MARCAB CONFEDERACY, 

various planets united into a very vast civilization which has come forward up through the last 200,000 years, is formed out of the 
fragments of earlier civilizations. In the last 10,000 years they have 
gone on with a sort of a decadent kicked-in-the-head civilization that 
contains automobiles, business suits, fedora hats, telephones, 
spaceships. A civilization which looks almost exact duplicate but is 
worse off than the current U.S. civilization. 

(SHSpec 291, 6308C06)