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Description

The year is 2323. The age of metanational companies has come and gone—revolutionary fervor has passed over the innermost breadth of civilization yet again. Despite the transition from hydrocarbon to nuclear power and then to dispersed geothermal-oceanic-solar energy complex, the deterioration and depletion of Earth's ecological and metal wealth continued unabated. Rampant social and economic inequality and injustice only deepened the steady descent in physical quality of life and human reproduction that followed overconsumption. Coupled with the stress of the particularly acute global Famine of 2132–35 triggered a spontaneous wave of labor unrest, insurrection, and civil war lasting from the 2130s to 2156, culminating in a worldwide revolution. Disobedience and uprisings erupted in the overexploited international peripheries of the global economy and soon spread into the more-advanced regions' metropolitan areas and urban belts. The ruling elite and their subservient framework of corporate social domination emigrated to the Moon's industrial, mining, and research territories to escape this chaos. The goal of the displaced flunkies of global capital became the development of a military-industrial network sufficient to ferry an invasion force between the worlds and suppress the new revolutionary community emerging from the chaos and civil world war on Earth.

Within a decade, this orbital enclave would be thrown further afield by the insurrection of Lunar specialists and laborers. The latter groups long maintained an unequal relationship with geocentric capital as the hereditary employees and overseers of Earth's off-world "property," despite their general self-sufficiency as exporters of goods back to the blue world. Lunar installations had come to manage production cooperatively, from the bottom-up, to avoid the creep of nepotism and cost-cutting that so often led to public disasters like infrastructural failures in a more forgiving environment like Earth's. In the intervening generations, this practical collectivization had become a matter of cultural distinction that had allowed authentic communities to form. For them, this heavy-handed militarization and universal conscription by displaced Earthers was the spark that led to open insurrection and the further flight of capital from that world as well. Both dismissive of the objective value of the planet Venus and the handful of idealists unable to impose themselves on that world's already self-sufficient communities of scientists and engineers, the remaining capitalist oligarchs went into self-exile in the sparsely populated, vaunted terraforming projects of the planet Mars. There they formed an emergency supranational regime, unilaterally declared to be—by inalienable legal precedent—the legitimate heir to the old corporate-propertarian world-system, vowing to reclaim Earth and the Moon by any means necessary.

The number of people alive on Earth plummeted from a high of thirteen billion in 2130, ten billion by 2200, to the present nine billion. The causes were myriad but overwhelmingly due to privation and violence; life expectancy fell sharply due to ecological and infrastructural collapse, shortages and disruption of supply chains, and mass violence that swept the globe during the subsequent social upheaval. Vast, furious crowds of people armed with bludgeons, pistols, and long guns were indiscriminately mowed down with aircraft or bombed from afar or even the stratosphere by remote-piloted or unsupervised ground and aerial combat robots. Megalopoli and whole urban belts—their police stations, city halls, government offices, and commercial and financial districts overwhelmed by rioters and declared free, self-governing territories through networks of newly-formed popular community assemblies—disappeared instantly in great blinding flashes. The glare of low-orbiting weapons systems reduced their distressed populations to vapor, and all structures slagged down to bedrock. These vast killing devices, built initially to reverse and redirect passing asteroids in a more optimistic age of space development, were repurposed to continually serve as a source of the fear of instantaneous, "clean," non-nuclear obliteration. Such "pragmatic measures" had become seen by the liberal establishment as a necessity in the later years of the international order, when food prices were rising year after year, and urban riots and rural insurgency in the once-prosperous, once-developed states had grown into an annual occurrence.

