible and not so sensible, have suspected for some time. Both other humans, who originated on Earth thousands of years ago, and other intelligent beings, who did not originate on Earth. So, not googly eyed intelligent bugs from the ninth dimension… or not only them… but other people. People from another world, another culture, with their own long history, language, spirit, and essence. We are called Zubonians, which, loosely, means “second worlders.” We are like you, fully and genuinely human, but not exactly like you. Our most recent common ancestor was about 12,700 years ago. During what your scientists call the Lesser Dryas… love that name… a brief return of the ice age after the end of the Wisconsin Glaciation, about 15,000 years ago. Stressed out the folks living here on Earth for about 1300 years. But it was the time when some kindly intelligent beings, from impossibly far away, that we now call the Aiyonzhiseler, or Ionians, came to Earth. And they, well, rescued some people who were facing certain doom. That’s us, or rather, our ancestors. They lived in Eurasia someplace. The Ionians know in detail, of course, but they don’t always share everything they know. More about that later, too. And you, your ancestors, are the people left behind. Long story. Which brings us to the third shock, of course…

Which is, obviously that there are, in the universe, other intelligent beings than humans. Other civilizations. They are not common. In fact they are incredibly rare. Some of your thinkers had pretty well figured that out, too; not that humanity is alone, which it isn’t, but that civilized beings, what we call zhiseler, “knowers,” are really, really rare. The ones that came to Earth a long time ago (and probably not for the first time at that), have not been interfering in your civilization like in some kind of science fiction novel. Well, except for the one time, before now! They were mostly observers. But for reasons that may eventually become clear they decided to replicate Earth life to another convenient world that could be modified to support it, and in the process to rescue some populations of doomed humans, trapped by the vicissitudes of the Dryas brief Ice Age. These alien, the Ionians, are indeed inscrutable, mysterious, hard to understand, all that, but, there’s good news. They, who are here, now, in the vicinity of your world, the Ionians, are not hostile to us, or to you. Just the opposite. They are here, not to colonize your world, which is not even a suitable environment for them. Nor are they here to take your resources, enslave you, or even interfere all that much or to your detriment with humanity and its destiny. Instead, they have come here, across unimaginable distance, for a second time, to rescue human beings, this time all of them, from nearly certain doom. And we, people from the “second world,” Zubos, have been called upon to help with that. Speaking for myself, I see this as an honor and a tremendous privilege. Of almost unimaginably historic proportions, from my perspective as well as yours.

Already there are people in this world who refuse to believe this benign version of what from any view are almost literally earth-shaking events. They see nefarious ends. But, my friends, my fellow human beings, please hear me out and I hope you can believe me. This is just not so. The Ionians, at least the ones who are here, have only a compassionate interest in humanity. There is virtually nothing we have that they want, other than knowledge about ourselves, which some of them find interesting. But they and their civilization have existed for a long, long time, and they have developed protocols and contingent plans for the kind of circumstances your world finds itself in. Some of them, I’ve gleaned, aren’t really interested in you, or us, at all, and would probably not interfere or even pay attention to our plight, if it were up to them. And many of them take an attitude towards other beings that’s so cautious as to verge on paranoia. But that does not make them hostile. Anyway, some others of them have journeyed here, and made truly incomprehensible technology available, in order to help you, or, as I prefer to think of it, to help us, humanity, to weather our worst crisis ever. Out of compassion. Or altruism. Whatever you want to call it. And I, Inhetiezgeret Tselek, as an emissary of mankind’s Second World, along with a few hundred of my fellow denizens of that world, are here to serve as liaisons, as we have some experience already dealing with these aliens. This is our mission, and we take it on with joy and determination to succeed.

You may be understandably skeptical. And I cannot and do not promise you that there will not be disruption coming. Including large scale changes to your way of life that many of you will not like — because it’s human nature to resist change— and over which you will not have control. But I promise you, and I hope in time you will come to see for yourself, that this intervention, this massive remediation of the conditions that this world has fallen into, will be for the benefit of humanity; all of humanity, and that it will be, in fact, the single best thing that ever happened to the race as a whole in its entire history. Even including the events that led to our second civilization on my world and its associated space. Which, while it is in a sense everything to me and my people, in another sense is only a prelude to what is happening now. And that, my friends, is nothing less than this:

The time for the healing of the Earth, and the reunion of all its children, is at hand.

