Cut-Up Timeline of the Future

via NASA

I love mashups, I love timelines, I’m certain I’ve mentioned somewhere that the ideal Alien franchise is Alien, Blade Runner, Predator, Avatar, and Halo. This post started as that, but spiralled out of scope very, very quickly (who could possibly have predicted this, I've never been known to spiral out of scope). The only original material here is the connective tissue, but you could easily find and replace the proper nouns and have yourself a Mothership timeline. Might do that in the future. Most of the sources should be easily-recognizable, and most of the those that aren't are probably from Orion's Arm.
 
As part of the self-imposed challenge, I’ve kept as many dates intact as I can: some have been juggled to a new century but they should still be recognizable.

Futures, Cut Up and Collaged

 
███ ██ 196█ - The US army deploys the first iteration of the Universal Soldier program.
 
Jan 14 1966 - Sergei Korolev survives surgery and continues his push for a Soviet moon landing.
 
Jun 26 1969 - Soviet cosmonaut Alexei Leonov becomes the first human on the Moon.
 
Jul 20 1969 - The United States’ Apollo 11 mission successfully lands Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin on the moon.
 
Sep 20 1969 - Second Soviet moon landing; Anistasia Belikova becomes the first woman on the moon.
 
Oct 12 1973 - The United States establishes Jamestown lunar base at Shackleton Crater.
 
Jul ██ 1974 - Zvezda lunar base is founded by the Soviet Union, also at Shackleton Crater.
 
███ ██ 1982 - Two Antarctic research bases (one Norwegian, one American), succumb to episodes of inexplicable violence in quick succession, leading to the death or disappearance of all hands at both facilities. The follow-up investigation produces no meaningful conclusion: ergot poisoning and cultic murders are the two most popular explanations.
 
███ ██ 1983 - US-Soviet conflict over a lunar lithium mining operation leads to the Jamestown Crisis.
 
███ ██ 1984 - The Lunar Peace Treaty is signed, dividing up lunar territory between the US and USSR to prevent further hostilities.
 
Jul ██  1987 - China establishes its first lunar base.
 
███ ██ 1989 - An InGen genetic research facility on Isla Nublar suffers a containment failure and releases an unspecified biological contaminant into the environment; the island is napalmed by the Costa Rican government to stem the outbreak.
 
███ ██ 1992 - Heightened violence in Jammu and Kashmir escalates to open warfare between India and Pakistan. International parties are unable to stop the conflict before it spreads across southern Asia. Charismatic augment-supremacist demagogue Khan Noonien Singh, who unbeknownst to the public was a former subject of the Universal Soldier program and former CIA intelligence asset, carves out a massive sphere of influence across south Asia.
 
Feb ██ 1995 - First human landing on Mars. Helios Base and Happy Valley colonies are founded later in the year.
 
███ ██ 1996 - With his fiefdom collapsing around him, Khan Noonien Singh flees Earth aboard the hijacked SS Botany Bay with 84 members of his inner circle. This marks the end of what will later be called the Eugenics Wars.
 
███ ██ 1997 - The Mars-7 Alliance is founded, consisting of the United States, Soviet Union, India, Japan, North Korea, the ESA, and a 13-nation coalition of communist countries.
 
███ ██ 2000 - Capitalizing on the expansion of Lunar and Martian colonies (and the loss of outsourced labor caused by the Eugenics Wars), the Tyrell Corporation introduces the Nexus-1 replicant; advertised as “biological robots”, replicants are ultimately cloned humans that have undergone a suite of genetic modifications derived from those used by the Universal Soldier program.
 
May 16 2001 - The Black Mesa Research Facility in New Mexico suffers a catastrophic reactor meltdown and subsequent explosion, becoming the worst nuclear accident in history. Conspiracy theories that the site had been intentionally bombed by the US government, Soviet Union, or Singh loyalists abound.
 
Sep ██ 2001 - US intelligence organizations, having patched major holes in inter-agency communication in the wake of the Black Mesa incident, defuse a plot to crash multiple commercial flights into key political and economic targets.
 
