A House of Peace Built on Sand: 2070 to 2080
The Interstellar Age, S02E01
A decade following the end of its Third World War, Earth was still clawing its way back from the brink.
A billion deaths and widespread global devastation could not be made up in a single generation. Low-yield nuclear exchanges throughout Eurasia had rendered swathes of already taxed agricultural land radioactive and barren, leading to most of the over two hundred million starvation deaths which had added to the war’s staggering butcher’s bill. New radiation cleanup techniques and innovative land reclamation practices were easing the strain on the global food supply by 2070, but the food situation in large parts of Asia in particular remained dire.
The war had also halted, and then rolled back progress on environmental restoration. Projects like those to sweep plastics and other refuse from the oceans, scrub excess carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, and revivify flagging ecosystems had mostly ground to a halt in the years leading up to the war; the titanic global struggle had then exacerbated existing problems, wrecking ecosystems and generating massive quantities of waste and industrial gasses. In the first decade after the war, public will—and resources—to restart these projects was lacking, due to the understandable focus on repairing the infrastructure damage caused by the war, and preventing the continuing starvation and disease epidemics that followed in its wake.
A political sea change occurred in most of the Allied democracies throughout the 2060’s. Bellicose, wartime governments fell from power across the board, replaced by peacetime governments with varying goals and focuses. In the United States, President—and wartime Vice President—Andrea Winter served only a single term before being defeated in the 2064 elections. She was replaced by a new administration which promised to focus more on domestic issues and social welfare programs rather than strengthening the Global Democratic Alliance. In India, long-serving Prime Minister Chandra Ravel was similarly defeated in that country’s 2064 elections–although in this case, he was replaced by a government which promised increased international engagement and involvement with the development of the GDA.
These political shifts were matched by a wave of cultural upheavals and resurgences. These varied in detail from one country to another, but one element was near-constant across the globe: a rejection of most forms of transhuman technology. While access to gene editing to eliminate congenital defects and conditions expanded, as did cybernetically enhanced limb and organ replacements, a groundswell of sentiment against non-lifesaving genetic modification and cybernetics like mind-machine interfaces and neural implants surged.
Fueled by fear and disgust at the excesses of the Authoritarian Axis, in particular the radical transhumanism of the wartime People’s Republic of China, these movements led to sweeping bans. Eventually, the GDA would place a global ban on the development and trade of the proscribed technologies. So intense was this rejection that it would be almost two centuries before technologies like neural implantation and genetic enhancement once again saw significant development and proliferation in the human sphere.
Unfortunately, a ban on transhuman technology was one of the few things a newly-unified world could agree on. As terrible as the war had been, it had forced the world’s democracies to set aside their minor differences and focus on a common goal. Now, with the imminent existential threat removed, those differences resurged with a vengeance. In addition to the pettier, regional conflicts and disagreements that had been shelved during the war, there was a major point of contention within the GDA from the beginning: how much power should the global alliance have?
Three factions began to crystallize at the start of the 2070’s, outgrowths of the debates which had surrounded the permanent formalization of the alliance a decade earlier. The Integrationists, led by France, the UK, and Japan, wanted a plan to transition the alliance into a global union state, on the relatively brief timeframe of ten to twenty years. This faction enjoyed widespread support in much of the former EU, Central America, and the Chinese Federation.
On the other side, the Deconstructionists, led by India and Australia, and with significant support in Eastern Europe, the African Union, and the Russian Republic, preferred to gradually decrease the level of control the GDA had over global affairs. In their formulation, the alliance should eventually become something more akin to the old NATO, a collective security organization with no influence on other policy, and a less integrated military and diplomatic structure.
Straddling the line between the two was a less defined, more conservative faction hoping simply to preserve the new status quo, with a robust alliance having little if any influence over domestic state affairs, but otherwise being highly integrated in the realms of military and foreign policy. Many supporters of this “Third Way” believed that the alliance would eventually evolve into a more unified global state of some description, but were in no hurry to force the issue.