This is truly exciting and wonderful, and I hope you will come to see it that way very soon. When I say “all its children,” I am including myself and the people of my culture, because we too are originally from this world, and our fate and yours are inextricably linked. Our name for your world is Urbos, as I mentioned before. This means “original world.” Or sometimes we refer to it as Kwento Lunlan, “Home of Man.” We do not seek to own this world or occupy it, but we call it that in recognition of the fact that it is our original home, just as it is yours. We have been separated from it for a long, long time, during which most of our people all but forgot about the Kwento Lunlan. Almost, but not quite. Every Zubonian knows and has always known that out there in the vast horizon of deepest space, lies our original home, orbiting a fairly ordinary star in a fairly ordinary galaxy, impossibly far away. For a lot of reasons that will eventually be at least a little more clear to you, we could not come here, or even communicate with you, still less come to your assistance as civilization emerged all on its own on this world. But we did get some information from your world, sporadically, and sparsely. We could not and did not come here, and for the most part neither did the Ionians in all that time, but there were watchers left behind. These are beings who, by their own ethics, do not tend to interfere with others’ affairs. But they do observe. And some of those observations, here and there, came down to us, your brethren across the sea of galaxies, over time. So we know, and have long known, something about you and your world, even your culture and your history (until recently only to a limited extent). But you did not know of us, or of the Ionians. Because they made sure to keep it that way. It’s their way, and they hold the cards, so to speak. They are the elder race. We aren’t in a position to challenge that. But, fortunately, for the most part the yoke is easy, so to speak. They don’t expect much from us. But what they choose to share with us is what we know from them or of them. And the same will be true for you. It’s just the way it is. I tell you this frankly, because we are in the same position. They have no objection to my telling you this, because it’s true, and they value the truth. What they don’t always value is sharing the truth. This is a lesson our people have had to learn over and over.

So my purpose in talking with you today is to outline the first four of what will eventually be Eight Gifts. That’s the simplest way to describe what the Ionians have planned for your world. I have portrayed them as a little secretive, which they are. But they are also very generous and powerful, so in some ways they are like gods. Simply and directly, let me list and briefly describe their planned “gifts” to the people of Earth. I will touch on the second four at the end, but for the near term, only the first four will concern us. These are gifts to our species, not just to this world, but it is this world where our species originated, and the survival of this world is crucial to the future of mankind, as well as, perhaps equally important, terrestrial life. As a result of these gifts, my friends, the future for our species, and the life of this world, is very bright. Without them, it would be very dark, indeed. I will not dwell on the science of why that is the case, which even without the more advanced information available to us your scientists had already begun to realize. But know this: without the Ionians’ help, life as you have come to know it on this Earth would be gravely disrupted, and it would be millions of years before it recovered… and even then it would be scarcely recognizable and would almost certainly not include the descendants of humanity. This catastrophe can and will almost certainly be avoided, thanks to these gifts to us.

At the very end I will also touch on why they are doing this for us.

First, Intervention and Remediation of the collapsing macroecosystem (“Gaia System”) of this planet. This intervention will mostly be conducted by automated technology, operated remotely, from orbit. It will literally transform the systems of the world to stop runaway greenhouse warming in its tracks and restore a sustainable balance to the world. These brute force implementations are completely beyond the ability of existing human technology here on Earth to effectuate, but for the advanced technology of the Ionians, it is feasible, even fairly straightforward.

There will be some accommodation for the fact that Earth is seriously overpopulated… Newsflash!... but this is not in itself fatal, and that, too will be addressed long term, in a way consistent with the ethical and compassionate principles of advanced Ionian civilization. Which, I hope it goes without saying, involve the preservation of life and an equitable approach to what you on this planet might call self-determination. I will not attempt to go into details right now, but it’s enough to say they will intervene and restore the chemistry of the oceans to a sustainable level, recapture fossil carbon, and restore the balances of various systems to a healthy and sustainable condition. They will quite literally save the world, physically, from catastrophic environmental collapse. After which, with the tools at hand, it will be our… your… responsibility to maintain the world in a healthy condition.

