Bacteria

Life has had a long time to evolve, far longer than humans thought in the pre-singularity eras. As earthers first learned when they sent increasingly sophisticated satellites and probes to explore their interstellar neighborhood, the galaxy was anything but a sterile void. Vast clouds of bacteria floated between the stars, seeding life in every niche, evolving into exotic and complex life forms everywhere they landed.

The earth was isolated, the existing life in its cluster neighborhood previously destroyed in a supernova of disastrous proportions. It had hundreds of millions of years to evolve into unique plants, insects and animals, culminated into humans and sumini, but in that it was no different than the millions of other planets in the galaxy that also evolved their own fauna and flora.

The biggest surprise to science was not that there was extra-terrestrial life, or even that there was an abudance of intelligent (and super-intelligent) life saturating the universe.

The biggest surprise to science was that the galaxy was sopping with DNA. Bacteria, edible plants, exotic space monsters who actually do want to eat human flesh.

It was also ultimately a fatal blow to most earth-bound anthropomorphic religions, although more exotic post-religious faiths eagerly filled that void. Even with its emerging sumini, earth was a bit player in the cosmic symphony of civilization. And rather than being a staging ground for a grand interstellar colonization, earth was instead a forgotten backwaters that had to struggle just to keep from being overwhelmed or decimated in a new galactic economy that earth's inhabitants could barely understand.

Earth itself didn't flourish; instead, it was dismantled and subsumed during a brief race for power and information during the rise of sumini rule. This new species, a weird cross between human and computer and corporation emerged from the earth's ashes, and humans were forever exiled from their birthplace.

That's not to say that humans haven't flourished. Indeed, the modern human enjoys luxuries undreamed of in pre-singularity times, without death or disease. But humans are just one more intelligent species, among millions of intelligent species banished to the galaxy's wastelands, each species barely above the level of insect compared to the dominant super-intelligences clustered around the stars.

Humans have given up the dream of exploring other worlds, or even ever again stepping foot on one. The chances of finding another earth that hasn't already been claimed or dismantled by a super-intelligent sun-hugger are beyond hope.

Besides, humans have become comfortable with their new nomadic lifestyle. They travel between systems in grand starships, inhabit pocket simverses they upload into freely at their leisure, slip through wormholes to discover new wonders.

But then there are spindowners...