Today the Earth remains a stifling and wounded world governed by the paternalistic party-state of the Socialist World Republic: a global government that came about through the confederation and eventual consolidation of the revolutionary movements that drove the institutions and supporters of the old establishment off-world entirely. The ancient city of Samarkand in Asia serves as the meeting place of world government, initially serving as a meeting place between Arab, African and Chinese revolutionaries in the desperate years before unification. The planet always remains at risk of being suffocated by overpopulation due to its crippled natural environment. Efforts to reverse climatic collapse, widespread desertification, centuries of deforestation, and the restoration of most marine life juggled with efforts to advance living conditions for billions of people have fostered an outwardly unpleasant, hard-working, but vibrant, cosmopolitan, and generally competent planetary society. The Republic has encouraged higher-density housing and vertical development, reversing urban sprawl in many regions. Such initiatives contribute to the careful depopulation and rewilding of large areas of the planet's land surface, in addition to the 'de-domestication' of certain land-intensive crops and livestock lineages whose wild relatives had been rendered extinct over the intervening millennia. Over the past several decades, the Republic has increasingly turned away from its orthodox top-down model of state/labor coordination and governance in favor of an increasingly decentralized and generally horizontal approach to handling its constituent assemblies, workers' co-ops, and regional planning and industrial organizations. The pressures of human survival and "war communism" have faded from the mainstream consensus, leading to the purposeful erosion of harsh, state-centric, and authoritarian policies in favor of community autonomism and self-direction.

The Moon, or Luna, sometimes distinguished by Earthers as 'the federated democratic assemblies of the Moon' (or LFDA), is the most widely-influential economic and political force in the solar system. It is an anarchic society consisting of innumerable island-like habitats within the Lunar subsurface, surface, and orbit that have voluntarily unified for self-defense and mutual aid. Only a handful of remote Lunar communities reject, at the very least, partnering with this association, yet even these maintain open borders and exchange goods with the broader solidarity. Sociopolitical administration is highly decentralized, divided between numerous local assemblies formed through open participation. The Grand Assembly consists of several thousand elected representatives who elect a smattering of co-presidents and co-chairpersons from among their number to serve as various functionaries. The overarching goal is the dispersion of political power and the flattening of hierarchy. The Moon serves as Earth's benefactor, contributing to the planet's societal recovery through material and technical aid and political advisement. In exchange, Luna has been able to shape the direction of Earthly political thought away from top-down bureaucratic socialism towards more bottom-up, cooperative systems and popular power. Many Lunarians see this as preferable to purposeful subversion by promoting dual-power structures like mutual aid networks and community defense organizations to undermine its popular mandate of government.

Mars is a directionless world founded on an empty promise its leaders and elites have failed to follow through with: sunward military revanchism and a peaceful frontier paradise. Almost three centuries have passed, and ongoing, intensive terraforming projects still pock its surface as part of a broader program to raise its carrying capacity to something that may sustain a permanent surface population without all the inefficiencies and tragedy of managing a precariously deliberate environment and habitat infrastructure through an inept, profit-based economic order. Despite sleety seasonal showers in the northern hemisphere, the planet is unfit for life more complex than extremophilic lichen and microbes. Industrial automation makes up most aspects of Martian society. Although a self-professed republic, power has been so concentrated in a small cadre of individuals as to make the Independent State of Mars a fiscal oligarchy in all but name. Its sickly sterile, whitewashed appearance, gleaming, silvery habitat towers, and smog-choked purple skies all reflect this. Traditions of faith scarcely endure. Instead, the individual's spiritual life and what hardly left exists in any community have been wholly diverted to the spiritual pursuit of accumulation, economic advancement, and capital.

A popular culture centered around near-mythic hero figures of the cult of techno-capitalist prowess, such as early space industrialist Elon Musk who helped popularize the notion of colonizing and terraforming Mars in the early 21st century, Joan Ko, a business mogul and humanitarian widely regarded as having planned and built the first "real city" on Mars, and controversially Nelson Kamal. Nelson, a pioneer in the once-overlooked sector of applied biosciences, is seen on Mars as a tragic hero during the World Revolution for deploying an experimental, "less-than-lethal" targeted bio-weapon that attacked parts of the nervous system to reduce "inclinations to criminal and mob-like mentality." The bio-weapon resulted in over a hundred million cases of irreversible brain damage, most requiring lifelong convalescent care or prolonged employment in a protective work environment after hostilities. Beneath the perpetual caution and anxiety of their security state, an underclass has accumulated and fumed, forming a parallel economy of reciprocity and gift-giving in defiance of the prevailing secular monetary cult.

