2016: Plagued by problems from its outset, the so-called “international space-station” is overhauled in favor of a design advocated by over three dozen of the world’s largest engineering firms.  Deployment of the replacement, dubbed “Milestone,” begins on 15 October. 

22 August 2029: Jack Carter, Ethan R. Good, and Lauren MacDuffie become the first humans to set foot on Mars. 

2025: A US-Nippon co-op, anonymously funded by cryonics mogul Dr. Mohammed J. Morgan, seeks the approval of the United Nations for its plan to establish a permanent colony on Mars by 2030, beginning a ten-year-long legal and diplomatic struggle. 

2033: On the first day of Ramadan, Baltimore-born Joshua il Hammad detonates a thirty-kiloton nuclear device from inside a Manhattan skyscraper, killing 800,000 instantly and afflicting nearly a million more with lethal radiation poisoning. 

2035: After ten years, Forward Thinking, Inc., the space interest, receives approval for its Mars colony program.  Launch is scheduled for Jan. 1, 2042. 

2038: Jon Nederlander, a Swiss physicist at CERN, makes public a controversial design for an orbital railgun to launch payloads into space cost-efficiently.  His underfunded project begins construction of a demonstration model in the Swiss Alps. 

2045: The first Mars colony, which counts among its residents Dr. Mohammed Morgan and all three of the original US astronauts, begins operation.  The initial landing site is named Gagarin City at Morgan’s insistence. 

2046: The Mandela, a second Mars-bound colony pod, is launched; touchdown is scheduled for 5 August 2050. 

2047: A malfunctioning Gagarin City climate controller produces a massive over-concentration of oxygen, resulting in an explosive fire that consumes most of the city within minutes.  The cause of the malfunction is never entirely understood.  The few survivors asphyxiate within days, though, unbeknownst to all, Morgan and a few others are able to secret themselves within six cryonic tubes brought surreptitiously from Earth.  Buried in a flawlessly insulated chamber two hundred feet beneath the Martian soil, the bodies of the six sleepers remain undiscovered for centuries. 

2049: World population is estimated at 8.9 billion. 

2049-2050:  Massive chunks of the Antarctic ice cap calf into the ocean, raising the global sea level by eight feet within two months.  Low-lying regions are submerged, killing millions in Asia, South America, the Netherlands, and elsewhere.  Disease, famine, and chaos are the inevitable result.  As desperate human waves crash against their borders, developed nations ready themselves for World War III.  The United States president declares a state of nationwide emergency and authorizes martial law, causing the predictable right-wing revolt. 

2050: The Mandela lands; its occupants dub their new colony Mandela City. 

2050-2057: Various wars rage back and forth across the globe, causing further environmental degradation and reducing the human population by over a billion, until petroleum supplies abruptly bottom out in the fall of 2057.  At final tally, China has ceased to exist as a state (or, for that matter, as a landmass with a large population of Chinese); Salt Lake City and Washington have been nuked by parties unknown, and Los Angeles has been sacked by a flood of refugees from the Pacific Rim; India and Pakistan have nuked one another into oblivion; two-thirds of the African population has contracted the deadly Cote d’Ivorie syndrome, and large portions of Russia have been irradiated.  Meanwhile, Sarah Apple, a young woman who claims to be the second coming of Jesus, captivates millions of followers by telling them that the Millennium, the fabled thousand-year-reign, has begun; she organizes massive efforts to help people in afflicted regions before disappearing during the 2056 bombing of Lima.  A collection of her writings and speeches (some of dubious authenticity), called the Apple Gospel, is later officially added to most denominations’ Bibles. 

2058: World population is estimated at 5.3 billion.  Following the hideous winter of 2057, the surviving developed nations begin a concerted campaign to rebuild their shattered infrastructures, a process which lasts (in one form or another) well into the next century.  To facilitate this, they mutually consent to surrender a significant amount of their national sovereignty to a new Global Economic Consortium and nationalize most corporate assets, then begin an intensive program of capital investment in nations devastated by the war.  The remainder of the 21st century is economically and culturally austere. 

2093: Armand Muller, an Austrian nuclear engineer, announces the creation of the world’s first manmade, self-sustaining fusion reaction. 