███ ██ 2003 - The asteroid “Goldilocks” is successfully captured for use as an iridium mine; the mission is hijacked so that it falls into Martian rather than terrestrial orbit. North Korea is expelled from Mars-7 over suspected connections to the hijacking.
 
███ ██ 2007 - The Coalition of Independent Spacefaring Nations is established, consisting of Brazil, China, Nigeria, Malaysia, Pakistan, South Africa, Saudi Arabia, and Thailand.
 
███ ██ 2018 - Mass mutiny by replicants in the Martian colonies of Dominguez and Shimata leads to a retaliatory ban of replicants on Earth; an international pogrom against replicants in hiding will continue for decades to follow.
 
███ ██ 2024 - The Weyland Corporation releases its “David” android model as a safe and affordable alternative to replicants.
 
Sep 01 2024 - Violent clashes between police and interned homeless in San Francisco Sanctuary Camp A erupt into full-scale revolt. By Sep 02 the riots have spread to other Sanctuary Camps across the US and on Sep 03 the California National Guard is deployed to Camp A, leading to the deaths of hundreds of interned individuals.
 
Nov 06 2024 - Christopher Donner is elected president of the United States on a platform of widespread industrial deregulation, loosening of labor rights, and “restoring law and order” in the wake of the Bell Riots.
 
2026 - Political tensions in the United States reach a tipping point and shift to open violence between the federal government and the populace. Dozens of separatist movements and partisan factions emerge in a comparatively brief period. While not called so at the time, this marks the beginning of what will be called the Second Civil War, which will in turn be considered the opening act of the World War 3.
 
2032 - Andrew Steele Jarret elected president of the United States, ushering in a brief but exceedingly brutal regime of religious authoritarianism.
 
2034 - A team of scientists led by Dr. William Weir and funded in part by the Weyland Corporation publish a breakthrough study in causality-stable faster-than-light travel; much of the material was reverse engineered from recovered documents of former Black Mesa researchers Isaac Kleiner and Judith Mossman.
 
2036 - Andrew Steele Jarret is ousted after a disastrous failed invasion of Canada prompts an international military response. Jarret drinks himself to death while under house arrest, and the Christian America party collapses along its already-severe factional lines.
 
2040 - The USS Event Horizon launches from Deimos on a year-long round-trip mission to Proxima Centauri using  the first fully-functional FTL gravity drive; first successful ova fusion procedure.
 
2044 - The Event Horizon and her crew are declared lost in action, having exceeded both the scheduled return trip and the slower-than-light communication window.
 
2047 - The derelict Event Horizon is detected in Neptunian orbit by outer system flight control buoys; the USS Lewis and Clark is diverted from its in-progress survey mission to investigate. The disastrous recovery mission results in multiple deaths and the sudden psychosis of Dr. Weir. Further development of the gravity drive is halted as FTL research (spearheaded by the Weyland Corporation) shifts to focus fully on the Black Mesa data.
 
2049 - Twelve nuclear weapons are deployed across the world, decapitating multiple major governments and sending the global economy into chaos.
 
While the origin of the launches was unknown at the time, investigations in the 2070s provided some evidence that the attacks were made by the Cyberdine AI SKYNET as part of a suicide attempt.
 
2053 - An international ceasefire agreement brings World War 3 to a close. The United Nations is re-established. The recovery of Earth proves to be a lucrative opportunity for the colonies of Luna, Mars, and the Belt.
 
2054 - The COSTIN space telescope detects and then confirms the presence of a biosphere on the fifth moon of Alpha Centauri A IV. In line with the Greek naming convention previously established, the world is named “Pandora” by its discoverers, who certainly had a sense of irony.
 
2060 - United Nations starship Unity launches for the Alpha Centauri system. At the time of its departure it is the largest spacecraft ever built, capable of carrying and supporting ten thousand persons in stasis for the 40-year journey.
 
2077 - The Resources Development Administration launches the ISV Bradbury and ISV Venture Star to Pandora, utilizing an STL stellar-laser propulsion system. Due to a drastically smaller payload compared to the Unity, RDA ISV-class craft are able to make the trip in 6.75 years.
 
2084 - The Bradbury and Venture Star arrive at Pandora and begin remote drone surveys of the surface.
 
