I don't think you quite got the story of U.N.S. Unity right. The mothership malfunctioned and people woke up early from their hibernation. Factions and their leaders arose after that. Nothing to do with Earth, but rather how they want to proceed into the future, based on their pre-existing affinities.
Yeah, based on the
leader profiles on the Firaxis website and the "
Journey to Centauri" novella, the various leaders had life experiences and personal predilections that led to them declaring full-on ideological factions on Planet, but these weren't movements on Earth (except the Spartans, kind of).
That said, there's no reason you can't populate your prequel setting with precursor movements or groups that
could have led to the purely ideological, post-national factions in Alpha Centauri. The novella sort of does that already- in
episode 9, it says the "Spartan Coalition" is a survivalist movement that existed in New Los Angeles, where Santiago ended up in, and was the basis of the conspiracy that led to the Spartan mutiny during Planetfall. I was never a big fan of the idea because it singles out their faction as a major catalyst for why the mission fell apart, but it's only mentioned in the novella but not in most of the other material, so I can ignore it easily enough.
Now that I think about it, Morgan Industries even more explicitly predates the mission, as it was a major corporation on Earth, and according to the profiles, became a major contractor to build the ship after the "Russian economic system crashed again in 2058." Though if we follow the novella, the CEO himself was the only actual Morgan employee to make it into space, and the faction he founds is a brand new company with the same name, his employees being members of the mission he seduced into joining him.
I also think that potentially the Gaians might have existed in one form or another on Earth: because of all of the environmental devastation going on, it only seems natural that there would be eco-activist to eco-terrorist groups, the
Gaia hypothesis is a real scientific theory, and there's always neopagan nature-worshipping groups. While it's probably a little much to single out Deirdre as being the member of such a movement before the mission (not to mention giving them the Gaian name so early on), it would make sense if she was a little influenced by them, and why she would gather so many followers besides her personal charisma and vision.
You can also feel free to ignore all of this supplementary material- it's separate from the game and not universally known, and often there's contradictions. (For example, the in-game datalinks rather infamously says Miriam is from the Christian States of America, a reference that's absent from the website profiles, but is brought back in the GURPS SMAC sourcebook.) I'm the type to really dive into this stuff and obsessively try to explain who the "Crimson Succession" from Yang's profile is about, or figure out what happened to the off-screen countries (kudos for mentioning Japan, btw, it's completely MIA from SMAC), but that's definitely not an approach that you have to follow when creating your prequel.
Right, one has to ask the question of why those factions and their leaders did not STAY on Earth.
It might just be those factions were more invested in trying to fix things on Earth, rather than fleeing to space. Maybe they wanted control of the planet. And also, in line with your ideas below, they were tied up to national, cultural, even religious identities that could not be as easily exported into space. The
Unity mission was a multinational one done under the U.N. - it's not like Civilization: Beyond Earth, where every mission is tied to a specific Earth government and/or Earth geographical location. So if you're doing a prequel set on Earth, it's fine to maintain that connection between ideology and different tribal identities.
If I remember correctly, Alpha Centauri, even with all the technologies you discover, never gains a breathable atmosphere during the game and everyone lives and breaths under domes...
That's a really good point!
I guess one could make a story for University (scientific progress, let's explore Alpha Centauri) or Believers. For the Morganities, the question is if life in a spaceship / on Alpha Centauri is really better than on Earth (at least initially), as everyone could live in their bunkers... In my brainstorming, I had the US split into three factions, with a pre-cursor of the believers getting their hands on NASA (well, the southern states) wanting to build a colony ship, while a precursor of the Morganites controlling the north.
It
is pretty funny that if you imagine the Believer precursors (whether the Christian States of America, the "Evangelical Fire", or whatever) controlling the South, they basically get launch capability because of the NASA spaceports in Texas + Florida.
As for the University, it could be any new roup of research purists, rationalists, and technocrats interested in the search for truth™, though I also want to mention that in Aki Zeta-5's profile it mentions before the mission she was a member of the "Zakharov Research Institute" back on Earth...
Who's the third faction in the U.S.?
another two factions representing Europe vs Russia/China (maybe peacekeepers vs hive),
Bear in mind that even if you disregard the supplementary info, ultimately Sheng-Ji Yang is sort of an extreme character with radical ideas for society. So while future China might be authoritarian, it probably shouldn't be as dystopian as the Human Hive is. (That's a lot of people and territory to shove underground and turn into mindless drones.) Though perhaps a future Chinese government taking authoritarian measures and applying state-of-the-art surveillance everywhere could be the sort of thing that shapes Yang's experiences, and vision for humanity.
a united Korea focusing on transhumanism/cyborg technology (precursor to Cybernetic Consciousness), and Japan focusing on robotics (no equivalent in Alpha Centauri, maybe a blend of Gaians and Drones)).
Cool ideas! Keep in mind you don't necessarily have to have each of your factions map out to SMAC ones 1:1. You can always have new characters and organizations. Maybe even characters who become equivalent to faction leaders on Earth, in charge of factions that could have been on Planet but didn't.
Spartans, Data Angels, Pirates, and Cult of Planet are the hardest to imagine, they more align with Alpha Centauri's approach of there being no factions on the colony ship but only charismatic leaders who later created those factions on the ship, not on Earth.
Spartans could just be militia malcontents in this future world- you can make them paramilitary rebels, insurgents, revolutionaries even- with any ideology you feel is true to Santiago's. Pirates, similarly, ctould be those who live on the territorial margins of the countries breaking down, former naval personnel preying on the citizens they once served. Data Angels could be cyberpunk hackers types trying to build an oasis in the metaverse, away from the conflicts and catastrophes of Earth's final days. Cult of Planet is really something tied specifically to Chiron's lore, but you can always have environmental extremists who go full-on death cult.
But also- feel free to explore more ideas of what could arise! Even if they don't end up as factions in SMAC.
I worked on a few quotes for the robotics one (well, using text-to-speech AI) to test how it would sound:
Very well done, looking forward to more content like this that brings your ideas into multimedia life.
Well, a prequel would fill a gap between Civilization and Alpha Centauri. Of course, the "official" story is that of "Civilization", i.e., one nation put everything into production, polluted the Earth, built a spaceship, and filled it with its citizens.
I guess a prequel would have to involve another catastrophe to cause an ideological split.
I like this comparison of Civilization and Alpha Centauri. Partly because Civ is more like idealized,
archetypal versions of real-world nations rather than the hyper-detailed striving-for-realism versions you see in grand strategy mapgames. Since SMAC is similarly about Big Ideas and core values of humanity (so also archetypes), it makes sense for the countries to be somewhat different from the historical ones. As much as I like
obsessive hyper-detailed attempts to suss out the backstory of SMAC, it probably makes more sense to portray countries more loosely. Sort of like how Beyond Earth does it, except better.