Venus is the most naturally hospitable non-Earthly body in the solar system. Venus today is far from its nightmarish origins as a runaway hothouse. An elaborate terraforming project was started in the early-2100s by a consortium of nonprofit organizations, academics, and philanthropists utilizing carbon capture technologies that had been dabbled with to offset the climate collapse on Earth, but on a much grander scale. Work continued throughout the revolutions of the 22nd century as the terraforming consortium relocated its operations entirely to Venus, following the families of researchers and technicians that had migrated there permanently to escape Earth's precarious social and economic situation. In the solar system, the most individually-developed planetary society, or more accurately, a community of organizations, has developed since then. Although geoforming machinery has only made the polar extremes of the planet hospitable to human life thus far, they are indeed quite pleasant.

The poles are home to many open-air population centers whose people have the most sweeping bell curve of intellectual brilliance and creativity, the highest standards of living, and the least inequality in the solar system. Venusian terraforming is ongoing but under an inter-municipal and cooperative rather than a top-down association. That's not to say life is utopian. Many visitors from Earth, Luna, and Mars find the social atmosphere, such as the societal expectation of hyper-specialization and the pressures that come with maintaining such economic automation as well as maintaining interpersonal responsibility to the community, quite smothering. They often need help adapting to a paradoxically rigid, horizontal social environment. Of culture, there are many, but generally are underpinned by a passion for physical and spiritual wellbeing, the regular exercise of skepticism, and rational inquiry, and the most prominent local religions being variants of the Abrahamic faiths, prominently Islam, in addition to Taoism, Buddhism, an entirely local belief known as Venusian Gaianism, and curiously, pockets of traditional African, Malaysian, Polynesian, and even Indigenous Australian folk religion and culture.

