HEAVY SKY: Earth - The Ruined Cradle

The year is 2257. Earth is screwed. Extractive industries and industrial pollution have wreaked havoc on the planet's weather, making a several thousand-mile-wide band around the equator essentially uninhabitable. This is a region plagued by frequent megastorms, droughts and heatwaves. The nation-states these regions once belonged to still nominally hold dominion over them, but the Stormlands cannot be tamed or owned. 

 

Most of Earth's human population lives in overcrowded gigasprawls, surrounded by endless factory farms. Sprawlers lives are usually dim, with most people subsisting on meagre basic supporting incomes, with most of their waking hours spent in virtual worlds. Most sprawlers rarely leave their apartments. They generate income through providing various online services. Most fabrication of products is automated. Most industrial labor is done by bioroids or robots. A vast number of people live on Earth, but for the most part they only serve as consumers, as engines that justify the production of goods and services. 

 

Some seek a higher meaning in the virtual world. Many try to escape the drudgery and oppressive nature of earth-bound life by leaving the planet. But life off-world is not easy...

 

Not everyone is welcome in the cities either. Those who can't or those who simply don't want to live in what’s left of civilization, eke out a meager living in bunker-like housing complexes closer to the ever blasting storms. But there are others who chose nomadic lives in the heart of the abandoned stretches of earth commonly referred to as Stormlands. 

 

The Stormlands cannot be inhabited by human civilizations. Coastlines shift, storms rip apart anything in their ways. These are not places that support persistent, large-scale societies. But nomads, of many a color, roam these parts aplenty. Corporations run heavily fortified mining camps that stretch out underground to extract Earth’s last remaining natural treasures in a race to the bottom. But those too are transient phenomenon. Nothing of permanence exists down here. Floating cities on the oceans, drifting along, providing refuge for outcasts, shoreline settlements that can submerge before storms batter the coasts offer shelter to those seeking freedom from the stifling, suffocating dense surveillance states in which most of humanity now dwells. The Stormlands attract extremophiles. Most who live here have altered their DNA from baseline humans. Some to survive long stretches of time without food or water, others to protect from the sun's merciless rays and all the forms of cancer they bring through the depleted ozone layers.

 

Earth's nation states have massively changed. Most no longer exist. When the climate finally shifted irrevocably and the wholesale destruction of much of the lands in the tropics and subtropics by extreme weather began, nation state after nation state went bankrupt. Many countries in what are now stormlands were simply given up. The corporations and their ageless, hyper-wealthy overlords swept in to pick up the pieces. Extraction of natural resources on Earth is still ongoing.

 

North America to the south of what used to be Canada is mostly uninhabitable. Where the weather patterns allow it, solar farms generate energy for the gigasprawls lining Hudson’s Bay. These are the United Cities of the Arctic Cirlce. The East Coast is frequently ravaged by extreme hurricanes and incapable of sustaining a large-scale civilization. The inlands are arid and dried out.

 

Central America is entirely stormland, most of what used to be Panama lost to the oceans. South America is mostly desert with the exception of the remnant of the Lega Progresista Patagonia to the south

 

All of Africa - with the exception of the green stretch of the West African Coalition - is desert or stormland. But the Sahara Desert is covered with photovoltaic generator stations that provide energy for most of Europe. Very few people live outside the green stretch of Greater Senegal, but extractive industries are still present and often engaged in violent conflicts with one another.

 

Southern Europe is depopulated due to widespread desertification and extreme weather, with solar farms and geothermal operations fueling the Scandinavian, Russian and English gigasprawls. Around the North Sea are the city states of the Dogger Commonwealth, the remnant of Western European peoples. Further inland are the cities of the Chelyabinski Rus.

 

The Indian subcontinent has turned into a desert wedged between stormlands, with a stretch of habitation in the Republic of Kerala, one of the last functioning nation-states, around the gigasprawl of Kollam in the southwest, which also houses one of Earth's busiest spaceports.

 

South-East Asia is one continuous stormland, devoid of permanent settlements.China in the 23rd century has massively changed. Most of what is left of the Middle Realm is a massive sprawl situated along the Northwestern coast of the Sea of Okhotsk. The hinterlands of the city are filled with rows and rows of high-yield factory-farms, while the ocean to the city's east is filled with equally endless rows of fish farms. The Chinese sprawl was built on land that traditionally belonged to Russia. As the terrestrial territory of the People's Republic became less and less habitable over the course of the early 22nd century, the Chinese government struck a deal with Russia, trading parts of the Chinese colonies on Mars and a substantial stake in its asteroid mining operations for substantial lands in south-eastern Siberia. China also absorbed most of the remaining populations of Korea and Japan. Koreans and Japanese eke out a marginal existence at the edges of Chinese society today.

China was hard hit by the disruption of the Bracer War. The government maintained a modicum of remote-control over its holdings on Luna and Mars, however the lack of physical access to these colonies allowed especially the Martian offshoots to cultivate a higher portion of independence and autonomy than the central government was comfortable with. The subsequent reimposition of control was a big factor in what caused the Martian Civil War. That war also made waves in China itself, where Martian units struck against the government several times.

Most of the world's food is grown in Siberia, Canada and Antarctica.

 

Antarctica has become green. And home to a third of earthbound humanity, living in the gigasprawls of the United Cities of West-Antarctica on the Antarctic Peninsula.

 

Australia is one of the last places on the planet that maintains some sort of national cohesion in the way it did before since the changes from the climate collapse were not quite as drastic here as they were elsewhere.

 

Auteaora, the former New Zealand, is the world’s richest remaining nation-state, maintaining a strict isolationism from the rest of Earth’s peoples. Auteaora has one close partner in the Democratic Republic of Tasmania, an island nation that became independent of Australia in the last century.

 

Australia, the Republic of Kerala, Greater Senegal and Lega Progresista di Patagonia are home to the world's busiest, safest and most tightly regulated spaceports. Earth’s orbits are littered with fast-moving debris, leftovers from the Bracer War over a century ago. The cleanup after the runaway Kessler-syndrome was impossible, so Earth’s spacefaring powers agreed to focus cleanup efforts on the orbits used by the busiest spaceports. Given that escaping Earth’s gravity well without access to a linear mass accelerator launch system is prohibitively expensive, there was not much in terms of independent space flight before the Bracer War. 

 

But returning to Earth’s surface outside of the cleared – and heavily patrolled and surveilled – orbits has now become very, very difficult and only the most experienced New Bracers have a chance of doing so.