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I wouldn’t know about the hence part, but I always read it as “years from now”. A bit like the opposite from “years since”.
As for the other thing, it started out with deliberately engineered beings for specific tasks like the vacuumorph.
About a hundred years later the remaining people would create new humans with the specific goal of being able to survive the harsher environment of a ravaged earth. It was these that evolved further into different creatures.
It’s a pretty far fetched story either way, I just like it for the weird pictures :)
I posted a link in one of the other replies. You can read the whole thing there if you’re interested, there’s a timeline on page 20 if you just want a quick overview.
My job title is data engineer, but the organization I work at is small enough that it basically ranges from business intelligence to cloud engineering to data architecture to data science to whatever other thing is even slightly related to data :)