Second, and closely related, is the gift of Knowledge, Technique and Method for Sustainable Planetary Environment.  With Ionian help and technology, we will introduce means of food production, energy production, transportation technology, and manufacturing economy, that will bring prosperity and sustainable livelihood to all of humanity. This is a huge promise, but please believe me. It is possible. And it will happen, and more quickly than you might think. The technologies available are very advanced, and involve essentially free energy. In the long run, I can tell you right now, your scientist Edward O. Wilson had it right… a good deal of the Earth will have to be given over to wilderness; free range for other inhabitants than us humans. Including most of the oceans. But this will happen gradually, and no one will be deprived of life or the chance at a self-determined meaningful existence.  Much will change. Some people will not like some of the changes. But for everyone, there will be relative abundance, and for the great majority, there can be no doubt in anyone’s mind but that their lot is improved. Some will seek new frontiers “out there,” but some will choose to stay right here, and live on a healed and sustainable Earth for a very long time to come.

Which brings me to the third great gift. Something you need to understand about the Ionians. Some of which has rubbed off on us, the Second Worlders. And that is that technology and biology are not really separate. They have an understanding of life, including the life of Earth as well as the life of other worlds and their own original home, that transcends terrestrial human understanding. It far exceeds the understanding of my culture, too, but we have already assimilated some of this knowledge, and learned to work with some of what they have given to us, long since. Anyway, you might think of this gift as Perfect Medicine. The Ionians understand our life completely. They will introduce cures for sickness, subtle changes that will allow us to live more easily and fully, and longer. If you are very observant, you may have already noticed that I, and other Zubonians, are subtly different from you in ways that aren’t just genetic drift. We have enhancements, thanks to this biotechnology. We are not angels or supernatural beings. We are fully human. But our systems are self-healing. Our naturally evolved programmed death is defused, so that our lifespan is greatly extended. Our genes are self-repairing. We do not experience runaway infection, or cancer, or other diseases that continue to plague… literally plague… Earth’s humans. We are very strong, have the ability to control our minds and bodies in ways that will seem wonderfully liberating to people who have lived in thrall to evolution and the consequences of development purely from natural genetic heritage. It’s a balance. We are human. We have the same chromosomes and essentially the same genome you have. But after we are born, enhancements are introduced that give us health, clear mind, ability to avoid mental incapacity or disease, and long life. And these same developments, enhancements to our lives, can, before too long, be made available here to you as well. And I feel sure that this news will be greeted with great joy and celebration… as it should be, because there is nothing good about sickness, old age and death. Death is inevitable, but much of the suffering that goes with it is not. That’s the ultimate truth here.

You may look at me and have a hard time imagining how old I am. Partly because, after twelve thousand years, we people of Zubos are naturally different from you. We have light brown skin but often green or blue eyes. Often reddish hair. These are not common combinations on Earth. We are on average a little more gracile, a little smaller than you, as the world we live on is slightly… very slightly… lower in surface gravity. Our overall appearance is just different, idiosyncratically different. Not hugely so, but you see it. In any case, you might think I’m… what?  Mid 30s? 40 in your years? Well no, friends, and I hope you see this as a promise. I was born on Zubos. So far away that it isn’t even meaningful to talk about “simultaneity,” or try to give a date here on Earth for the day I was born. But I can approximate, based on my age as I’ve experienced it. And based on that, if you could assign a date, it would be sometime in the year 1780. You heard right. I’m in the prime of life, but I am about 260 years old by your reckoning. And this will become normal for humanity here on Earth in the near future as well. This is the third gift, in a nutshell, my friends. Not immortality. Every living thing dies. But long, healthy, and meaningful life.

This will take a while to roll out, but once intervention of the kind that the Ionians have elected to do here is underway, it has its own logic. And I have been assured that the means to transform life for the people of Earth so that this gift is realized for the great majority now living will be forthcoming. So hang on. It will get better.

The Fourth Gift may seem somewhat less dramatic, but it is actually very significant. And it is simply this. Free access to information and culture. This one is not unlimited, any more than the others. In fact, as I intimated, there are lots of things that the Ionians just don’t share with us. They have their own reasons. A many million year old civilization (I didn’t mention that, did I?) will not share things it considers potentially dangerous in the hands of a “young” client like… us. They will tell us a lot of things, teach us a lot of technology, and just give us, without understanding, other kinds of technology. They will give us access to a vast storehouse of knowledge and history of beings like and unlike us going back a very long time and spanning unimaginable space, although even that is not total. A good deal of what makes the other gifts possible will be withheld from you, as it has been from us on Zubos. They have technology that seems like magic to us, even now. That produces energy seemingly from nothing (actually from interaction of different dimensional levels or something; I confess I don’t understand it at all). But what you do learn, and get access to, will expand the horizons of human knowledge enormously.

