The society that emerged in the 2170s was therefore dramatically different from the freewheeling laissez-faireism of fifty years earlier. Many very old, established institutions, among them the nation-state, the Roman Catholic church, and the English monarchy, had enjoyed a renaissance during the half century interim. These institutions had prospered because they had adapted quickly and taken leadership positions in the restructuring that followed The Chaos.
By the late 2170s, when a semblance of stability had returned to the planet, interest in space began to build again. A new generation of observation and communication satellites was launched by the reconstituted International Space Agency, one of the administrative arms of the COG. At first the space activity was cautious and the budgets were very small. Only the developed nations participated actively. When piloted flights recommenced and were successful, a modest schedule of missions was planned for the decade of the 2190s. A new Space Academy to train cosmonauts for those missions opened in 2188 and had its first graduates four years later.
On Earth growth was achingly slow but regular and predictable for most of the twenty years preceding the discovery of the second Raman spaceship in 2196. In a technological sense, mankind was at approximately the same overall level of development in 2196 as it had been, sixty-six years earlier, when the first extraterrestrial craft had appeared. Recent spaceBight experience was much less, to be certain, at the time of the second encounter; however, in certain critical technical areas like medicine and information management, the human society of the last decade of the twenty-second century was considerably more advanced than it had been in 2130.