2093 - The USCSS Prometheus is lost with all hands during its maiden FTL voyage, decapitating the Weyland Corporation’s expeditionary fleet and resulting in a multitrillion-dollar loss for the company as stock value plummeted.

[Sidebar: Subsequent inquest revealed that Peter Weyland had not only died aboard the Prometheus, but had ordered the mission based on falsified data published in The Journal of Paleoastronomy (a vocal supporter of ancient alien conspiracy theories); nearly a third of the Prometheus’ crew lacked meaningful credentials for their claimed fields of study, and a further half did not possess credentials from an accredited institution.]

2100 - The Unity’s reactor core suffers a critical failure shortly after arrival in the Alpha Centauri system; the ship’s captain is assassinated in the chaos, which leads to the fragmentation of the colonists and crew along ideological lines. Unable to land on Pandora due to the RDA’s colonization rights, the Unity factions instead land on the unclaimed and poorly-studied rocky world of Chiron (Alpha Centauri A VI).
 
2104 - The Weyland Corporation colony ship Covenant is lost with all hands. The Yutani Corporation makes its first buyout offer.
 
2114 - The first widely-available “dinosaur” neogens are developed based on public domain documentation of InGen’s late 20th century attempts.
 
2119 - Direct first contact is made with the na’vi on Pandora, marking the first communication between humanity and another sapient species; mass human colonization of Pandora begins; “unobtanium” mining operations begin.

2121 - "Great Downturn" recession hits Earth; officially declared over in 2129, but its aftereffects were felt for decades afterwards.
 
2136 - The Avatar Program begins on Pandora, allowing RDA personnel to directly teleoperate na’vi-derived replicants.

2141 - The first Demarchist (democratic anarchy) states form in the Solar System.
 
2145 - “Merfolk” parahuman geneline developed; first distinct non-sapiens human species since extinction of Neanderthals. 
 
2148 - Excavations on Mars uncover the ruins of a facility constructed by an extinct space-faring alien species (“Protheans”) as an observation post some 50,000 years before present. Several nonfunctional spaceships, a fragmented data cache, and a significant depot of refined unobtanium (element zero / eezo) catapult space travel forward centuries by spurring the discovery of mass effect fields and their use in FTL drives.

2149 - A Union Aerospace Corporation research facility on Mars is destroyed during tests of an eezo-augmented gravity drive; a massive media suppression campaign by the Martian government follows. Rumors of a Satanic cult, demonic incursion, and "the Slayer" persist for years after with no apparent source.
 
2149 - The Grissom Expedition arrives at Pluto and makes two major discoveries:

1. A functional interstellar mass effect relay under the ice crust of Charon
2. Extensive ruins constructed by a third intelligent alien species on Pluto and its moons, dated to ~1.2 MYA.

Several cryofossilized specimens of the ruins’ inhabitants are recovered and taken to Luna for study; these MIGO (Mycelium Integrated Gestalt Organisms) demonstrate nearly-identical neurological link abilities as most keystone species in the Pandoran ecosystem.
 
Aided by the decrypted Prothean cache, the Grissom Expedition activates the Charon mass relay and makes a successful voyage to Arcturus. The Systems Alliance is founded out of a union of Terran and offworld member states, marking the first interplanetary federation.
 
2152 - The Systems Alliance continues exploration of the mass relay network, and establishes colonies on Demeter, Eden Prime, and Nova Terra.
 
2154 - A na’vi alliance, led by the Omatikaya, Olangi, Tayrangi, and Trr’ong nations, leads an assault against RDA facilities on Pandora; the majority of RDA personnel are driven off the planet. With the recent discovery of the Prothean cache on Mars and the subsequent loss of their unobtanium monopoly, the RDA is unable to maintain operations on Pandora and collapses within the decade.

[Sidebar: Due to the limitations of the RDA’s interstellar supply line, unobtanium was extracted at a regular pace that aligned with ship arrivals. With no more than five payloads en route to Earth at a given time, any long-term production disruption would cripple the operation. Most of the unobtanium that was in their possession at the time of the revolt was years from reaching Sol and would still need to be refined into eezo by other parties when it arrived.]

