Data Log - The Apocalypse

The end didn’t happen with a bang, or a fanfare, or even a nuclear fireball. It just… crept up on us.

It began in the 21st century. Humanity made great strides in that century but so much damage had already been done, and so much of it was invisible, too. When the insect population collapsed, food crops and biodiversity both suffered. Without those, ecosystems all over the globe suffered. By the time we curtailed our CO2 emissions, there were too few trees to sequester the excess.

The result was hotter summers and deeper freezing winters. Species went extinct by the thousand every day, and as we squabbled over the cause and solutions, we pulled ourselves apart. Old allies became bitter rivals. Nations came apart at the seams. The great edifices that supported the Internet, global trade, just-in-time delivery and all the other things that Humanity depended upon to live… they all fell apart.

Starvation, disease and war made the twenty-second century even bloodier than the twentieth.

Humanity was always good at adapting, though. When the sun baked the land, we invented the thermal regulator; When the crops failed, we invented grow-pods. We got better at recycling, at finding new energy sources… but we were always a step behind where we needed to be. Folks used to joke about the big tech firms and their slogans. “Yesterday’s solution, tomorrow.”

It’s not that we destroyed the world. But we certainly made it impossible to sustain human civilization as it was. Too many places lapsed into feudal tyranny, or mismanaged themselves into famine, or just plain became unlivable as the climate shifted.

Through it all, we never gave up on space exploration. There were complaints of course: that it was a waste of increasingly valuable resources, that all the money and effort could go towards actually solving the problem… now it seems maybe space was the only solid investment we ever made.