Old Earth

We saw Terra sacked, then, three instalments later, we saw her as capital of the Terran Empire. However, at the end of Poul Anderson's Technic History, we do not see Terra for an entire four instalments, then never see her again - in this series, I mean. Flandry had envisaged Terra sacked again when the Empire fell and, other things being equal, we have to assume that this has indeed occurred between The Game of Empire and "A Tragedy of Errors" but what happened next?

"...yonder was Capella. Old Earth lay on the far side, a couple of hundred light-years from here."

-Poul Anderson, "A Tragedy of Errors" IN Anderson, Flandry's Legacy (Riverdale, NY, June 2012), pp. 455-540 AT p. 460.

 

"Like Romano-Britons after the last legion had withdrawn, people out in the former marches of civilization do not even know what is happening at its former heart. They have the physical capability of going there and finding out, but are too busy surviving. They are also, all unawares, generating whole new societies of their own."

-Poul Anderson, INTRODUCTION IN Flandry's Legacy, pp. 543-544 AT pp. 543-544.

"I wonder what's happening there, thought Tolteca. It's long since we had any word from Old Earth."

-Poul Anderson, The Night Face IN Flandry's Legacy, pp. 541-660 AT I, p. 553.

(Tolteca is over two hundred parsecs from Sol.)

"They still named [Old Earth] Home, but she lay in the spiral arm behind this one, and Laure had never seen her. He had never met anyone who had. None of his ancestors had, for longer than their family chronicles ran. Home was a half-remembered myth; reality was here, these stars on the fringes of this civilization."

-Poul Anderson, "Starfog" IN Flandry's Legacy, pp. 709-794 AT p. 713.

Unanswered questions:

What has happened on Earth?

What has happened to other intelligent species that were around earlier in the Technic History?

How will the immense wealth from the Cloud Universe affect the civilization of the Commonalty?

What are the strange ways of other branches of humanity?