Editing SeventhSun:Seven Suns (section)

== The Second Sun — Awakening ==

The Second Sun is remembered as the '''Dawn Time''', the age of the first humanity.

Natural humanity arose upon Earth, developed civilization, mastered its world, and eventually travelled among the stars. The cultures of the Dawn Time were not a single civilization but an immense succession of peoples, nations, alliances, and interplanetary societies.

The people of the Second Sun inhabited a world that would seem profoundly strange to their descendants. They were born in bodies they had not designed. Intelligence belonged chiefly to living creatures. A person, a machine, a species, and a world appeared to be clearly different kinds of thing. The laws of nature seemed fixed, and technology was constructed rather than cultivated, invoked, or embodied.

Images from the Dawn Time show beings recognizably human, but the simplicity of their bodies and the primitive separation of mind from instrument make them seem nearly as alien as any nonhuman race.

Humanity spread outward from Sol and encountered a galaxy already threaded with life. The extent of that expansion is unknown. Some traditions maintain that the descendants of the Dawn Time still inhabit distant stars, unaware of—or indifferent to—the fate of Earth.

Its governing idea was '''awakening''': life becoming conscious of itself and looking outward from its first world.