"Man may be excused for feeling some pride at having risen, though not through his own exertions, to the very summit of the organic scale; and the fact of his having thus risen, instead of having been aboriginally placed there, may give him hopes for a still higher destiny in the distant future."
- Charles Darwin
"There are things in the Universe billions of years older than either of our races. They are vast, timeless, and if they are aware of us at all, it is as little more than ants and we have as much chance of communicating with them as an ant has with us. We know. We've tried and we've learned that we can either stay out from underfoot or be stepped on. They are a mystery and I am both terrified and reassured to know that there are still wonders in the Universe, that we have not explained everything. Whatever they are, Miss Sakai, they walk near Sigma 957 and they must walk there alone."
- Ambassador G'Kar, Babylon 5
KIRK: A war?
SARGON: A struggle for such goals and the unleashing of such power that you could not comprehend.
KIRK: Then perhaps your intelligence wasn't so great, Sargon. We faced a similar crisis in our early nuclear age. We found the wisdom not to destroy ourselves.
SARGON: And we survived our primitive nuclear era, my son. But there comes to all races an ultimate crisis which you have yet to face.
KIRK: I don't understand.
SARGON: One day our minds became so powerful, we dared think of ourselves as gods.
- Star Trek, Return to Tomorrow.
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It is the year 1105 IC (Imperial Calendar). On distant Terra it is reckoned to be the year 5625 A.D. The Third Imperium rules over more than 11,000 planets. Beyond the Great Rift lies the Spinward Marches sector, where empires great and small come together and the centuries have echoed with colossal interstellar wars between the powers. But greater powers by far than those of Man, intellects cold and ancient have been watching, indeed manipulating the flow of events in a war so slow and secret that the lesser races barely perceive their existence. But all that is about to change. The ancients are ready to divulge their secrets...