2111: After nearly two decades of R&D by several corporations, a trio of starships powered by the “Muller process” takes off from White Sands, bound for Mars.  The cost per kilogram of payload is estimated at 50 dollars American, a savings so vast as to make space travel feasible even in the postwar economic climate.  Over the next thirty years, Mandela City's population grows a hundredfold, swelled by the ranks of the dissatisfied and the foolhardy. 

2125: World population is now 7 billion on Earth and 8000 on Mars. 

2130: A large asteroid nudged into Martian orbit is worked-over by countless Von Neumann devices to become an embryonic space elevator.  A similar project is initiated in Earth orbit in 2136.  When completed in 2158 and 2163, respectively, these galvanize a gigantic leap in interplanetary traffic. 

2134: Most of the autonomous Martian cities agree in principle to the initiation of a full terraforming program. 

2140s: Belt-mining operations commence in earnest.  (Several hollowed-out asteroid bodies are later used for the construction of Beltway cities.) 

2135-2160: Chaos on Mars as Red eco-terrorists battle Consortium forces to prevent what they see as the devastation of Mars' natural environment through terraforming.  Hostilities die down somewhat when Solomon Garrick, rumored leader of the movement, is killed in 2153; however, sporadic fighting and incidents of terror continue until the early 2190s. 

2167: To counter widespread piracy, illicit mining operations, and criminal flight, Earth and Mars deputize a large fleet of warships and charge them with the maintenance of order in populated areas of the solar system.  This body, acting independently of any one planetary authority, is dubbed the “Earth-Mars-Beltway Patrol Legion,” an unwieldly name later shortened to “The Legion.” 

2181: A cloud of nano-surveyors descending through Saturn’s outer atmosphere reports a startling anomaly: a massive solid object seemingly hovering five miles below the planet’s cloud cover.  Further investigative probes are sent, arriving early in 2182.  When one of the larger probes lands to attempt to take a core sample, its signal abruptly ceases. 

2182-2208: A battery of intensive scientific testing is conducted on the mysterious object.  Thousands of probes are sent in at varying velocities and ordered to backtrack after a certain amount of time and return with their data.  After fifteen years, the world’s scientists grudgingly agree that the object is some kind of space-warping gate, though they have no idea what physical principles it operates on or how it is able to remain suspended in Saturn’s atmosphere without any apparent means of support.  It takes another eleven years to begin the tedious process of mapping out the gate’s potential destinations -- the artifact apparently behaves according to certain rules of probability, making it impossible to for any object entering the gate to be certain of its final destination.  It also becomes apparent that objective travel time is exponentially related to entry velocity. 
 
2200:  The Global Economic Consortium renames itself the Solar Economic Consortium.  Business proceeds as usual. 

2208: In a highly controversial move, the Legion uses the gate to mount a manned expedition to Alpha Centauri, though the system has been found to contain mostly asteroids and space debris.  Luckily, the force actually manages to end up in the Centauri system (arriving in 2209 realtime) -- unbeknownst to the crew, the odds of doing that had only been calculated at 57.4 percent.  Within a year, the expedition has established a permanent staging area in one of the more stable rock clusters.  Transmissions are relayed between the systems through mega-redundant nanobots which pick up incoming signals, duck through the gate, and retransmit them.  However, the loss of nanobots with each iteration is staggering -- over 40% are lost on each passage.  The GEC orders more of its brightest minds and resources to be devoted to the problem of "de-randomizing" the gate. 

2210:  During Halley's Comet's latest go round the sun, a group of Martian malcontents (the "Cluster Fuckers") land and begin digging into the ice, becoming the first known comet-riders and media darlings. 

2215: After years of speculation, the "memory chip" is finally engineered successfully; the device allows the storage and retrieval of human memories and sensory input on computer. 

2208-2230: As a result of the reasonably successful Alpha Centauri experiment, public interest in the possibility of extrasolar colonization rises.  However, no one is willing to fund -- much less attempt -- a voyage that carries at best a 60% chance of success, so the Centauri colony remains an isolated case. 

