The great irony of the 23rd century: while the 22nd closed with the discovery of life off of Earth, the main preoccupation of the 2200s would be the survival of life on Earth. Mankind at this point was confined to the Arctic and Antarctic circles, a fragile handful of habitable zones dependent on extraorbital resources for survival. The prevailing climate strategy was adaptation, the creation of sealed cities, not too different from space colonies, in which billions of humans would live. How sustainable this was was a matter of debate; projections for worsening weather conditions pointed to a runaway greenhouse gas effect that would render the Earth much like Venus. The odd nuclear war between global powers hadn’t helped matters; in 2205 the Patagonian Revolution, when the Earth-based motherland revolted against the wealthier lunar colonies, culminated in a nuclear exchange that required a major humanitarian and environmental effort in South America along with harsh sanctions on the lunar colony.
By the start of the century European environmental scientists had succeeded in convincing their government that the accelerating deterioration of the Earth’s biosphere was reversible, albeit with an unprecedented investment of resources on a global scale.
The European Union, in turn, took this proposal and its mind boggling cost estimate to its great rivals in the
Russian Federation and the
Corporate Cooperative. A generation ago the two had been bitter enemies, but the Europeans attempted to convince them (and the minor powers in the Western Hemisphere) to pool their resources and cooperate for the long-term survival of Earth-based civilization.
Amazingly, they agreed to the “Eden Initiative''. The Eden Initiative was a sweeping international effort to stabilize the Earth’s climate. The United Nations as a whole received a broad new mandate for environmental restoration and trillions of singdollars were poured into ambitious carbon storage, solar shade, and tidal processing facilities across the globe. The scope here cannot go underestimated: by 2250, a third of Earth’s gross domestic product was directly or indirectly involved in the Eden Initiative. And by the century’s end immense progress had been made as temperatures and meteorological activity began to decrease, defying projections for the opposite. Increased data meant that environmentalists were able to determine that the Earth would have passed a point of no return sometime in the 2290s. In a geological sense the human race had avoided disaster by a millimeter through a massive and prolonged intervention into stabilizing the planet’s environment.
The Eden Initiative represented a triumph of European diplomacy and influence in the halls of the United Nations. While increasingly ossified and archaic by modern standards, and largely irrelevant in political affairs beyond the moon’s orbit, it nonetheless claimed authority over the majority of the human population. This accumulation of diplomatic capital led to subsequent dividends: the Eden Initiative also brought together the disparate regional governments of North America, which were loosely under the aegis of an American Union that had been steadily abdicating responsibility for over two hundred years. Inertia and infrastructural ties had kept the habitats together, but at the apex of European influence the Atlantic provinces chose to formally secede and join the stronger and more unified political polity, beginning a series of wars of independence and corporate conflicts that would be unresolved by the end of the century but almost certainly seeming to result in the European Union gaining full control over all of North America. The final integration of the entire continent, and the necessary reforms needed to accommodate it within the EU’s framework, would continue to divert resources in the new century from other endeavors, but some of the practical effects in the immediate term would be the breakup of Atlas Earth under the EU’s antitrust laws and a wave of migration towards the Outer Solar System.
The concentration of terrestrial resources on Earth isn’t happening in a vacuum (metaphorically). Human colonies like Atlas Mars and Ceres began making ambitious power plays for influence in the solar system, directly challenging the established powers on Earth. Did Earth-based powers choose to invest more resources into the Earth because of their declining positions offworld, or did those positions begin to decline because of the focus on Earth-based interests? It’s a bit of a chicken or the egg situation: each trend reinforced the other.
That’s not to say the terrestrial superpowers were completely inactive: Europe established new colonies on Europa and Titan, the Corporate Cooperative parlayed an alliance with Atlas Mars into a stronger position on the Red Planet, and Russia made investments on Io and Ganymede. But these moves were almost entirely with the cooperation of practically independent space powers who were less subsidiaries and more partners, and often were the senior partners in each initiative.
The second defining event of the 23rd century were the Asteroid Wars. The Eden Initiative saw unprecedented cooperation between terrestrial powers, while the Asteroid Wars saw an unprecedented conflict among their extraterrestrial counterparts. The First Asteroid War, decades earlier, had rearranged the balance of power in the inner solar system. But it had been far from decisive in settling the question of who controlled the Belt. The Belt at this point in history was transforming from the frontier of human settlement into a power in its own right, with industry to take advantage of its own mineral wealth. Ceres was the largest population center, but Pallas, Vesta, and Hygiea all began to develop as habitats with economies centered around something beyond simple resource extraction.