The planet Mercury's habitation throughout the past two centuries has been sporadic, populated, abandoned, and repopulated multiple times with the ebb and flow of demand. Automated mines have been built and repurposed for generations, with a strong tradition of scientific expeditions from the voidward worlds co-opting decades or even centuries-old equipment and material from the desolate Hermian surface for their purposes. Currently, the planet lacks any large-scale formal actors due to an abundance of piracy and black market dealing, having overrun the local mining operations and making regular forays into the usual shipping routes between Mars, Venus, and Earth-Luna.

~~~

Credit goes to for making the planet graphics and star-field. I put this together in early April. The idea I had was the solar system many generations after the calamitous overthrow of a cyberpunk-style dystopian future ruled by transnational corporations by its overexploited masses.

Description

The year is 2323. The age of metanational companies has come and gone—revolutionary fervor has passed over the innermost breadth of civilization yet again. Despite the transition from hydrocarbon to nuclear power and then to dispersed geothermal-oceanic-solar energy complex, the deterioration and depletion of Earth's ecological and metal wealth continued unabated. Rampant social and economic inequality and injustice only deepened the steady descent in physical quality of life and human reproduction that followed overconsumption. Coupled with the stress of the particularly acute global Famine of 2132–35 triggered a spontaneous wave of labor unrest, insurrection, and civil war lasting from the 2130s to 2156, culminating in a worldwide revolution. Disobedience and uprisings erupted in the overexploited international peripheries of the global economy and soon spread into the more-advanced regions' metropolitan areas and urban belts. The ruling elite and their subservient framework of corporate social domination emigrated to the Moon's industrial, mining, and research territories to escape this chaos. The goal of the displaced flunkies of global capital became the development of a military-industrial network sufficient to ferry an invasion force between the worlds and suppress the new revolutionary community emerging from the chaos and civil world war on Earth.

Within a decade, this orbital enclave would be thrown further afield by the insurrection of Lunar specialists and laborers. The latter groups long maintained an unequal relationship with geocentric capital as the hereditary employees and overseers of Earth's off-world "property," despite their general self-sufficiency as exporters of goods back to the blue world. Lunar installations had come to manage production cooperatively, from the bottom-up, to avoid the creep of nepotism and cost-cutting that so often led to public disasters like infrastructural failures in a more forgiving environment like Earth's. In the intervening generations, this practical collectivization had become a matter of cultural distinction that had allowed authentic communities to form. For them, this heavy-handed militarization and universal conscription by displaced Earthers was the spark that led to open insurrection and the further flight of capital from that world as well. Both dismissive of the objective value of the planet Venus and the handful of idealists unable to impose themselves on that world's already self-sufficient communities of scientists and engineers, the remaining capitalist oligarchs went into self-exile in the sparsely populated, vaunted terraforming projects of the planet Mars. There they formed an emergency supranational regime, unilaterally declared to be—by inalienable legal precedent—the legitimate heir to the old corporate-propertarian world-system, vowing to reclaim Earth and the Moon by any means necessary.

The number of people alive on Earth plummeted from a high of thirteen billion in 2130, ten billion by 2200, to the present nine billion. The causes were myriad but overwhelmingly due to privation and violence; life expectancy fell sharply due to ecological and infrastructural collapse, shortages and disruption of supply chains, and mass violence that swept the globe during the subsequent social upheaval. Vast, furious crowds of people armed with bludgeons, pistols, and long guns were indiscriminately mowed down with aircraft or bombed from afar or even the stratosphere by remote-piloted or unsupervised ground and aerial combat robots. Megalopoli and whole urban belts—their police stations, city halls, government offices, and commercial and financial districts overwhelmed by rioters and declared free, self-governing territories through networks of newly-formed popular community assemblies—disappeared instantly in great blinding flashes. The glare of low-orbiting weapons systems reduced their distressed populations to vapor, and all structures slagged down to bedrock. These vast killing devices, built initially to reverse and redirect passing asteroids in a more optimistic age of space development, were repurposed to continually serve as a source of the fear of instantaneous, "clean," non-nuclear obliteration. Such "pragmatic measures" had become seen by the liberal establishment as a necessity in the later years of the international order, when food prices were rising year after year, and urban riots and rural insurgency in the once-prosperous, once-developed states had grown into an annual occurrence.

Today the Earth remains a stifling and wounded world governed by the paternalistic party-state of the Socialist World Republic: a global government that came about through the confederation and eventual consolidation of the revolutionary movements that drove the institutions and supporters of the old establishment off-world entirely. The ancient city of Samarkand in Asia serves as the meeting place of world government, initially serving as a meeting place between Arab, African and Chinese revolutionaries in the desperate years before unification. The planet always remains at risk of being suffocated by overpopulation due to its crippled natural environment. Efforts to reverse climatic collapse, widespread desertification, centuries of deforestation, and the restoration of most marine life juggled with efforts to advance living conditions for billions of people have fostered an outwardly unpleasant, hard-working, but vibrant, cosmopolitan, and generally competent planetary society. The Republic has encouraged higher-density housing and vertical development, reversing urban sprawl in many regions. Such initiatives contribute to the careful depopulation and rewilding of large areas of the planet's land surface, in addition to the 'de-domestication' of certain land-intensive crops and livestock lineages whose wild relatives had been rendered extinct over the intervening millennia. Over the past several decades, the Republic has increasingly turned away from its orthodox top-down model of state/labor coordination and governance in favor of an increasingly decentralized and generally horizontal approach to handling its constituent assemblies, workers' co-ops, and regional planning and industrial organizations. The pressures of human survival and "war communism" have faded from the mainstream consensus, leading to the purposeful erosion of harsh, state-centric, and authoritarian policies in favor of community autonomism and self-direction.