These three power blocs, wrangling constantly in the Alliance’s Global Forum, were only the relatively staid, official manifestations of a growing conflict that permeated all levels of world society. On the fringes were other groups and ideologies openly hostile to the Alliance, each for their own reasons. Far-right movements opposed any kind of global integration, seeing the Alliance as a conspiracy perpetrated by a cabal of socialists, progressives, and of course, Jews, who had secretly orchestrated the war and the “defeat” of the People’s Republic of China so that the communist utopia could be brought into being by indirect means. These groups were particularly prominent in Eastern Europe, the Russian Republic, the United States, and Brazil.
As for world communism, it had largely been discredited by the crimes and the defeat of the PRC in the war—but many grassroots organizations still carried the socialist torch. These opposed the Alliance too, seeing it not as a communist conspiracy, but as a capitalist one, run by a sinister cabal of megacorporations, neoconservatives, and again, Jews. These groups were based largely out of Western Europe and parts of Asia, including the Chinese Federation.
A third subset of anti-Alliance movements was religious in nature, opposing the GDA for various doctrinal and eschatological reasons. But spread throughout the Middle East, Africa, and parts of the US, these groups had the least popular support, and were never able to set aside their own confessional differences long enough to unite against their common foe.
Far-right and far-left resistance to the Alliance largely simmered beneath the surface until the early 2070’s. At that time, a combination of slower than expected post-war recovery and a decline in the war’s inflated industrial production led to a deep, global recession. As in other such times of economic hardship, fringe groups experienced a surge in popularity and power.
Fairly or not, given the global situation the GDA was bound to shoulder most of the blame for the economic downturn. Protests escalated to riots in hard-hit cities; far-left and far-right parties surged in power in elections, riding waves of popular resentment. By 2075, none had yet formed a government in any of the major states of the Alliance; but all those who wished to preserve the GDA, in whatever form, feared that if one of the founding members of the Alliance should formally withdraw, it might trigger a cascade effect and crumble the entire edifice of global unity.
Neither the Integrationists nor the Deconstructionists seemed able to provide a viable alternative to resentful populations—the former because they went too far, the latter because they did not go far enough. And while opinion polls appeared to show that most of the world’s people preferred a less extreme third way, no leaders had yet emerged who could craft a coherent set of principles, a narrative for that path, which could capture imaginations and excite passions the way the more extreme ideologies could. Many feared that the dark days of the 20’s and 30’s, which had laid the groundwork for cataclysmic world war, had already returned.
But by 2076, there was some reason for hope. After five years of hardship, the global economy showed signs of rebounding, or at least stabilizing; if that rebound could be encouraged and maintained, economic growth might take some of the wind out of the extremists’ sails. Then, at the end of the year, a dithering, ineffectual presidential administration in the United States suffered a crushing electoral defeat at the hands of war hero Horatio Ramirez. As an admiral in command of US 5th Fleet, Ramirez had masterminded the destruction of the PLAN fleet at the Panama Canal, and later, as Commander, U.S. Pacific Fleet, he had presided over final victory in the war against the PRC.
In his post-war political career, Ramirez had come to champion a path forward which focused on a sense of possibility and purpose rather than remaining mired in the horrors of the past or the challenges of the present. Now, as President, Ramirez emerged as the first of a new generation of world leaders who would finally make the “third way” an exciting story rather than a stodgy remainder—the promise of a future in which a free humanity, independent, but united in purpose, could work together toward a common destiny.
The following year, Ramirez found a global partner in this mission. After years of uncommon political turmoil and successive minority governments in India, the post-war Naya Raasta—New Path—party won a surprising majority in the snap 2077 elections. The new prime minister, Vidya Samra—herself a veteran of the war, having served as a junior officer in a logistics company in Iran and Myanmar—had campaigned on a platform similar in spirit to Ramirez’s. Once in power, the two became fast diplomatic friends, forging a partnership in the Global Forum aimed at not just preserving the Alliance, but crafting a new purpose for it.
That purpose would have to go beyond a simple redoubling of reconstruction and environmental restoration. Something was needed that would capture a weary world’s imagination. Ramirez and Samra, as it turned out, had the same thing in mind.
