 How has planetary leadership evolved since the 20th century?
The ripples that had ruffled the surface waters in the Pit, quieted again to glassy smoothness. The icy breeze tore tiny puffs of dust from grotesque, angling drifts of soil, nearly waterless for eons. A launching catapult for the last space ships built by the gods in exodus, perhaps it was—half a million years ago. Glacial ages, war, decadence, disease, and a final scattering of those ultimate superhumans to newer worlds in other solar systems, had done that. Man, it seemed, had a successor, as ruler of the Earth. Loy Chuk had flown his geological expedition out from the far lowlands to the east, out from the city of Kar-Rah. But his cranium bulged up and forward between shrewd, beady eyes, betraying the slow heritage of time, of survival of the fittest, of evolution. A mineral saturation that had held time and change in stasis. A perfect preservative for organic tissue, aided probably during most of those passing eras by desert dryness. Not the star-conquering demi-gods, but the ancestral stock that had built the first machines on Earth, and in the early Twenty-first Century, the first interplanetary rockets. A strange accident, happening in a legendary antiquity, had aided them in their quest for knowledge. Medical and biological sciences were far advanced among Loy Chuk's kind. It might move, speak, remember its past! Flashing flame, the latter arose, bearing the entire hundred members of the expedition.
 Authority is more vested in the knowledge and expertise of technologists and researchers
 Authority is more vested in the knowledge and expertise of technologists and researchers  The entire planet has adopted democracy as a means for ensuring liberty to all species  The Kar-Rah have combined the most humane principles from authoritarian regimes and constitutional democracies  Earth has eliminated all government in the name of autonomy and free will