[AlexanderHowl]

In the distance future, human civilization has carved itself out a niche by being willing and able to exploit the resources of the plentiful rogue objects that drift between the stars in the Orion Arm. While other species squabble over the limited resources available to each star system, there are an average of 100,000 rogue planets per star in interstellar space, though they are primarily rogue dwarf planets orbited by debris clouds (effectively asteroid belts rather than planets). Even so, human civilization has settled billions of rogue planets throughout the Orion Arm and, while they individually only support an average population of few billion, human civilization is the largest and wealthiest in the Orion Arm.

While each rogue planet is an independent polity, they are members of the Human Alliance, which represents human civilization. Few other alien species understand the sheer size and wealth of human civilization, and the Human Alliance would like to maintain that ignorance. The Human Alliance also maintains thousands of terraformed biological preserves orbiting stars that it uses to renew the genetic material of the human polities.

Recently, the Human Alliance has noticed several hundred human polities disappearing every year. While they were small polities, no more than a few million resident each, no evidence remains to point to the fate of the polities, just space colonies hollowed out by something. The public is starting to notice something odd though, and immigration from smaller polities to large polities has reached an all time high as humans seek safety in numbers.