The Moon, or Luna, sometimes distinguished by Earthers as 'the federated democratic assemblies of the Moon' (or LFDA), is the most widely-influential economic and political force in the solar system. It is an anarchic society consisting of innumerable island-like habitats within the Lunar subsurface, surface, and orbit that have voluntarily unified for self-defense and mutual aid. Only a handful of remote Lunar communities reject, at the very least, partnering with this association, yet even these maintain open borders and exchange goods with the broader solidarity. Sociopolitical administration is highly decentralized, divided between numerous local assemblies formed through open participation. The Grand Assembly consists of several thousand elected representatives who elect a smattering of co-presidents and co-chairpersons from among their number to serve as various functionaries. The overarching goal is the dispersion of political power and the flattening of hierarchy. The Moon serves as Earth's benefactor, contributing to the planet's societal recovery through material and technical aid and political advisement. In exchange, Luna has been able to shape the direction of Earthly political thought away from top-down bureaucratic socialism towards more bottom-up, cooperative systems and popular power. Many Lunarians see this as preferable to purposeful subversion by promoting dual-power structures like mutual aid networks and community defense organizations to undermine its popular mandate of government.

Mars is a directionless world founded on an empty promise its leaders and elites have failed to follow through with: sunward military revanchism and a peaceful frontier paradise. Almost three centuries have passed, and ongoing, intensive terraforming projects still pock its surface as part of a broader program to raise its carrying capacity to something that may sustain a permanent surface population without all the inefficiencies and tragedy of managing a precariously deliberate environment and habitat infrastructure through an inept, profit-based economic order. Despite sleety seasonal showers in the northern hemisphere, the planet is unfit for life more complex than extremophilic lichen and microbes. Industrial automation makes up most aspects of Martian society. Although a self-professed republic, power has been so concentrated in a small cadre of individuals as to make the Independent State of Mars a fiscal oligarchy in all but name. Its sickly sterile, whitewashed appearance, gleaming, silvery habitat towers, and smog-choked purple skies all reflect this. Traditions of faith scarcely endure. Instead, the individual's spiritual life and what hardly left exists in any community have been wholly diverted to the spiritual pursuit of accumulation, economic advancement, and capital.

A popular culture centered around near-mythic hero figures of the cult of techno-capitalist prowess, such as early space industrialist Elon Musk who helped popularize the notion of colonizing and terraforming Mars in the early 21st century, Joan Ko, a business mogul and humanitarian widely regarded as having planned and built the first "real city" on Mars, and controversially Nelson Kamal. Nelson, a pioneer in the once-overlooked sector of applied biosciences, is seen on Mars as a tragic hero during the World Revolution for deploying an experimental, "less-than-lethal" targeted bio-weapon that attacked parts of the nervous system to reduce "inclinations to criminal and mob-like mentality." The bio-weapon resulted in over a hundred million cases of irreversible brain damage, most requiring lifelong convalescent care or prolonged employment in a protective work environment after hostilities. Beneath the perpetual caution and anxiety of their security state, an underclass has accumulated and fumed, forming a parallel economy of reciprocity and gift-giving in defiance of the prevailing secular monetary cult.

Venus is the most naturally hospitable non-Earthly body in the solar system. Venus today is far from its nightmarish origins as a runaway hothouse. An elaborate terraforming project was started in the early-2100s by a consortium of nonprofit organizations, academics, and philanthropists utilizing carbon capture technologies that had been dabbled with to offset the climate collapse on Earth, but on a much grander scale. Work continued throughout the revolutions of the 22nd century as the terraforming consortium relocated its operations entirely to Venus, following the families of researchers and technicians that had migrated there permanently to escape Earth's precarious social and economic situation. In the solar system, the most individually-developed planetary society, or more accurately, a community of organizations, has developed since then. Although geoforming machinery has only made the polar extremes of the planet hospitable to human life thus far, they are indeed quite pleasant.

The poles are home to many open-air population centers whose people have the most sweeping bell curve of intellectual brilliance and creativity, the highest standards of living, and the least inequality in the solar system. Venusian terraforming is ongoing but under an inter-municipal and cooperative rather than a top-down association. That's not to say life is utopian. Many visitors from Earth, Luna, and Mars find the social atmosphere, such as the societal expectation of hyper-specialization and the pressures that come with maintaining such economic automation as well as maintaining interpersonal responsibility to the community, quite smothering. They often need help adapting to a paradoxically rigid, horizontal social environment. Of culture, there are many, but generally are underpinned by a passion for physical and spiritual wellbeing, the regular exercise of skepticism, and rational inquiry, and the most prominent local religions being variants of the Abrahamic faiths, prominently Islam, in addition to Taoism, Buddhism, an entirely local belief known as Venusian Gaianism, and curiously, pockets of traditional African, Malaysian, Polynesian, and even Indigenous Australian folk religion and culture.

The planet Mercury's habitation throughout the past two centuries has been sporadic, populated, abandoned, and repopulated multiple times with the ebb and flow of demand. Automated mines have been built and repurposed for generations, with a strong tradition of scientific expeditions from the voidward worlds co-opting decades or even centuries-old equipment and material from the desolate Hermian surface for their purposes. Currently, the planet lacks any large-scale formal actors due to an abundance of piracy and black market dealing, having overrun the local mining operations and making regular forays into the usual shipping routes between Mars, Venus, and Earth-Luna.

~~~

Credit goes to for making the planet graphics and star-field. I put this together in early April. The idea I had was the solar system many generations after the calamitous overthrow of a cyberpunk-style dystopian future ruled by transnational corporations by its overexploited masses.