In the Year 2525.
The future may not be too different from the past.
Those who were living, or more like existing, on their home planet were monitored by a fleet of moon stations responsible for capping the population level at a mere 5b. We travelled around and visited them during our life cycles, which was beyond their understanding. They seem to be fixed upon their local star to calculate a time pattern. Completely inadequate for real travelling.
The world's population had outgrown their home planet which they named Earth, well before their 22nd century. The Earth was now used as one of 25 prison planets, it seems apart from reproducing, the humans were also good at not obeying the rules. They seemed to think they were special and had this thing called free will and democracy. We of course tolerated them as long as they stayed on their little blue sphere. They were after all just parasites, we had seen them rise and fall so many times. Once they overgrew their space and became too many we just helped the living planet to eradicate a percentage of them.
They called it many things, an act of god, was their favourite. We encouraged them by introducing various types of gods for them. They were dumb enough to accept them all. All their gods were gods of love and peace, and the murderous wars they inflicted on each other were done mostly to appease their gods.
Controlling their habitat was easy enough, we brought forth storms and fires, famine and diseases. If they grew too quickly all we would do is adjust their life source, [the Sun]. If it became too strong many, mainly the older ones would perish before their time, or we would allow the sun to fade and watch with some mirth, as most of their blue rock became white and the 'temperature' as they labelled it would become so low that many species would disappear, it seems that this drastic measure was harsh on all of the human type creatures except those who lived in the sea [as they call it].
We lived amongst them from time to time to try and get a better understanding of them, but their minds were feeble and weak. We helped them, we showed them how to do many things, even elementary travel between their closest planets. We allowed them to explore their solar system [as they called it] but in fact, they were in a prison.
We controlled their time and space.
Getting them to understand their 'place' was difficult. Their myths and religions had brainwashed them into thinking that their puny blue world was in some way the centre of all living things. This was something we couldn't imagine. Why would a simple parasitic species slowly evolving on a living planet even comprehend that they were more important than all over species in all of the known universes? But there, you see was my mistake, they could not even understand, with their weak and feeble brain, just how large our stardust really was.