So far, you've seem
The world in 2100,
The World in 2200, and
The World in 2300
Now you get another century. This one's really interesting, too.
Short fix: In 2318, the supervolcano structure simmering underneath Yellowstone National Park detonated, ultimately killing close to 700 million people worldwide, and setting the planet on a long-run march toward a new ice age. Eighty years later, the world is still recovering; there is a new science -- field construction -- the ability to spool semipermanent elements out of the raw metric of the cosmos, more akin to the inertron and ultron substances from the original Buck Rogers novel than the force fields from Star Trek and Star Wars. Brazil is powerful, but the real future is among the outworlds, the richest nations now exclusively in space, led by the Asteroids and Mars. It a Humanity that is regrouping, that no longer has the perspective of a wider cosmos that entranced the previous three centuries; there is Humanity, and the void, and coming to terms with the consequences of its own mastery of nature -- yet another form of vulnerability.
The Aftermath of the Yellowstone Explosion: The Earth has been recovering from the single largest natural disaster in recorded history. In 2415, the first of a series of progressively more powerful quakes began, accompanied by a significant increase in the level of geothermal activity, such as the hot springs and geysers. Proposals for a controlled release of the magma pressure were waved aside – anything that opened the door a crack would be the same as opening one a crack inside of a burning house.
On September 15, 2318, the Yellowstone Caldera exploded, dislocating approximately 3,000 cubic kilometers of debris, though the cooling effects of the debris were commensurate with a significantly smaller cataclysm, say, on the order of 2,200 cubic kilometers. This might seem like choosing modes of execution, but the difference is as night and day; had the explosion affected the Earth’s climate as the models predicted, as our current quantum simulation insist upon regardless, we would not be having this conversation.
Most of North America, in an ellipse reaching from Phoenix at the nearer focus to Montreal at the farther one, was obliterated by a combination of pyroclastic blast and suffocation under meters, in some cases hundreds of meters, of superheated ash, with significant accumulations forming hills, even entire ranges of them, as far away as central Nebraska.
The debris cloud, expanding at near-supersonic velocity, took no more than three hours to finish off approximately 330 million people in the United States alone, and that despite dedicated preparations built on four centuries of settling hostile climates throughout the Solar System; within weeks, the number of global fatalities would double to 663 million.
Then the bad news began.
Undone by Benevolence: The average global temperature has dropped 5.7 degrees Celsius in the past century, though 0.5 degree is attributable to inertia from the deliberate cooling efforts that saw the Earth through the Great Warming.
Now we have the opposite problem; we are entering an ice age. Left to its own, inside of five hundred years the average temperature of the Earth will fall below the freezing point of water. Long before then, the ice caps will have begun to advance in earnest.
On other worlds would be a simple matter to reduce and then reverse the cooling trend through active ecological management. On Earth, the very success of the effort to save the planet from overheating has doomed us; the heat-absorbing Hu lattices are nearly indestructible save for contact with water or ambient temperatures similar to the conditions within the Earth’s core. Further, one consequence of the sudden cooling is that the Earth is much drier than before, as water vapor is locked up in the advancing polar ice. As a result, the silvery-black artificial forests are spreading again, especially in the now-wide desert and savanna belts of both hemispheres. Blast and extreme heat can destroy the devices, but generate conditions that are favorable for the regeneration of the surviving elements. Nuclear weapons could eradicate the Hu trees, but at the cost of obviating the need to remove them.
It appears that we have been undone by our own benevolence; thanks to the Hu trees, thanks to our saving the world from superheating, the coming ice age will be the final chapter of life on Earth. The weather will become drier and drier, stabilizing around a global average temperature of 241 degrees Kelvin -- 20 degrees below zero Fahrenheit, the coldest ice age in the entire geological record, a single Hu lattice-covered glacier covering all of the Earth. And all we can do is forestall the inevitable, play for time, and hope that the answer comes before the parent world of Humanity must be quit for keeps, and all its vast and persistent modes of life extirpated by the very means set to guard them from our earlier foolishness.
We have made ourselves ashamed anew, for we have saved ourselves alright, have bought precious centuries to fashion new homes for Humanity across the Slow Range. The Great Warming might have slain Humanity and spared Earth’s innocent biota. The Great Cooling has damned them.