This knowledge is the foundation for the other gifts, that will unfold in due time. The Ionians will impart materials technology that will make it possible to have ready access to space. Space elevators, making ballistic rocketry obsolete, and other advanced means to travel in the solar system. Secret technology that, given freely as discrete machines, will allow for acceleration in space for indefinite periods of time, seemingly without any source of fuel or other energy. It’s all heady and confusing. But here’s the short version: in the future you will be able to learn about beings, cultures, and histories you’ve never imagined existed, and humanity will be able to travel among the stars, although not quite in the way you might have expected. And this, in essence, will, in due course, constitute the Fifth Gift.

At the same time, the Sixth Gift will be the both the technology to build, and the actual construction of, an artificial world. A space habitat with more surface area than Earth. Humans here on Earth have already conceived of such things. I can tell you, it is not just pipe dreaming. Gigantic habitats for humanity and associated earthly life constructed in space are very real, and will be built right here in the Solar System in due course.

The remaining gifts will be contingent. Our species has not yet fully demonstrated that these are our birthright. Speaking to you as a man, to other humans, I want you to aspire, with us, to achieve the trust that will be needed for these to be imparted to us, or for us to develop them on our own, as may be. In Zubonian culture, we have some access, but not free access. So what am I talking about here?

What they think of as the Seventh Gift is what you might think of as Universal Ethics. Karmkerkiezel Olyarese in our language, a phrase that has very specific meaning in relation to Ionians and the way they conceive of life and its purposes. This is the distillation of religion (sort of), spirituality, philosophy, ethics, over time spans greater than the entire existence of the human race, that have manifested themselves and emerged elsewhere in the universe, and which, the Ionians teach us, anyway, are essential for long term survival. They will not share certain knowledge or ability with us, or any other beings they encounter, until they are convinced that this system of doctrine… more than that really, but that’s an essential part of it… is fully integrated not just into our intellectual being but our very essence. They will share these tenets, and methods, and mental states… with us, as best they can, if we seek it, but they cannot make us adopt or incorporate this knowledge (and more than knowledge). And while they are generous, they are not particularly generous with their time, or interested in spending time with us. So learning the subtleties of other beings’ ethics and philosophy, and even more their methods of mind and mind training, is far from a given or easy. But it is, nonetheless, a gift that is literally beyond price and is the key to our ultimate success as a race of zhiseler, wise beings. So we set this as our goal, to achieve the universal spiritual, philosophical and ethical awareness that constitutes real civilization. We are told, and I believe, that these tenets, or whatever you want to call them, really are universal. Every successful civilization eventually attains them, in more or less the same form. It’s like convergent evolution. The karmkerkiezel really is olyarese, that is, universal. I can tell you this much. It is not magic. It is not supernatural. It does not involve currying favor with, or praying for the assistance of, gods or godlike beings. But it is moral, and involves the evolution of mental processes so that a more direct awareness of reality is attainable. There have been hints of this in our human cultures, but there is a time in the life of every successful civilization when it all comes together, and becomes an essential part of the shared culture. This, I believe, is in our shared future, and it is something we can, and should, aspire to.

I do not mean to insult those who choose to retain their faiths or religious beliefs. That is, of course, a key element of self-determination, which, it happens, is also part of the karmkerkiezel. We must all seek truth in our own ways, and I will not presume to tell you here and now what is the right way. Together, we will move forward.

