Relevant Historical Notes
  • Earth governments have been forced, for a variety of reasons, to federate in ways similar to the European Union in order to meet the demands of the 21st century. Even this has not staved off the megacorporate steamroller that has led to much regulation being neglected or outright ignored.
    • Brushfire wars, typically fought through proxies or with mercenary corporations, have devastated the Third World. The first non-governmental use of nuclear arms occurred in 2081, used to sterilize an area that had been infected with a persistent biotoxin that targeted the chemical receptors in the brain responsible for aggression (which, though unintended, turned out to be extremely fatal).
    • Oceanic die-off has led several notables firms to experiment with mediation nanomachinery piles, scrubbing toxic water and fostering a healthy growth environment for plankton and similar creatures vital to the aquatic food chain. At least, that's the general idea. Now the Mediterranean is too toxic to safely swim in for more than a few minutes at a time, more and more people believe that nanoecology isn't going to solve the mounting problems.
    • As climate change and pollution make adverse weather more and more dangerous, large arcologies have sprung up in the hearts of the larger cities, as populations consolidate for safety.
  • The space economy is booming, as more and more nations and megacorporations find their way into orbit to profit from the bounty of space even as Earth's ecosystem falls to pieces. The Singapore elevator recently came online, joining the Kilimanjaro and Easter Island elevators in providing low-cost access to space.
    • Titan has recently been colonized by a Scandinavian quasi-governmental cooperative. Bidding for spots on the crew was fierce and only the cream of the crop got out to Saturn, until an anti-trust action was lodged in the WTO by another coorperative microcorporation run by skyjacks, which forced the Titan Group to rotate microgravity workers. As the new fusion rockets were routinely making the Titan run, hauling petrochemicals back to plastics and polymer factories in Earth orbit, exchanging crews added little to the mass allowance.
    • Earth orbit grows more crowded by the day, as M-type asteroids are hauled there and processed to create habitats of all kinds, including a few examples of Stanford Torii and O'Neill Cylinders. Many corporations do their business from habs in orbit to avoid being taxed by the starving multigovernmental organizations on Earth.
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