Plans for a crewed mission to Mars had been in development at various space agencies and private firms since the 2010’s, but none had come to fruition. The enormous time and capital investment—and risk—required had always proved too great to surmount. NASA had made plans for a manned mission for the mid-to-late 2030’s, but the domestic and international chaos in the wake of the 2029 Sino-American War had indefinitely delayed that project. A joint mission proposed by NASA, the ESA, and the Japanese and Indian space agencies during the Western resurgence of the early 2040’s had come closer to realization—but the war indefinitely shelved that project too.
Now, President Ramirez and Prime Minster Samra decided the time had come to not only revive that mission, but surpass it. Codenamed Destiny, the new mission would involve not just the American and Indian space agencies, but would be a truly global effort, drawing talent, expertise, and capital from all over the world. Private space exploration firms would contribute as well as governments.
To match the expanded scope of the project, an equally more ambitious goal was required. The original joint mission had planned only to deposit three astronauts on Mars for a period of thirty days, before returning them to Earth. The new Destiny mission would aim for an even more unprecedented objective: to send a crew of fifteen astronauts—larger than any other single crew in the history of spaceflight—to Mars to establish a permanent outpost there. Future missions, planned to initially fly every year, then on an increasing schedule, would relieve the crew and replace them with gradually expanded rosters for 1-year rotations.
The joint US-Indian announcement in May, 2077 took the world by surprise, despite the hints Ramirez had dropped during his inaugural address in January of that year. The announcement asserted that the mission would be launched in just five years—a stunningly ambitious timetable, given what would have to be achieved before a launch was possible. A spacecraft had already been designed for the previous mission, and tests of the engine and crew compartment had been conducted in the mid-2040’s. But the expanded mission parameters meant that the Destiny spacecraft would have to exceed these designs in several key aspects.
And furthermore, it still had to be built. In order to do that, space needed to be clear. Efforts to sweep low Earth orbit of the debris from the “Silent Massacre” had begun almost as soon as the war ended, in order to return communications and GPS capabilities to their pre-war levels. But as with other areas of reconstruction, progress had been slow. As phase one of the Destiny plan, President Ramirez directed NASA to immediately step up clearing operations by 150%, and managed a congressional authorization for the funding needed to do that, including contracts to several private space firms to assist in the operation.
The next step would be to expand the Artemis Moon base. Established in the late 2030’s, the base had grown slowly throughout the 2040’s with global tensions on the rise. The joint NASA / Japan Space Exploration Agency crew had been withdrawn in 2050 over fears that they would be trapped on the Moon without sufficient supplies should a global war break out. Astronauts had begun returning to Artemis starting in 2070—but again, the flow of resources to this project had been a trickle, and the crews there were doing little more than keeping the lights on. Now, with renewed funding and authorization, they would be tasked with bringing the base back up to, and beyond, its pre-war functionality. Then, it could serve as a waystation for the Destiny spacecraft on its journey to Mars.
At the same time, the old plans and prototypes for the previous mission’s Mars base had to be dusted off, and just like those of the spacecraft, expanded. Now, instead of supporting three astronauts for thirty days, the base would have to support fifteen for an entire year. Artemis Moon base facilities were already in use which could support similar numbers of occupants for even greater periods of time, in theory—but the Moon base, when occupied, could count on resupply every few months at the most. A facility which could be transported across the roughly 225 million kilometers to Mars, and then survive without any resupply for at least a year, was another challenge altogether.
The breakneck pace of these space engineering projects would be matched by the search for, and training of, the mission’s crew. The astronauts would be chosen from among qualified candidates around the world by a combined lottery and elimination system—including from the former Axis powers. Ramirez and Samra agreed that it was essential for global unity that one astronaut each from Russia, China, and Iran should be chosen, as well as representatives from the major wartime Allied powers. Such a crew working together in space for all humanity would be a dramatic demonstration that the war was well and truly over, and a new era had begun.
Yet as work began on this incredible project, the world was not united in the belief that it should. Vocal opposition came from many quarters, for many reasons. Cadres of experts asserted that such a mission was impossible, at least in the timeframe suggested. Varied interest groups balked at the enormous price tag that the mission and its subsidiary Lunar and LEO projects would carry—projected at roughly one trillion dollars. The money would be better spent, they said, on environmental regeneration, food production, nuclear disarmament, military rearmament, cultural projects, global integration, global decoupling, and on and on, depending on the particular proclivities of the activists in question.
