The preservation of an undamaged human gene line became an overwhelming preoccupation, more important than family, race or nationality. Finding a willing and fertile partner for marriage became an international quest. The need to emigrate to a new partner’s homeland overrode most of the old religious and social taboos.
A new taboo grew in their place. Genetic engineering was a necessary and valuable tool for agriculture, but became a horrifying concept when human gene lines were under consideration.
The Post-War Era
The Great Burning subsided slowly into a new normal. The climate remained overheated and continued to fluctuate, but less drastically. To minimize their impact on the environment, cities were built with soaring towers. To avoid trampling the surrounding vegetation, the towers were cross-linked with walkways and public transportation bridges that sometimes resembled the fantasies of science fiction from the early twentieth century. Farms were also built vertically where possible, with floor above floor of hydroponic farms rising into the sunshine. Factories and roads were buried underground to leave the surface undamaged. This greatly increased the construction cost, but good tunnel-boring equipment was developed to reduce those costs. This equipment was later adapted to build underground cities on the Moon and Mars.
Countering these tendencies, most societies demanded that their traditional architecture be preserved, along with their languages, literature, religions, and art. Every ancient city had districts that were deliberately archaic, sanctuaries where their past could be remembered and cherished. Some hyper-traditional societies tried to reject modernity entirely.
Medicine continued to draw in the best minds and the most focused funding, making huge progress. Treatments for radiation sickness were developed and generalized into long term care for people living in enhanced radiation environments. As the worst effects of the Final war receded, human quality of life was vastly improved. The aging process was slowed so that the years of adult vigour extended from twenty through sixty and beyond. People became middle aged in their fifties. Many postponed childbearing into that decade, or even into their sixties, with the confidence that they would still be healthy enough to celebrate their children’s graduation from university with a mountaineering trip to the high Andes. Notwithstanding, few people lived past a century. Radioactive fallout had blanketed the entire planet and continued to impose a health burden that got worse with age.
Without these developments, human occupation of space would have been much more difficult because of the pernicious effects of cosmic rays outside the protective bubble provided by the Earth’s magnetic field.
The twenty first century had witnessed the first attempts to colonize the Moon and Mars. None of the colonies had been self-sufficient when the Final war cut off their supplies, dooming the colonists to slow deaths. It would be another century before the colonization efforts would be restarted, driven by a need for resources that could not be extracted from the Earth without causing unacceptable environmental damage.
Outside of Russia, Europe had largely demilitarized and played no role in the Exchange. Africa, South America, Southeast Asia and Australia were similarly spared. No one survived the Fimbulwinter unscathed, although the southern hemisphere and tropics suffered less than the northern hemisphere. The Great Burning was brutal in the desert lands that were the heart of the Islamic world, but depressed agriculture everywhere until farmers learned to anticipate the changing weather.
Regardless of the devastation in the homelands, refugees carried their cultures to new sanctuaries and preserved them as best they could, even from the four powers that had been in the heart of the conflict. Australia and South America became havens of surviving civilization, and the Euro-African sector soon began to flourish.
A new political order, governed by the Terrestrial Council, was instituted, determined to prevent the rise of any major powers capable of inflicting global war. Regional governments implemented the policies set by the Terrestrial Council, replacing the nation states that had caused so much trouble.
In time, the resources available in space beckoned, drawing adventuresome souls to colonize the Moon, to mine the near-Earth asteroids, and to settle on Mars.
[1] For a discussion of pronouns for people with unspecified gender in this book, see Appendix A: Gendered Pronouns
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