And the Eighth… and last… Gift? This is access to the network of translation… travel… through vast distances of space. The Ionians did not even invent this. They discovered it. And so have some… a very few… other naturally evolved races of zhiseler, widely scattered in space and time far too vast for easy human understanding. I use the Zubonian word, zhiseler, meaning something like “wise beings,” because xenosophonts sounds so pedantic. Maybe it’ll catch on in English, as a borrowed term. Anyway, this network, of “star links” or “gates” or whatever you want to call them, is precious and carefully guarded. How it works, how it is accessed, how to find the locations where it exists… all of these are carefully guarded secrets, which are not shared with us. Yet, in the long run, we are sure it is the key to our joining the great adventure of expanding our life and culture through vast realms of space and time in the future. With you, in time, we will stand on the cusp of a leap forward, and I believe we can and will be able to do this, with the Ionians’ help, but it’s far off, a long horizon. Something to know about as a promise for the future. In the meantime, we will have such access as we are granted, and that, alone, is wonderful almost beyond imagination.

So, for now, we, and especially you, here on this world, are so very, very lucky, because you have escaped the fate of many worlds that have arisen here and there in huge numbers in this unimaginably vast universe, which is to arise, and briefly flourish, but to fail to grasp the holistic essence of living in and on a world in time to make the transition to sustainability and expansion in space. Many civilizations over quite literally billions of years and countless tens of billions of light years of space, scattered far and wide because intrinsically very rare to begin with… have lived brilliant short lives and perished in the collapse of the life systems of their worlds brought about by their own failure to grasp the means to survive in time. But this will not be your… our…. fate, because we are fortunate enough to have a patron elder race that will guide us and help us through this transition.

You might have guessed that Karmkerkiezel Olyarese, as we call it, is the reason we were rescued from certain death on Earth during the Lesser Dryas Ice Age. It is the reason the Earth has been left alone, free to develop as its potential dictates, without interference, up to now. That may not be so obvious, because there are trade-offs, obviously. But the old ones long ago learned from experience that the universe flourishes best, by and large, by being left alone.

The karmkerkiezel is also the reason why, now that it is clear that the critical turning point has passed and, without intervention, the collapse of Earth’s macrosystem and extinction of humanity on this world is certain or nearly so, that policy has been reversed. Massive intervention and redemption is already underway. The Eight Gifts are a reflection of one of the most important tenets of the karmkerkiezel, which is generosity. We don’t need a foreign word for that; it’s something we all understand. Adults selflessly help the young to achieve maturity. Those who have much may… and should… feel an impetus to share with those who have less. This impetus arises from another aspect of the karmkerkiezel which we humans have also fully evolved, even though we do not always live up to it. And that, of course, is love, which also gives rise to compassion. We may… we should… in the end we must… love life. And we must care for life. The fact that these impulses are, in the fullness of time olyarese… universal… is the reason for our good fortune. Because the old souls of the universe like the Ionians not only advocate, they are, in their very being, suffused with just that love of life, and desire that it flourish, wherever it exists.

Fellow humans, the future is bright. There will be some difficult transitions ahead, but your children, our children, will live to see a world, and more than a world, where life, sustainable, expanding, adventurous, meaningful life, is possible, even assured. And that is truly worth celebrating, as it is the single most momentous event in your or our history, and will probably remain so for ages to come.

Thank you. I will not take questions right now, but in the near future a great deal of information will be released that will help people in all walks of life prepare for what is to come. Good night. Laoyeh. May you have long life, prosperity and happiness. Yo seng keln, sarayole, ib golorakis.

Ionian Philosophy

watch this space (ha! as if anyone is doing so!)

On Ionian Paranoia (from a Human Perspective)

NOTE: portions of the following are superseded. The language and names, as well as the existence of human "daughter worlds," is no longer applicable. 

Humans have found Ionians incredibly frustrating and baffling, over the long history of their connections to them. This frustration has to be balanced against the fact that, however mercurial, bizarre, uncommunicative, condescending, or otherwise annoying the reality of Ionians may be, the human population of the Daughter Worlds and other habitats in Human Space owe their very existence to their altruism and technology. It was Ionians who saw fit to rescue some human beings who (at least, so the story went) were in imminent danger of extinction. This was during the tail end of the Wisconsin glaciation on Old Earth, at the time of the original discovery by Ionians of the Solar System Link to Ionian Space and consequently of Earth itself.

Ionians of that era provided the means (including transportation) to inhabit a new world, Zubos, a remarkably Earthlike world which they set aside specifically for these humans. Zubos was partially terraformed (having already been relatively habitable), and various geoengineering tweaks have been undertaken over the time of its habitation. In fact, Ionians seem to pay attention to their charges, and have frequently offered help just in time when systems were failing, politics had made a particular world or habitat ungovernable, or other serious problems threatened catastrophe. They didn’t interfere, exactly, but just made available some out or fix that defused the situation. It was disconcerting, in a way, and humiliating, more than once, but people just came to think of it as part of the way things are.