[Sidebar: Claims that the na’vi revolt was led by Avatar Project member Jake Sully were later determined to be unfounded;  the alliance was in fact headed by Nekxtstal of the Omatikaya, who impersonated the MIA Sully as a way to damage RDA morale by posing as a high-profile traitor.]

2156 - Seat of the Systems Alliance moves from Earth to Arcturus Station.
  
2158 - The reactionary Frieden party is founded on Europa; they are not particularly creative fascists, deploying a gamut of predictable talking points against their enemies (namely the Systems Alliance and the Second Soviet Union, with boilerplate supremacist ideology bolted on for good measure.)
 
2160 - Jovian Moons Campaign: The Frieden movement leads a coup of the Europan government and subsequently declares the world’s secession from the Systems Alliance. Three months of warfare follows, primarily between Frieden militias and Soviet forces under Jovian premier Vladimir Koslov.
 
2162 - The Frieden-Soviet war spreads to Earth, with fighting most intense in equatorial Africa and South America; this stage of the conflict is later called the Rainforest Wars.
 
2163 - The United Nations Space Command deploys troops to Mars to put down Koslovic separatists on Mars.
 
2164 - Frieden-Soviet war spreads to Mars. Fighting will continue on the planet until 2166.

2169 - The first space-adapted human geneline is released.
 
2170 - The Interplanetary War ends with the Treaty of Callisto.

2175 - California secedes from the United States
   
2182 - First uplifted bonobos.

2190 - First Calebs (uplifted dogs) developed; the first Conjoiner hivemind forms on Mars.
 
2206 - The artificial intelligence unit Traxus IV goes rampant, forcing the total shutdown of the Martian Planetary Net.
 
2222 - The Weyland-Yutani USCSS Nostromo self-destructs shortly after responding to an anomalous distress signal on Zeta2 Reticuli IV 2 (“Acheron”).
 
2248 - Founding of the Jovian League.

2256 - The Babylon 5 space station, intended as neutral territory between the Systems Alliance and independent colony worlds, begins operation in the Epsilon Eridani system.  

2279 - The Weyland-Yutani colony of Hadley’s Hope on Acheron (Zeta II Reticuli b 3) is lost with all hands after the catastrophic meltdown of the atmosphere factory.
 
2279 - The Weyland-Yutani penal colony of Fiorina 161 is lost with all hands.
  
2300 - First destructive upload procedures performed.

2310 - First uplifted corvids
 
2320 - First uplifted elephants and pigs.

2330 - The Outer Planets Alliance is founded on Ceres.
 
2336 - First uplifted dolphins.
 
2350 - The Pur’n’Kleen water hauler Canterbury is lost while returning to Ceres from Saturn; survivors of the incident claim that the ship had been intentionally attacked by a Martian warship.
 
2381 - The Systems Alliance cruiser Auriga suddenly drops out of contact and diverts course from its designated outer Sol system patrol route. The ship is unable to be stopped before it makes a relativistic-velocity crash near the Zimbabwe-South Africa border. An estimated 45 million persons die from the impact alone, rendering it the single greatest loss of life in human history.

2405 - Destructive uploading banned by the Systems Alliance.
 
2494 - The hijacking of the UNSC Callisto by outer colony insurrectionists is met with violent reprisal from the Systems Alliance. Armed resistance quickly spreads through the outer colonies 

2508 - The Aegis VIII mining colony excavates an artifact belonging to a previously unknown extinct intelligent species; first documented encounter with Inferni redivivus. The outbreak quickly spreads to the visiting planetcracker USG Ishimura, where it is contained through the efforts of ship's engineer Isaac Clarke.

2511 - An armed uprising by the Unitologist Church on Titan Station breaks containment of Inferni redivivus samples; the outbreak quickly spreads and is contained only by forced meltdown of the station’s antimatter reactors.
 
2514 - An Inferni redivivus Brethren Moon wakes from aestivation in the HR 8799 system, but is killed by a collision with the planet Tau Volantis.
  