Others were more violent in their opposition. Religious extremists protested that space travel was a prideful affront to God. Far-right and far-left anti-GDA groups all opposed the mission for their own reasons, each believing that it was a cover for a globalist conspiracy—either communist, or capitalist—to destroy the last vestiges of either national and ethnic sovereignty, or socialist resistance. Terror attacks carried out by the most extreme of these groups, which had begun in the early 2070’s, stepped up toward the end of the decade, in part spurred on by the effort to bring the Destiny mission to fruition. Several attempts were made to target various Destiny facilities around the world. The most high-profile successes in this terror campaign were the bombing of a plant manufacturing fuel system components for the spacecraft in Japan by leftists in 2079, and the assassination of two of the Russian astronaut candidates by neo-fascists in a mass shooting in 2081.
Tragic as these and other incidents were, they could not derail the mission. The greater threats to Destiny’s success came from political skepticism, fueled mostly by the project’s staggering cost, and from the mission’s unprecedented engineering challenges. Over the remainder of the 2070’s, Ramirez and Samra were able to bring most of the major GDA governments onside, but continued to face the greatest opposition from domestic partisan wrangling. In addition to classic political horsetrading—such as ensuring certain districts of recalcitrant congressmen and MPs received contracts to build spacecraft or Mars base parts—the mission’s supporters marshaled arguments to justify its trillion dollar price tag.
Forward-thinking economists touted a permanent Mars base as a vital waystation for future missions to the asteroid belt and Jupiter. Bolstered by data from the mission’s private partner firms—in particular the venerable SpaceX, and newcomer Venturestar, founded in the EU in 2072—they pointed out that if Earth could exploit the vital, and virtually limitless, resources in the belt and the Jovian moons, the future economic returns would more than make up for almost any investment today, even one greater than the thirteen figures already on the table.
Over time, these hard-nosed financial arguments found purchase with those for whom romantic appeals about the final frontier failed. As progress continued on the mission, and as the skeleton of the massive Destiny spacecraft began to take shape in orbit around the Moon, even progressive groups and political parties—which had opposed the mission on the grounds that the money would be better spent improving the lives of people on Earth—began to come around. “What would you rather have to help the downtrodden and forgotten,” a prominent German progressive said in early 2080, “a few more dollars today? Or tomorrow, limitless clean energy, and the end of scarcity, the end of want?”
“The latter,” came the answer from many quarters—”if it works.”
As the new decade dawned, that remained a massive “if.”
“Make no mistake,” President Ramirez declared in his famous 2081 State of the Union address; “despite the strides we have made, this undertaking is a great risk. Space holds as many dangers as opportunities—but nothing great has ever been accomplished without risk. This great nation was not forged without risk. We did not vanquish the armies of tyranny and oppression without risk. We did not create the world we live in today—a world, for the first time in all history, both free and at peace—without risk. As a sage once said, ‘we are not descended from fearful men.’”
So, the Destiny mission inched closer to fruition. As tests of the spacecraft components began, as the astronaut hopefuls conducted publicized exercises at training bases in deserts around the globe, it did finally begin to capture the imagination of a weary world.
But while support for the mission among the general public grew, opposition on the fringes only hardened. Peaceful, but die-hard progressives planned new waves of protests in the leadup to the mission’s final phases. Extremist terror groups plotted to redouble their efforts to sabotage the project as it neared completion, by any means necessary.
Even in the halls of power around the world, there remained those who were skeptical or resentful of the project. Some hoped it would fail—and drag the GDA down with it. Others felt it did not go far enough, that something even greater, more dramatic—and more existentially dangerous—would be required to hold humanity together. All made their own plans to step out of the shadows should the mission meet with disaster.
And finally, inhuman eyes watched the construction of the Destiny spacecraft with trepidation. For they knew what it meant: the time was coming soon when they would no longer be able to hide from the children of Earth. It was then that the time of greatest danger, and opportunity, would truly begin.