Overview
Colonizing Sol explains how corporate sovereignty replaced civic colonization. From Sol to Elysium explains why the whole solar order ultimately tried to outrun its own contradictions. The era notes below cover the long middle: who built the infrastructure, who captured it, who resisted, and which technologies changed the definition of personhood along the way.
Era Sequence
Corporate Exodus - 2025-2100
Privatization hardens into company sovereignty. The transport and extraction stack that will later become SolEx is assembled. Off-world debt peonage becomes normal.
Age of Automation - 2100-2250
AGI, industrial genetics, and early cavity-habitat scaling produce enormous productivity gains and enormous new systems of control. The Pan-Solar Consortium emerges as a market stabilizer rather than a public government.
Identity Crisis - 2250-2500
Uploading and uplift break the older boundaries of human personhood. Luxury immortality, industrial digital labor, and engineered sentience all become profitable at once.
Identity Abyss - 2500-2750
Reality management, algorithmic governance, cognitive exploitation, and ideological hardening push Sol toward a society where most people live inside systems built to define them before they can define themselves.
Existential Collapse - 2750-3025
Wireheading epidemics, resource contraction, insurgency, and elite exit politics make the old order visibly unsustainable. FTL stops being a frontier fantasy and becomes a desperation project.
FTL Trigger - March 17, 3025
The last great technological gamble becomes the discontinuity between Sol and Elysium.
Throughlines
For corporate ancestry, precursor firms, and the research programs that fed later megas, see Institutional Lineage.
For named conflicts, congresses, scandals, and route compacts that shaped the eras above, see Historical Events.
For the territorial end state of the late-Sol order, see Megas and Territories.
For the political logic that kept warfare and exchange barely governable, see Politics, Pan-Solar Consortium, and Restrictions on Warfare.