2535 - A series of overlapping disaster events cripple the planets of the Sol system. 2535 and 2536 alone see a major epidemic linked to a flaw in genetic rejuvenation treatments, an aggressive fungal ecophage on Earth, the rampancy of Mercurial von neumann bot populations, and major malware infections of common nanotechnology. Earth’s population of 22 billion is halved. This period will be later known as the Technocalypse, or simply "the Fall".
 
2537 - Rogue nanoswarms cripple Mars' terraforming efforts and a sizable proportion of the population; the Global Artificial Intelligence Array (GAIA) is brought online as a last-ditch effort to stem the ongoing disasters in SolSys.

2538 - The Caracas Treaty Org is formed out of surviving Earth and Cislunar polities to tamp down the prolifieration of dangerous technologies.

2547 - First Contact War: An Alliance expedition through the Shanxi-Theta relay makes hostile contact with the Shandi oni Oq’u Ch’awaruutu (lit. “Covenant of the Great Journey”), a militant religious alliance of spacefaring alien species. Viewing human tampering with a mass relay as blasphemous, Covenant forces pursue the retreating Alliance ships through the relay and begin orbital bombardments of the colony worlds of Shanxi and Harvest. Chi Ceti IV, Leonis Minoris, and Skopje are glassed later that year.

2548 - Covenant forces invade Meridian; the planet is not fully glassed until 2551 due to local resistance. Battle of Xi Boötis A. Bounty and Madrigal are glassed.

2549 - Jericho VII, Charybdis IX, Cote d'Azure, Asmara, Verent, Kholo, Boundary, Algolis, Estuary, Paris IV, Arcadia, Mesa, Kroedis II, Greydowns are glassed.

2550 - Endymion, Dwarka, Eridanus II, Lostwithiel, and Minab is glassed. Battles of Great Bear, Ballast and Gamma Pavonis VII.

2551 - Systems Alliance forces successfully repulse the Covenant siege of Concord. Battle of Trove. Legopo, Imber, and Promise are glassed.

2552 - The Covenant mounts a major invasion of the Alliance's inner colonies, culminating in the invasion of the heavily-fortified Epsilon Eridani system; Reach is glassed, the venerable Babylon 5 station is destroyed and the Covenant launches a siege of Solsys. The siege is ultimately broken by intersecting external factors: 

• The UNSC Pillar of Autumn, fleeing Reach under secret orders from the Office of Naval Intelligence and under pursuit by Covenant forces, discovers the intact and fully-functional Prothean megastructure Halo Installation 04; Covenant forces breach the installation's Inferni redivivus containment facility, activating its automated countermeasures. The ring is destroyed by detonation of the Pillar of Autumn's antimatter fusion reactor before either threat is able to escape.
• The Covenant's internal factionalism reaches the point of civil war, as sangheli separatists under the command of Arbiter T'elo Badami break with the Prophet's leadership over the revelations from and destruction of Installation-04. The prophets order a genocide of the sangheli and elevate the jiralhanae to full control of the military.
• The asari, turians and salarians, along with their allies among the Covenant fringe species, launch their own separatist movement; the coup successfully seizes control of the Covenant's capital station, the Citadel of High Charity, and re-establishes the Citadel Council.
• GAIA takes a combat role for the first time in the war, acting separately from the Systems Alliance or United Earth Government; Covenant losses are catastrophic.

With its leadership decapitated and its military overextended, the Covenant dissolves swiftly and violently. The siege collapses by December. 

2553 - Official peace accords signed between the Systems Alliance and T’elo Badami’s provisional military government on Rube. A similar treaty is signed with the Citadel Council later the same year, though with more open trade agreements.

2558 - The UNSC Infinity deploys troops to the Prothean shield world of Requiem, attempting to seize control of the world from Jul ‘Mdama’s Covenant remnant. The engagement ends in failure, as 'Mdama's forces drive the artificial planet into the local star rather than let it fall into human hands. 

Later that year, the rampant AI unit Cortana activates warship production facilities on Nomos II and launches an invasion of Solsys in an attempt to wrest control of Earth away from GAIA; she is swiftly subsumed by the archaliect and her fleet is dismantled. 

