I'm glad it's not just me that suspects this. I've long thought that we're not playing a game that's about humans in the 34th century.
We're playing a game that's about being dead Guardians in the 92nd century playing at being humans in the 34th century.
It goes like this. The Thargoids wiped out the Guardians - but only physically. Before the end came, many of them retreated into virtual spaces, uploaded to and simulated within crystal AI cores buried deep in planetary crusts.
There they waited for millennia, waiting for the Thargoid menace to pass, entertaining and diverting themselves, while their crystal substrates slowly, slowly rotted away. The most popular of these virtual entertainments was a simulation of a fictional alien empire, a crazy parallel cartoon world populated by the descendants of comedic simian life forms. Deep in the future, the cores become corrupted almost to the point of hopelessness. Many of the entities that were once the elite of Guardian society - philosophers, artists, scientists - have crumbled to a low percentage of their original integrity. They live out their time trapped in the ancient entertainment suites, not realising they aren't real.
It explains why everything in our universe is slightly off. The odd mixture of fantastically magical technology combined with sheer Victoriana. The societies which make no sense, have no depth, where the trade of a billions-strong multi-planetary fiefdom is represented by a handful of single-pilot ships. The radically different political philosophies that engender no variation more profound than a differently decorated station. The bizarre distorted features of humans, like a taxidermist's bad trip. The glittering voxel cliffs of stars, inexplicable, broken. The all-pervading sense of senselessness, futility, looping and repeating the same pointless tasks towards some forgotten goal, but nothing ever changes, not really - just grows dimmer and smaller and quieter.
