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The Confederation of Planetary Humanity is the name humanity uses when it wants to present a unified face to the galaxy. The operative word is "wants." In practice, CPH is the political shorthand for the Sol system, its immediate allied territories, the Chilrandi Grand Herd, and the Xitixhui clan — an entity that controls the ICC, operates the Navy and the ISA, administers the frontier stations, and is regarded with varying degrees of suspicion, resentment, and outright hostility by most of the human polities it nominally represents. The galaxy sees one humanity. Humanity sees something considerably more complicated.
What follows is a political landscape assessment, written for crew members and captains who need to understand who they're working for, who they're avoiding, and why the same cargo that's welcome on Mars might get them arrested at Zion.
The CPH core — Sol system and the ICC
The Interplanetary Colonial Council — the ICC — is the governing body of what most people mean when they say "the CPH." It sits on Mars, in Olympus City, in a complex that also houses the CPH Navy's command structure, the ISA's public-facing administrative offices, and the Diplomatic Corps that manages the frontier stations. It was built by the American government in exile, shaped by the exigencies of the Voidship War and the First Contact War, and has been accumulating institutional power ever since in the specific way of bodies that control the Navy, the intelligence service, and the only functioning diplomatic channel to the wider galaxy simultaneously.
The ICC represents Sol system — Mars, Luna, the Earth LaGrange habitats, Venus (marginally), the Belt, Jovia, Saturn, and the outer reaches — plus the Chilrandi and Xitixhui as allied species with representation but not full voting membership. It does not meaningfully represent Chung Kuo, which has its own government and its own territorial claims. It nominally represents the exosystem human polities — Nippon, Bharat, New Europe, Zion, New Mecca, New Moresby, and the others — but "nominally" is doing a great deal of work in that sentence. Those polities send representatives to the ICC, pay a defense tithe they resent, and are governed by the ICC Constitution they had limited input in drafting. The relationship is less partnership and more managed friction.
Mars — The ICC Heartland
Sol system · CPH political capital · Population: ~2 billion
ICC seat of government
Mars is the political, military, and bureaucratic heart of the CPH. It was built by refugees, governed by exiles, and shaped by two centuries of deciding who humanity is going to be when it grows up. The result is a society that is simultaneously idealistic about human potential and deeply, practically experienced in how badly that potential can be misused — a combination that produces excellent governance documents and deeply cynical civil servants.
The Martian political system is a hybrid of direct and representative democracy with a mandatory service component: every citizen provides some form of service to the state, and representation scales accordingly. In practice this has produced a society that is highly educated, moderately militarised, and intensely suspicious of inherited wealth — while also producing a corporate sector of considerable power that has learned to operate through the service framework rather than against it.
Mars controls the CPH Navy, the ISA, the frontier stations, and the diplomatic corps. It does not control most of what makes human space economically functional — the exosystems produce food, raw materials, and specialist manufacturing that Mars cannot easily replicate. This dependency is the principal check on Martian authority that actually works.
The Mars-Earth relationship is politically sensitive in ways that outsiders frequently misunderstand. Mars was built by people who fled Earth. The Martian government has, at various points in its history, attempted to retake Earth, given up on Earth, ignored Earth, and formally declared Earth a research and salvage zone. The current official position is neutral custodianship: Earth belongs to humanity, its surface population deserves humanitarian consideration, and any decision about large-scale return or intervention requires ICC consensus. This position satisfies no one fully, which Martian officials consider evidence that it is probably correct.
The ISA is headquartered at L3, the Earth-Moon LaGrange point, and is the single most powerful intelligence and law enforcement body in human space. Its official mandate is counterintelligence and criminal investigation. Its actual activities include monitoring of psionic individuals, a clandestine program of null-space research classification, and what Naval Intelligence politely describes as "proactive threat management" in the outer systems. Its relationship with the Evolvist communities at Sol B is the setting's most elegant cold war: both sides know exactly what the other is doing, neither side can fully prove it, and the dance has been running for over a century.
Government Hybrid direct/representative democracy — mandatory service component
Key institutions ICC, CPH Navy, ISA, Diplomatic Corps, Bureau of Uplift Research
GalCiv policy Active engagement — CPH controls all formal GalCiv diplomatic contact
Earth policy Neutral custodianship — no intervention without ICC consensus
Principal tensions Exosystem independence movements; Chung Kuo border; Corporate influence; Evolvists
Luna and the Earth State
Sol system · Earth custodian · Population: ~3 million (Luna); ~500,000 (Earth surface)
CPH — junior partner
Luna is the CPH's oldest settled body and its most industrialised — low gravity makes it ideal for nano-assembler work, its proximity to Earth's LaGrange industrial stations makes it the hub of Sol system commerce, and its position as humanity's first off-world foothold gives it a symbolic weight that Lunars cultivate carefully. Hadley, the capital, holds half a million people and the Luna Trade Exchange — the most active commodities market in Sol system. The Luna Naval Academy at L2 produces a significant fraction of CPH officer corps.
The Earth State is the political fiction that allows the ICC to claim custodianship of Earth without having to do very much about it. The Earth State government — such as it is — administers the research stations, the salvage licenses, the occasional humanitarian mission to surface communities, and the permanent monitoring installation that watches Earth's EM spectrum for any sign that the fundamentalist survivors are reconstituting something dangerous. Earth itself is toxic, radiated, and inhabited by perhaps 500,000 people living in widely varying conditions, from sophisticated underground communities that maintained technological continuity through the dark age, to surface populations that have regressed to pre-industrial levels. The ICC's position is that Earth belongs to humanity collectively and that large-scale intervention requires consensus it has never achieved. The Earth State's position is that someone needs to be doing more and they lack the resources to do it unilaterally. Both positions have been stable for sixty years.
A diagram of the Earth/Moon Lagrange points
L1
Earth - Moon transfer station
L2
Luna Naval Academy
L3
Internal Security Agency Main Facility
Earth Defense station / Naval facility.
L4
McMillan Industries HQ.
L5
Private Habitats
L6
On the other side of the sun, trailing the Eath are various observatories and naval yards.
The ISA's main facility at L3 nominally serves the Earth State's security needs. In practice it watches everything in the Sol system and a significant amount outside it.
Key institutionLuna Trade Exchange — Sol system's primary commodity market
Earth policyActive monitoring, limited humanitarian intervention, salvage licensing
Principal tensionsTerra Movement pressure; ISA overreach; Earth surface community relations
The exosystem polities — CPH members in name, independent in practice
The exosystem polities were founded by specific cultural, national, or ideological groups fleeing Earth's collapse. Two centuries of separate development on separate worlds have made them into genuinely distinct civilisations with their own priorities, economies, and grievances. They pay the ICC defence tithe. They send representatives to Olympus City. They comply with ICC Constitutional requirements. Beyond that, they govern themselves — and their compliance with ICC authority in practice is roughly proportional to how much they need the CPH Navy and how far away they are from Mars.
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