Earth

Homeworld of all mankind, Earth has undergone significant changes since the 20th century. Humanity has left its cradle in Sol System to venture forth into the stars, and through Heritage 7 has given rise to new races within mankind. A large population remains on Earth, where efforts to reclaim a scarred world have been underway for years. Despite its importance, many have never visited this world, the wellspring of men.

Today, the world remains a bastion for the ISA and humanity has remedied the easiest of the abuses plowed upon the world in the rush of the industrial revolution. Nearby, mankind has established some of the largest colonies on Luna, Mars, and the Griton Stations.

Locations in Orbit

• Luna : Earth's moon, home to the first off-world colony, has become a busy haven as a launching point to the other worlds in the system.
• Griton 1 : "Big Bertha" (Lagrange 1)
• Griton 2 : (Lagrange 2)

Cities

Plate Cities

Plate cities grew out of the desire to escape, and forget, the steady decay below. On the surface, years of abuse put the Earth�s ecosystem into a tailspin. In many large cities, mega-building were already stretching skyward, so the leap to a new cityscape was not a long one. Like a cake being assembled, the cities steadily grew upward into the latticework that currently exists in the largest metropolitan centers the world over.

The early skyscrapers were spearheaded by deep pockets. Often, these more aged structures have been folded into the lower levels of older plate cities. Costs associated with these older foundations, alongside the slow decay associated with older plate cities, have helped spur the efforts in reclamation of the world�s landscape.

Description

Plate cities are the grandchild of mega-cities like New York. Raising mankind through feats of engineering, plate cities take and uplift whole regions into the sky. The plates networked physical structures and created vertical tiers within cities where people could work, live, and play on the newly created levels. Where possible, open-air pavilions and expansive causeways exist, but for the most part the cities are self-contained within the expansive network of structures, as wind speeds grow moving higher.

Ships weave through the latticework, moving in-between larger hub levels, which connect individual pillar-buildings. This flexible design allows for service to most areas and connects goods and human traffic to large mega-elevator centers. Moving out from the main sectors, visitors and residents can transit shorter distances to remote destinations by hop-scotching between lesser elevator systems. When traveling the smaller routes, people can even find ancient elevator systems as part of the mix if they travel to low enough sectors in the city. Space-age construction materials and computer-aided design allowed the plates to grow skyward to never before seen heights. At the lowest levels old and new technologies merge to ensure the plates remain stable. An often forgotten community of engineers, maintenance, and service workers often live in specific sections of these lower levels to be near their work in case of emergency.

The infrastructure below most plates was not designed to support the volume of life within the cities. Since most of the plates grew from older, fast growing cities vast dead zones of concentrated runoff and pollution mar the land around the cities. Syntek workers are working on these areas non-stop to reclaim land and control the waste and resource problems. It should be noted that while no plate is self-sustaining, many cities have extensive facilities inside the city for urban farming, parks and recreation, and even limited manufacturing. Around the cities are some of the larger deadfall areas on the planet with the remainder of sites across the world having been reclaimed over the years or converted for alternative use.

S-Codes

Addresses in the plates refer to sectors, or S-Codes. Pointing to these cities within cities is often difficult for outsiders, but for residents and those familiar with the system no problems typically arrive. Some cities are worse than others in their traffic, maintenance, and transit infrastructure, but in every case residents and visitors alike are advised to be ready for a roundabout trip.

Mega-elevators connect the largest sections of plates and are operated as a primary means of moving goods and large-volumes of people through the cities. While personnel elevators largely consist of vertically designed magnetic trains, certain service elevators move open platforms the size of football fields at blinding speeds through the clouds.

Life

Plate cities are not bad places to live, but they have dramatically altered life on Earth. Holding the most humans anywhere in the universe these cities are conversely less cramped than space stations due to their sheer size. Mega-metropolises, more people now live within plate cities than in smaller communities the world over. The population on Earth is stable with very low birth rate. Most new residents are immigrants from outside colonies.

Stratification as it is known in the plates refers not only to the layer-cake design of the multi-tier cities, but also to the spread of the population and concentrations of wealth. While only the worst of the plate cities, such as Los Angeles, exhibit serious problems of class-struggle through stratification, most only see a steady push upward. In recent years this pressure on the movement upward, spurred by abandonment of lower-level facilities, has managed to push waves of native Earthlings out into the stars to nearby Luna and on.

History

The Old World

Time has spun on. On Earth, aged cities and nations have given way to the loose conglomerate body of humanity that exists today. Unified under the ISA, the world has retained some ties to the ancient world through careful preservation projects. Sea levels in the world rose approximately three meters before finally abating in the late 22nd century. The ice-caps have sat diminished for centuries, and whole ecosystems destroyed.

Thankfully for the world proactive groups had worked to forestall disaster by establishing gene and seed banks scattered across the globe. Before any greater wasting struck, which could have altered the entire civilization of man, science rose up with early solutions to the smaller crisis. Food supply was one of the first to be addressed through resource control farming and low-impact techniques. The energy dilemma was tackled a short while later as a multitude of alternative sources went online to move mankind into an energy age. On and on these changes went, steadily pushing mankind upward until, finally, space was reached en masse. Both Luna and Mars were the catalysts of mankind�s push into the heavens. Progress, on Earth and afar, has snowballed onto a mega-scale since.