We had called the onset of interstellar colonization, begun in the previous century, the Dispersion. We were a few years early; the Dispersion has now begun in earnest, especially for the Americans.
Flight to the Sea: Many Americans fled to the relatively underdeveloped littoral of North America, even contesting seafloor with the Hispanic Aquadora colonies in the Caribbean, though Venezuela’s advantage in the area, backed by Brazil, was difficult for America to challenge under the circumstances. The greatest flux went into the region formerly known as the Bermuda Triangle, though many on the West Coast descended into the metal-rich basins of the Pacific, forming countries such as Abyssinia. Currently, 439 million people living under the waves, significantly less than a century ago, but not for any reason attributable to the Yellowstone Explosion – Earth’s oceans are no longer the most lucrative frontier, significantly less wealthy than the United States is despite the consequences of the disaster of eight decades ago.
Flight to the Rocks: The wealthiest frontier by far is the Asteroid Belt, where average incomes (in 2005 dollars, for your benefit) of $176K belie a staggering disparity in fortunes – not only in coinage, but in life expectancy. In other words, it was a near-perfect cultural match for American immigrants, who in fact had been moving outward in a modest but consistent stream for several centuries. In order after the Asteroids in per capita income are Europa, Mars, Venus (though immigration there remains tightly restricted by the Han Federation), Ganymede, Titan and Callisto. In terms of overall power, the Belt is considerably weaker than a Brazil or a China, but is falls between Mars and Antarctica, and those newer nations fall just ahead of Pakistan these days, and not far behind the remnant European Union.
Flight to the Stars: At last count, there are 658,300 settlers on Medusa, wary highland residents with ever an eye cast toward the purplish, burbling lowlands where the Gorgons prevail. The settlers even have a name for the plant-dominated regions: The Wabe, and have taken a passion toward naming the local flora and fauna from Lewis Carroll writings…though the origin of Coultersnatch, the name for a vine-thin, rat-faced flying scavenger, has been lost to antiquity.
As for going farther afield, the slowships are still en route, their many millions sleeping through the centuries, and millions more have followed in recent years, though the pace of outmigration has slowed considerably; while much has been destroyed by Yellowstone, and the Earth is gradually sliding under ice, most of the settlement is focused closer to home for the time being.
Economics and Society on Earth:
1. Resurgent Clergy. Rumors of the death of religion have been mistaken; the Yellowstone calamity had a profound effect on the Americans, many reverting to the puritanical and vengeance-minded strain that had been discredited centuries earlier; happily, none of these have been allowed to emigrate off-world, as such irrationality is grounds for perpetual grounding; the fire-bombing of the Marinera Creche on Mars was all the fanaticism that the offworld colonies required; let Earth have its crusades and jihads; rational Humanity will claim the stars. The sudden influx of Americans to the Outer Worlds has disrupted the purity of the militantly secular Areans, but ah well. They will learn soon enough that here in the heavens, God likes His neighbors quiet.
2. The Retrossance and the Reverters. Now, many of the old economic paradigms are returning to the fore; mechanized production, nearly dead after centuries of nanotech, has recovered, especially in the devastated regions where the complex Faber infrastructure is no more, but half-wrecked finished materials are abundant. With the scavenger economy, for such ‘ore’ is higher-grade even that that of the asteroids, amidst the lack of implicit and easily-verified trustworthiness required for micrommercial arrangements, old-style trading, with contracts and forceful maintenance of same, has resurfaced.
Prior to Yellowstone, we had convinced ourselves that we could both care for the Earth and remain its masters, and profit handsomely from our presumption of wisdom. The late 2200s were a golden age; populations were growing, there were worlds enough – and time – to fill them with happy, well cared-for families, and much interesting science to study, and projects to complete, and work to do, and stories to tell about it all. There have been many changes in the last few centuries, and yet none sufficient to prevent or mitigate the natural calamities of the age. The knowledge that the very means of saving Humanity from its own hand in global warming has now doomed the Earth to a deep freeze has inculcated a fatalism, a sense of the futility of the uses of power in human hands. Why try? Why aspire to mastery of nature, when it only causes greater harm?
