 In the last 10,000 years they have gone on with a sort of decadent kicked-in-the-head civilization that contains automobiles, business suits, fedora hats, telephones, spaceships — a civilization which looks almost an exact duplicate but is worse off than the current US civilization.The capital of the Confederacy is said to be ""one of the tail stars of the Big Dipper"", probably Alkaid, a star 108 light years distant from Earth.The Marcabians used to rule Earth at some point in the past but lost control of it due to ""losses in war and other things"".