[Sidebar: As with the Citadel, mass relay network, and Installation 04, the Requiem & Nomos II shieldworlds were falsely presumed to be constructed by the Protheans - this was not disproven until the follow-up investigation of the Battle of the Citadel in.] 

2559 - The Treaty Org appoints GAIA as their official defense standard against cyber and biological threats; all incompatible systems are outlawed. 

2583 - Investigation of the rogue SPECTRE agent Q!xářèr Axhtr̯íæš (transliterated name Saren Arterius), by Systems Alliance agent Jane Shepard reveals that Arterius had been subverted by contact with an Uncategorized Existential Threat (code name SOVEREIGN). During the hunt, an intact, non-rampant Prothean AI unit ("Vigil") on Ilos provides definitive proof that the galaxy's megastructures (Citadel, relay nework, Halo installations, shield worlds, etc) were constructed by the Protheans themselves, but rather the work of a much older "Leviathan" civilization; SOVEREIGN was an Inhibitor command unit, built by the Leviathans as part of an automated Inferni redivivus control and quarantine system and activated by the Covenant’s breach of the Installation 04 containment facilities in 2552. As command unit, SOVEREIGN would wake the rest of the network from stasis for a full purge of the relay network and any systems in contact with it so as to starve the infection of food.

SOVEREIGN assaults Citadel Station (formerly the Covenant capital of High Charity), and is destroyed only via near-lightspeed ramming maneuver by the SSV Normandy under Commander Jane Shephard.

[Sidebar: A growing but unproven theory is that the Inhibitor network has degraded over time, as it did not activate for the Inferni redivivus outbreaks of 2508-2514 or the takeover of the Nomos II production facility by Cortana in 2558.]

Despite attempts by Captain David Anderson and Admiral Steven Hackett to go public with the Vermire- report, the Citadel Council suppresses its release and claims that SOVEREIGN was an unusually large geth dreadnought. 

2585 - An individual claiming to be the resurrected Jane Shepard cuts a bloody swath across the Terminus Systems before she is killed by Blue Sun mercenaries on Omega Station. Post-mortem analysis of the body revealed that the killer indeed was the cybernetically-puppeted corpse of Cmdr. Shepard, operated by a semirampant AI based on partial brain scans. Far-right human-supremacist terrorist organization Cerberus claims responsibility.
 
2586 - Fleets of Inhibitor warships (“Reapers” to the media and public) sweep through the mass relay network, sterilizing every planet that could potentially come into contact with Inferni redivivus. Systems Alliance ambassador Donnel Udina facilitates a coup of the Citadel Council with the aid of Cerberus, lasting about three hours before the Inhibitors arrive. 

SolSys is spared only thanks to the apparent intercession of GAIA; fewer than a dozen extrasolar colonies remain by the end of the purge, and the state of alien-controlled worlds is unknown. The Systems Alliance, Covenant remnant, and Citadel Council are no longer extant.

[Sidebar: The specifics of GAIA’s contact with the Inhibitors remains unknown; a GAIA-operated vessel and an Inhibitor ship co-orbited the Charon relay for 18 hours before the Inhibitor departed; the Arcturus Relay was destroyed immediately following. It's suspected but not confirmed that GAIA was able to reverse-engineer some advantage from the wreckage of the 2558 invasion fleet.] 

[Sidebar: Those colonies that survived the Inhibitor War did so only by going completely dark, shuttering all communications with the outside and scuttling their interstellar fleets. They were presumably excluded from GAIA’s negotiations.]

2590 - GAIA now controls the entirety of Earth and Cislunar space; the archaliect disregards Treaty Org directives and begins the mass relocation of the humans remaining on Earth, sending them to other worlds of the Sol System or aboard interstellar colony ships; this is met with a brief failure of military resistance called the Last War. (Which it is, at least on Earth.)

2608 - The Great Expulsion ends; fewer than 50 million humans remain on Earth.

2740 - The government of the recolonized Epsilon Eridani system broadcasts the River of Stars Charter, declaring the Eridanus League as the first interstellar polity since the collapse of the Systems Alliance. However, no other polities join until 2765.

Now - It is the present day.