Circa 2150, humanity discovers that an enormous spore the size of a comet has drifted into its solar system. Scientists study it and conclude that it is a kind of deep space megaflora that propagates slowly from star to star.
The first astrobotanists nurtured the plant with sunlight and the atmospheric chemicals of Venus, discovering that the tendril roots of the mature plant had terraforming properties. Every five years or so, it would form a new spore, direct it towards a distant star, and fire it with extreme speed into interstellar space.
They named it Grower.
By 2210, humanity’s original solar system was reaching the limits of its natural resources, but researchers had discovered how to equip the gigantic spores, as they formed, with biostatis chambers and industrial equipment. Mankind began its diaspora to promising new systems. Some colonies were national missions, others commercial ventures, other utopian experiments. But each knew that they were to travel for a hundred years or more, never see the Earth again, and perhaps perish never to regain contact with human life.
Indeed, it was seven hundred years after the diaspora, 2900, that one very advanced system on a mineral rich planet with strong ties to the original human solar system developed a revolutionary Space/Time Vortex technology (STV). This technology was able to sustain, very briefly, a wormhole that allowed transportation across long distances in space, and (in its current state) brief distances in time.
For the first time in six hundred years, humanity is reuniting afters its diaspora.
Use of the technology is very risky, with the potential to disrupt stars on a malfunction, and so must be practiced very far from human life. Operating an STV wormhole is therefore a costly and lengthy enterprise, unavailable to any but the most powerful. But it is the key to power in a turbulent time.