2235: Legion ships lay siege to the Beltway home of miner and suspected pirate Lars Wong, killing Wong and his immediate family.  Evidence within the remains of the home unequivocally prove the miner innocent and Legion officials issue a public apology.  Regardless, the incident galvanizes anti-Consortium sentiment, which finds its first successful expression when two thousand disgruntled miners and assorted personnel, dubbing themselves the "Spartans," highjack a colony pod near Titan and plow it through the transit gate.  Dozens of groups attempt to follow; several are shot down by Legion patrols, but several more make it through. 

2236:  Despite loud protests in the Consortium offices, Legion officials decide to allow unchecked migration through the gate, arguing that the discontented are best allowed to leave. 

2237: A splinter group of Cluster Fuckers diverts an entire comet down Saturn's gravity well and through the gate; taking orbit around a gas giant in the Epsilon Eridani system, they begin to colonize other bodies in the system; however, later travellers to E.E. find it uninhabited, with the colonists' records ending abruptly at 2239. 

2238: After six (subjective) months of wandering since their departure, the Spartans find a marginally habitable, Earth-like planet to settle.  Naming it Sparta (naturally), they begin to carve out a niche for themselves in the planet's ecosystem.  Since the male to female ratio is about 2:1, cloning and genetic assembly become priority operations. 

2245: A massively virulent and fatal influenza vector wipes out two Lunar cities and spreads to millions on both Earth and Mars in the six months before it can be contained.  The incident prompts Legion officials to further restrict travel and tighten security; in turn, equally virulent rumors that the Consortium itself planted the virus set off a second wave of departures through the gate. 

2260-2273: The Titan colonies declare independence from the Beltway Mining Axis and a drawn-out war ensues, during which the Consortium and the Legion remain strictly neutral, only intervening to prevent Geneva Convention violations. 

2265: The governor of the Centauri colony (population 83,000) sends a fully-loaded colony pod through the gate to Wolf 359. 

2273:  After over a year of surrepititious construction, the Beltway Mining Axis' railgun becomes operational -- the three domed cities on Titan are punctured and destroyed by the enormous projectiles, killing over 90% of the population.  Public outcry leads to the arrest and imprisonment of several key BMA officials for the commission of war crimes.  Rather than serve out their sentences, however, many of the officials take the option offered them by the government to leave through the gate on their own self-financed expedition. 

2275: The Church of the Dark Star builds a meditation retreat on Pluto.  Yearly attendance in the first decade of operation peaks at 45 persons in 2282. 

2280:  After quickly becoming lost in the Gate network, the BMA officials and their fellow-travelers land on a marginally habitable, tundra-like world which they name, unimaginatively, "Axis." 

2287:  The Wolf 359 colony, flourishing, normalizes relations with Centauri and Sol. 

2292:  Earth's oceans have receded to pre-2050 levels. 

2298:  Crude nanoassembly techniques are developed nearly simultaneously by the Pfilter and the Merriday-Woo pharmaceutical conglomerates; the first nanoassembled drugs hit shelves in 2303. 

2300:  The terraforming of Mars is declared complete.  Atmospheric pressure at the datum is 0.712 that of Earth's, with the atmosphere composed of 72% nitrogen, 17% oxygen, and 11% carbon dioxide and trace gases.  44 percent of the planet's surface is covered in water, and most major landmasses are capable of life-sustaining processes. 

2320: A magnetic containment failure at the Kobe-Kyoto No. 8 fusion reactor causes an accident which flash-incinerates over thirty city blocks instantly, killing 2 million.  After two years of poring over dense, "grown" code, programmers locate a five-hundred line fault believed to be the culprit.  The SEC decries the overreliance on embedded networks and orders greater human oversight of crucial systems. 

2327: Spartan scientists discover that by using lasers at wavelengths around ten to the negative seventh meters as a carrier wave, the Transit Gates can be forced to open to one destination with absolute certainty; furthermore, by modulating the wavelength up or down, the destination can be selected from among any of the gates within about five parsecs of the point of origin.  Knowing that they have a guaranteed way to return to Earth space, the Spartans begin a massive military buildup with the intention of overthrowing the Solar Economic Consortium.