Rise of the Collective

At the end of the Asio-OPEC war humanity, as they had once before at the close of World War II, decided that the nature of war and civilization must change. Men and women of power struggled to regain control while those who put them in place moved against the established systems. Resentment over the losses of the past half-century and more of decay and war fermented into a powerful schism that would split entire cultures. Even the greatest among the nations were not left unscathed by this time of turmoil.

Weakened by war and spurred by an angry populace, nations did little as the only other powerful group remaining stepped forward, the corporation. Some histories claim the era of the corporation spurred more than just the latter half of the 21st century�s problems, and while impossible to prove the claims resound with many. Nevertheless, corporations rose from the ashes of the Asio-OPEC war. Moving to power progressively over the next fifty years, corporations managed to undercut government programs and privatize major facilities formerly the realm of government alone. A rise to power like this was not entirely without disagreement from the populace despite their early support for anything different. It has taken hundreds of years for mankind to rediscover its voice after the �democracy� that swept the globe in the 20th and 21st century.

Saved by Science

An ironic twist that early syntek were used to clean up the decay of the low-lands after the Heritage 7 virus saved humanity from the Carcinomatosis. These were some of the first generation of the constructs and have long-since been replaced. Still clean-up continues all across the planet. Junkers and other salvage crews work to build value out of the decay of the ages of industrialization and the subsequent centuries.

With the current state of technology repairing Earth should be a small matter, but reclaiming Earth�s landscape and natural bounty through scientific breakthroughs associated with terraforming is not possible. For uninhabited planets, the use of multiple terraforming engines is the best method mankind has to foster long-term habitation. Yet for worlds like Earth, large populations and the history of thousands of years would be displaced and destroyed in applying the powerful science. Still, ecological engineers are able to work within the confines of the highly populated world. Earth, or Luna and nearby colonies, are home to some of the best and brightest in the field of ecological engineering. Tireless in their exploration of the still developing art, scientists are held to high degrees of accountability for preservation of Earth�s remaining natural ecosystems alongside the safety of its historic sites.

In the early 21st century, mankind was saved by a group of scientists and philanthropic investors who saw a crisis bigger than anything mankind had ever faced. These men and women foresaw a food crisis that would have destroyed humanity, or driven it to a war worse than the Asio-OPEC. Recognizing the danger, they created a series of banks throughout the world. These were underground, protected repositories of seeds, genetic information on plants and animals, alongside digital databases of human achievement and history.The banks were tapped into with the close of the Asio-OPEC war because of the strain on the world�s resources. Coupled with newer technologies the banks were able to spread a wealth of food to the people of the world. Today, a few household names can trace their company�s roots to these ancient banks and the efforts that saved the world.

Government & Culture

While smaller power-bases still exist on the world, comprised of alliances of small regions and cities, the largest concentration of power rests with the Inner Sol Alliance. As one of the founding worlds, the ISA maintains a large presence both in basic personnel and military installments on Earth. Transit and exchange between the ISA�s main base on Luna and Earth is substantial. Critics of the ISA note that the birthplace of mankind is also the largest military arms proliferator due to their actions.

Astrum, originating from the ancient Interpol police forces on Earth, also maintains a strong presence on the world. The police force operates one of its largest training facilities on Earth, recognizing a need for its agents to have a strong sense of loyalty to Earth and the race�s heritage.

Daily Life

Life upon Earth is, for the largest part, a good window into life across the universe. Inter-meshed tightly, humanity has seen a homogenizing of culture and races for several centuries. Earth humans are the primary inhabitants of Earth, yet the world is home to an ever-increasing population of gene-born races.

Outside of the mega-cities, Earth-life is a busy but less-cramped existence. Observers from centuries past would have a hard time believing that very few, if none, on Earth are left without the most basic of needs met. Humanity, moving always forward, is not in some strange utopia on Earth, but rather in equilibrium with itself for the first time in hundreds of years. Production, consumption, reclamation, and development all interweave to ensure that the Earth will remain despite man�s best efforts to destroy the great blue world.

Communities are reforming all across the globe into both interest-based communities as well as heritage-based communities. Interest-based communities are a modern twist on communes and art communities from ancient societies. In the modern version, citizens network into small communities where they can better share interests, passions, talents, and work. While the latter, heritage communities, are spurred by the rise in reconnecting with lineage and cultural roots lost over the years of homogenization.

Points of Interest

World Heritage Sites

Ages of human history have fallen away lost to time. Yet the losses are countered by ever-increasing efforts by humanitarians to record and preserve the cherished history of the Earth and its people. For over a thousand years, the World Heritage sites lead by UNESCO World Heritage have helped to catalog the greatest achievements of mankind on Earth. Held as a testimony to the marvelous aspirations of the species, these sites have came and went with time. Reclaimed either through the natural order of the world or through the action of mankind itself numerous famous sites exist only in memory and record.

The Asio-OPEC war was particularly damaging to the heritage of mankind as entire continents went to war on a scale larger than any of the previous World Wars. Particularly hard hit were the Americas as well as the greater coastal cities of Asia.

Despite the losses, the draw of history is powerful and helps to pull in hundreds of thousands of Earth humans, geneborn, and syntek pilgrims each year.