More radical exponents of this train of thought advocate the cessation and reversal of the many terraformation projects, a movement that some of Earth’s rulers have encouraged, as leverage in the never-ending gamesmanship of the great powers. The most extreme sect are the Reverters, who advocate the deconstruction of all of technological civilization, and think of the Yellowstone supervolcano as an auspicious beginning. They are admirers of the Crystal Vanguard from the early years of Antarctic colonization – the Vanguard were green terrorists. However, the Reverters go far past that – their ultimate agenda is the reversion of Humanity to a non-sentient species, even to the point of genetic warfare, the release of tailored retroviruses; they have already deprived entire communities of the ability to speak, or use fine motor skills with some of their test attacks. Conventional wisdom is that the Reverts are the latest iteration of a death-worshipper cult, another Branch Davidian or Thugee.
3. The Newest Wonder: Field Construction. A predicted consequence of quantum matter/energy is that we should be able to spool out not only matter and energy from the background noise of the cosmos, but threads of space and time, as well. It is only with both the energies available to starship engines and thousands of ship-years’ worth of direct observation of macro-scale relativistic fields that we have developed the instrumentation to accurately measure, then manipulate, such natural distortions in order to tweak their effects. There remains much to be done, but one offshoot of this is that at considerable expense in energy, it is possible to alter the transparency of a section of space, such that it becomes opaque to matter (ie., can form a floor, or a tabletop, or a wall, or a bulletproof vest) or energy (insulators, panels to refrigerators, radiation shields). For lack of a better term, the real force field is more productive as a construction material than for its legendary usage as a shield in space battles, since the fields deteriorate quickly under extreme duress, same as normal matter. However, this aspect has proven decisive in space combat already, for ships made out of force plates rather than conventional smart alloys are much less massive and just as strong, giving such spacecraft a commanding edge in speed, range, acceleration and payload.
4. Where the Peeps Hang. The past century has experienced massive decline in population on Earth, for not only did the Yellowstone Explosion kill over 660 million people with resulting deficit births (children not engendered, on account their hypothetical parents never survived to have them), but reduced the carrying capacity of the Earth significantly. The traditional environs of Earth have 7.356 billion people now, about two billion less than a century ago; this is expected to be a temporary setback, as demographic trends suggest significant replenishment within another century. The Pelagics, the ocean-dwellers, number 439 million. 91 million live in Antarctica. There are 42.4 million Martians, 25.8 Asters (or Belters), 18.9 million Europas, 10.8 million Ganymedes, 15.5 million Lunes, 5.2 million Venusians, 6.5 million Callistos, 2.4 million Titans, 3 million Ios, 1.6 million Tritons, 876 thousand Mercurians, 1.4 million Plutonians, and 658 thousand Medusans. Approximately 13.5 million, give or take a few, are en route to the stars. 8.043 billion people in all the cosmos, almost all of them within striking distance of the next super-volcano or mega-tsunami to grace the planet Earth.
Geopolitics
Brazil. What characterizes the Empire at the moment is the paradox of incredible power and poverty combined; its subjects (they are not participants, they are definitely objects of the regime) are among the most destitute in the human cosmos, but its ruling class, the Harlequins, are unparalleled in opulence and mastery of their domains, using the full range of cybernetic, genetic and psychological engineering to exert their whims. The empire is vast, has far and away the largest population (1.2 billion), and is bested only by Russia’s impressive arsenal in mnemonics in the technology race. Militarily, Brazil is the top military power, and far and away the most aggressive, a consequence of population pressure on its overexploited territory. At the moment, Brazil is courting better relations with Argentina, Cambodia, and Pakistan, seeking to cajole alliances with these regional player. However, against a range of smaller challenges to its majesty, the Empire is less kind in demeanor, and has fought engagements over the last 100 years in Nicaragua, Kenya, Morocco, Afghanistan, Suriname, Panama, Ghana, Peru, Uzbekistan, and Io (one of the Galilenes, the four major moons of Jupiter).
China. China’s chief Earth-bound consideration is fending off Brazilian advances in Asia, and is likewise playing nice to Cambodia, which has become something of a regional nuisance with its Orchestrationist government and aggressive military posture. China maintains its support of the Congo Liberation Union (CLU) in central Africa, which has gained in stature as Brazil, formerly a great beneficiary to the peer provinces there, has evolved into an exploitative overlord. The Chinese have faded somewhat in the technology race, beset as the country is by lasting ecological damage from the Ascendancy era; regardless, on a per-capita basis the Han Federation is second only to India among the Earthly powers, and the third-ranking military power, much of it invested in the Dragon Fleet, the Han space navy, which is seeking basing rights on Ganymede, to oppose the Brazilians’ making inroads in the Jovian system.