The Ionians originally shared some basic science and technology with the primitive humans, and made some of the infrastructure of their vast civilization available. Within a millennium after the First Contact, there were several human worlds, and humans had access to spacefaring technology. But these things were consciously doled out. There was never general access or acceptance of humanity as belonging to the Ionian supercivilization in any meaningful way.

Ionians kept the locations of links to their own home systems secret, and did not share with humans the techniques of locating and prospecting for spatial links. Even after millennia, this technology and even the basic science behind it proved elusive. Nor did the Ionians share with humans much information about themselves or their history, or any of the other civilizations they had encountered. They were very careful not to share technology that could be transformed into weapons, and when they did communicate directly and straightforwardly with human leaders and scientists (which was infrequently), as often as not it was to warn them to stay away from any destructive or weapons technologies, which, they made clear, would simply not be tolerated. But, apart from this, they were benign zookeepers, whose motto seemed to be Live and let live, mostly separate from us, thank you very much. In fact, only one of the Human Worlds had any permanent Ionian population, that being Koros (also called Corrace), which was the location of the Ionian Institute of Earth and which had a population of very eccentric Ionian pure-biologicals who apparently thought it acceptable to share a world with humans of Earth (not something which the vast bulk of Ionians would consider as even sane). All of this was the case, even though to a close approximation Ionians and humans are biologically similar enough that the worlds they would choose to inhabit would tend to be the same worlds, and their artificial habitats would have roughly the same internal conditions of gravity, pressure, temperature, air mixture, etc. 

The general belief among humans came to be that Ionians are just naturally paranoid. They will not take any chances with upstart races. They aren't hostile, but they don't let them in; they keep them at long-arms' length and carefully control not only contact, but technology and information transfer as well. The principle of both of these being: only that which benefits the Great and Glorious Totality of Ionus will be allowed. The secondary goal of benefiting the aliens (i.e., us) is not ignored, but it is subservient. And nothing not actively useful to them, or at least harmless to them, and important to the well-being of their client (again, that being us), is allowed to pass between them and us. So, millennia after Contact, humans still know relatively little about them, and have surprisingly little actual direct contact with them and their technology. 

As a result, although the broad outlines were known, of how Human Space and its worlds and habitats came to be, and how they were dependent on and connected to the ancient and almost unimaginably powerful civilization of the Ionians, the sweep and grandeur of Ionian history, the scope and geography of the Connected Space known to them, and the bulk of their scientific knowledge, are and always have been  mostly a matter of conjecture and mystery. 

Yet, whatever the frustrations and alienation people have felt over the long years of co-existence with Ionians in their various forms and apparitions, there has never been anything like enmity: Ionians have not actually harmed humans in any verifiable incident, ever. They just haven't been forthcoming. This is frustrating to human beings, but it is also generally understood that, however baffling and annoying they may be, they are, ultimately, benign. This is presumptively a hard-wired feature of their civilization by now; there do not appear to be any exceptions, or even any near-exceptions. Ionians have from time to time rescued humans from accidents (although not reliably: it would seem that their surveillance of human activity is at most sporadic). They have, again, from time to time and somewhat unpredictably, provided needed technologies when systems failed; offered new links to new worlds (at odd and unpredictable times, however). Occasionally in history, this particular move has defused tensions that appeared to be on the verge of leading to human/human conflict.  It could even be said that they have, invariably, been humanity's benefactors, if not always in quite the ways that the humans involved would prefer.

Given the penchant of humans on Earth to make gods of what they don't understand, it might be expected that at various points along the way of the relations between Ionians and humans there might have arisen cults or even full blown institutions of worship or supplication to these mysterious, seemingly invariably beneficent, if distant and uncommunicative, beings. But this, too, the Ionians have managed to quash: one thing they have let be generally known, in no uncertain terms, is that they are not essentially different from us. They are living beings, or the augmented descendants of living beings. They are, indeed, more advanced, both technologically and even in their intrinsic, artificially enhanced, biological nature, but originally they evolved naturally on a world not unlike Earth (somewhere, and they aren't saying where), and they believe that life in the various forms in which it has arisen is intrinsically valuable. (And that intelligent life, which they know to be exceedingly rare, is truly precious and worthy of preservation even at great cost). They have a civilization-wide value of biophilia, which they will discuss, at least to some extent, and they have managed to inculcate something of this philosophy in virtually all of the diverse cultures that make up the humans of Human Space (not including Old Earth). 

