It is a very good that Humanity developed psionic gifts in the late 21st century. For these led to a rejection of materialism, and to the hearing of the Calling.
There is a reason that SETI did not find aliens communicating on the hydrogen wave line, or anywhere else. Aliens were using something better. Telepathy.
From their view, telepathy is the defining hallmark of a sentient species. And if they had come upon Earth as it had been, a haven of materialism, they would have taken the 'non-sentients' at their word.
"We are meat. We have no soul."
The aliens would have looked at the aggressively expanding Human/Orca/Kraken civilization and taken them at their word, but through alien lenses they would have seen....an aggressively expanding hive of lower life forms. Well you know what you do when you discover termites. You blow up their sun.
But the ship Madagascar was a dissident faction from All That. And so they looked for some place on the outer edge of the Solar System where the Materialist Hegemony would leave them alone.
And thus Madagascar found the Ring Gate on a small moon in Saturn's Rings. They were looking for an icy asteroid with nickel-iron to boot (if they were lucky) that they would lase into a rocky balloon, and turn into an O'Neil habitat. Instead, they saw something that 'ate' their radar waves, and so they investigated despite the risk of losing their lives. For unlike the 'rational cowards' of the Hegemony, they believed they were 'souls attached to matter', and so life beyond death was a rational factor to consider in making the decision to risk that temporary life.
It also helped that they had some of the only clairvoyants and telepaths in the Solar System.
Eventually, they took the ship through, and 'met' the League of Sentients which was on the verge of 'dealing with termites'.
After that, they learned much more about psi from the older races, and they returned to Earth. Needless to say, the masters of the universe in Wall Street and Shanghai were not pleased. Only the threat of immediate and total annihilation by the aliens kept them from 'disapearing the tom-fool mystic idiots'. Still, they tried to work things around their way, but the power equation had changed. The facts were made clear, and over a generation, the Hegemony was destroyed. It was not all peace and light because some of the new psionic powers enabled horrible abuses. And the Hegemony fostered terrorists who nuked several cities. But in the end, nothing Man could do, could stop the Alien tsunami.
And thus in the early 23rd century, Humanity was given charge of a Protected Planet. Falantir hosted several thousand planet trees. The very largest dozen arched from the ground up into orbit. These sentient trees were happy to share the planet with humanity as humans and Falantir trees occupied almost totally different ecological niches, or could. Its a typical sized planet, and three thousand trees, even city-sized ones takes up very little room. And the vast majority are only about two hundred stories tall. One would have to be deliberately seeking offense to find having to share a contient with five hundred trees to be imposing on personal space, or to find that the trees request for the use of hydrogen powered or electric cars rather than polluters to be unreasonable.
On Falantir, some of the hard-core resisters have infiltrated along with the less hard-core who were invited. The Council of Mind that now rules Earth and the Sol system (with areas set aside for Materialists who can function as they wish inside these reservations) thought that sending some of the resistive, but somewhat reasonable enemies among the sentient trees would open their hearts and minds to the truth. What it did not count on was the infiltration of the Materialist Hegemonies last hard-core of terrorists.
With a fine disregard for logic and consistency, the MH terrorists now uses telepathy and telekinesis even as they council regular MH supporters that doing so is 'delusion and mental illness'.
Also, the occasional alien (with huge powers of mind and tech) occasionally visits the Falantir and the Subcouncil of Mind for Falantir (Smof).
The powers of the Falantir vary with age, but the older, the stronger is the general rule. However, the older, the sleepier is also the general rule. Humanity in the Alien's mind is to serve as 'housesitters' and 'water the plants'. In return for the use of the planet,humans are to protect and care for the Falatir. By any reasonable standard, this is a very good deal, but the MH are trying to bend reality with clever words.
This is a TWO-POINT ENTRY WORLD>One, the verser may enter the world aboard the good ship Madagascar as it boosts up from Mars on its ion drive, or the verser may arrive on Falantir as the MH terrorists strive to find some way to break the SMOF such as starting a forest fire that would burn the Falantir trees (which would kill everyone on the planet). A 2pt. world can be used as a contingency world, or simply as a variable entry point world.