The Chinese have fought wars in the past century among the more distressed regions of the Earth, with military assets considering action or actively engaged against other powers in Kenya, Central African Republic, Sierra Leone, Uruguay, Bulgaria, Uganda, Morocco, Afghanistan, Ghana, Honduras, and Syria.
Indonesia. Indonesia is the current second-ranking military power, and current primary challenger to Brazil, with an array of bases in Argentina and strong presences on both Titan and Callisto, an active participant of the Solar Cold War between the Brazilian-led Concert, an alliance of orchestrationist regimes, and a flexible, virtual alliance among the participations, the free realms of the Solar system. Indonesia’s war record in the past century includes engagements in Mozambique, Nicaragua, Bulgaria, Morocco, Honduras, Guinea, Panama, Kenya, Uganda, Afghanistan, Ghana, Syria, and Suriname, almost all in direct contention with Brazilian Cyberne or Imago, the Harlequin-caste shape-shifters that are half-human, half-avatar, with the strengths of both material and virtual weapons at their disposal. The Indonesians, however, have their own tricks, for they are the primary innovators in field construction.
The Indonesians have an impressive arsenal, but it has cost their society, its participants having chosen a more austere and martial lifestyle as part of the responsibility to preserve themselves against the Brazilians, who covet the eastern archipelago for their own, and have made promises to Cambodia to hold them on the Empress Mercada’s behalf should their armies be unleashed against their powerful neighbor to the south; the Indonesians have made their strong displeasure known, not bothering with the niceties of the Han in this regard.
Bangladesh. With the decline of the ocean frontiers, Bangladesh’s fortunes have waned, as well. If there was something to describe Bangladesh’s culture at the dawn of the 25th Century, it would be…well-rounded. Among the ten great powers, Bangladesh is middling in all categories, if a bit spare in pocket change. At the moment, Bangladesh is focusing its diplomatic initiatives on Venus, Ganymede and Zaire, taking a middle road between the juggernauts of China and Brazil. Also on the gamut is the new alliance with Pakistan, a reconciliation over four centuries in the making. Farther afield, Bangladesh is involved in more aggressive fashions in the past 100 years in Austria, Tanzania, Honduras, Morocco, Kenya, Uruguay, Central African Republic, Ghana, Syria, Greece, Bulgaria, Uganda, Suriname, Afghanistan, Uzbekistan, and Sierra Leone.
India. Per-capita wise, India is the richest country on Earth, and the least militaristic. India’s diplomatic focuses are on Zaire, Europa, Antarctica, and Malaysia. Its more assertive dealings in the last century have been in Central African Republic, Ghana, Greece, Sierra Leone, and Bhutan.
Pelagics. Once the technological vanguard, the Pelagic nations have become the refugee backwater of the Solar System, the recourse for defeated and destroyed peoples. Regardless, alone among the nations of Earth, the Sea Peoples have profited from the changes caused by the Yellowstone Explosion. The Pelagics, however, maintain their closest ties with the Outworlds, Venus, Ganymede, and Antarctica in particular. As for military actions, the Pelagics in the last century have been involved in Honduras, Uruguay, Central African Republic, Sierra Leone, Tanzania, Ghana, Morocco, and Kenya.
Enter: Mars, the Emerging Great Power
As more of Humanity has moved offworld, the new and wealthy nations of the heavens have asserted themselves, involved in the intriques and in several instances the wars of Earth.
Mars, with the largest population and closest ties to Earth, has a dedicated spaceport and aerodrome in Papua New Guinea, as well as close alliances with Vietnam, Australia, Germany and Mexico, as well as its traditional affinity with the United States. Mars has also developed enmities, having fought the Sudanese in Ethiopia, the Indians in Sri Lanka, the Russians in Georgia, the Brazilian in Costa Rica, Ireland and Ghana. While significantly less powerful in the aggregate than Brazil, Mars possesses RK (relativistic/kinetic) artillery, and is thus more than capable of obliterating the power-centers of the Empire should it choose to take its quarrel with the Red Planet to the next level; this gambit, thankfully, has not been taken.
Wrap
And that's your world, 400 years from now, and my world as of right now.