An Earlier Alien Link to the Solar System, and the circumstantial evidence of the Ionian discovery thereof

The exact location of the Spatial Link between Earth's Solar System and Ionian Space is a closely guarded secret, which plays a role in the story of the Recontact, to be discussed elsewhere.

During the course of the approximately 16,000 years of human culture within Ionian Space, however, it gradually became clear to human scientists that the Ionians had contact with Old Earth that exceeded a single visit in the relatively recent past. This inference derived from evidence that there had been some surveillance and continuous contact with the original home world of the human species in the millennia that followed the original contact. This too, is an essential element of the story of the Recontact, and the details of the unfolding of this mystery are told elsewhere.

Although prior to the period of the Recontact, humans knew very little of Old Earth, and therefore had no basis to suspect the fact, it was eventually realized, post-Recontact, that there must have also been at least one other link in Solar System Space that connected to a location from which contact had been made with Earth in a much more remote past time than the initial Ionian contact. The evidence consisted mainly of the fact that there were species of prehistoric plants and animals on Zubos and other human worlds and habitatats of Ionian Space which certainly did not exist on Earth 16,000 years ago (along with many that did, but which had since become extinct on Earth). The assumption was that there had been at least one other alien visit to Earth, long before the Ionians discovered Earth, or even had become a spacefaring civilization on their own. 

It was generally understood, even before the Recontact, and despite the fact that the Ionians did not share this kind of information, that the Ionians were in contact with, or aware of, truly ancient alien civilizations with which they had come into contact or discovered as extinct civilizations while exploring Connected Space. An intriguing mystery presented itself from the evidence that one of these extremely ancient civilizations must have been discovered by means of the Link with the original home of humanity, Old Earth. Again, the evidence was purely circumstantial, but no other explanation presented itself. The assumption was that the civilization itself was either extinct or otherwise no longer in contact with Solar System space.

The actual evidence consisted of living small dinosaurs which had become extinct on earth over 65 million years earlier, but which continued to thrive on one or more of the human habitations and planets. There were also plants descended from cycads and ginkgos, as well as giant club mosses, extinct varieties of fishes and arthropods, ammonites, extinct mammalian and reptilian orders, and numerous other forms of life, which were either no longer extant on Earth long before the Ionian contact, or which belonged to branches of life forms that still survived, but which were, in the specific forms found, no longer present on Earth itself, nor had been for ages past. The assumption was that some other aliens had taken an interest in Earth much, much earlier, probably around the time of the extinction of the dinosaurs, and that these aliens had transported these life forms to one or more other worlds, reachable via sequential link from the Solar System. Further, it was inferrable that the Ionians had at some point visited this other world or worlds, and transported some of these life forms, not back to their original home, Old Earth, but to some of the human worlds of Ionian space.  

The inference that Earth was the connection between these ancient preserved life forms and modern Ionian Space was the only reasonable conclusion. The Ionian reticence to discuss the details of their discoveries and the extent of their "empire" in Connected Space, which approached and even transcended outright paranoia, left the human scientists who pondered these questions to conjecture, infer, and deduce what facts they could, without the confirmation or additional details that undoubtedly were well within the power of the Ionians to grant. From a human point of view, their invariable refusal to do so, or even to communicate on the subject at all, was beyond frustrating, but it had been a fact of life for so long that it just had to be accepted. It was, in fact, scientific investigators from Earth itself who found this entire subject so compelling that they sought to push for disclosure from the Ionians, but cooler and more experienced heads at places like the Institute for Urbonian Biology at Zortzipak, realized that this was a fool's errand: the Ionians would divulge nothing. If there was more to be learned of the "Old Ones," as they came to be known, who must have visited Earth tens of millions of years ago, it would have to be the result of human re-discovery, via the Solar System Link that must exist or have existed, if that were even possible. But where was it? How could it be found? All these things remained unknowns.