The First Asteroid War had left the Russian Federation dominant in the Belt, through their autonomous Space Forces, while revealing the vulnerability of their colonies on Mars and the Corporate Cooperative’s presence had been severely reduced, though not eliminated. But there was a third power: the European colony of
Ceres had ridden its position of neutrality into a prominent commercial position allowing it to challenge the
Kosmicheskie Voyska. Belter interests were increasingly out of alignment with their home countries on Earth, where the focus was on environmental cooperation. Ironically the resources demanded for the Eden Initiative intensified competition in the Belt to provide those raw materials. A fresh wave of mining outposts and the infrastructure to support them was established, much of it corporate driven.
Cerean politics was defined as populist and anti-corporate, a legacy of their political revolution. Their military was similarly populist, a militia of loosely organized part-time mining vessels. Many of them turned to piracy as much for ideological reasons as economic, eager to cut the corporations profiting from it as they were to take a cut out of the wealth flowing towards Earth. Unlike the “competitive actions” between corporate security forces of the previous century these were a magnitude more disruptive to commerce, like a broadsword to a scalpel. They were also near undeniably based out of Ceres: while the government never authorized it, it was also slow to condemn it. The ramping up of pirate activity got the Cerean government a great deal of bad press in the inner system and provided the KV a window to take action against them. This was the Second Asteroid War, a sharp conflict as the KV attacked Cerean positions in the Belt, some of them explicitly in support of the pirates, some of them just strategically important. Despite being on paper a formidable force the Cerean navy was caught off guard and outmatched ton for ton by the KV, which had ambitious plans to directly attack Ceres under the auspices of a UN anti-piracy mandate.
But the same economic factors that drove the escalation in the Belt worked to put a damper on Earth, where the European Union vetoed the Russian proposals and pressured the Russian Federation to de-escalate the conflict. The KV’s victory was thus incomplete and the Cerean military was able to rebuild, though they were forced to greatly rein in their militia fleet. Relations between both powers and Earth were badly damaged: Ceres felt unsupported in the actual war by Europe, while the KV felt betrayed by their own civilian leadership in the peace deal. Both sides made meaningful reforms in the aftermath. Tensions remained high and both factions sponsored pirates against each other’s spheres.
Ceres significantly centralized its militia fleet, both to prevent further provocations and provide greater command and control in the event of the war. Many remained converted mining vessels, but they were no longer part-time militia commands. This militarization placed great strain on the social and political fabric of the colony as resources were dedicated to a relatively small part of the community, neglecting the powerful hydroponic syndicates. Tenuous compromises held up under the threat of a fresh war with the KV for the moment but the military-industrial build-up began to concentrate wealth in unions tied to the militarization effort.
The same KV, the autonomous Russian space force, confronted the reality that their interests were being actively held back by their central government. They began to divert more resources into their off-the-books holdings, minimizing the portions officially part of the Russian military. They also massively increased the number of support staff and contractors in their controlled habitats, offering generous contracts including extensive family relocation plans. At the same time they continued to refine the legacy of two interplanetary wars, matching Cerean ship-building and standardizing the lessons learned across the fleet.
The Third Asteroid War would have its origin not in the Belt, but on Mars, where
Atlas Mars began to act on its grandiose ambitions. The Corporate Cooperative had signed several security agreements with them and began development of large-scale agriculture, but the bulk of domestic Martian food was still under control of the Sovereign Republic of
Singreal, a state of affairs intolerable to the nationalistic (is that even the right word?) Atlesians. Atlesian Legionaries aggressively contested mining rights in bordering territories and then suddenly escalated, seizing Singreali stations on the planet’s surface as part of a general military offensive against their colony. Singreali corporate security was overwhelmed and they appealed to the KV, who had stakes in the settlements, for support. KV naval assets began to redeploy to Mars, the largest military deployment in the inner solar system in history, a response that made the terrestrial powers suddenly very nervous when they considered their relative military neglect. KV’s intervention escalated the conflict and Atlas Mars opened operations against the Russian colony of Novokiev, where the lack of coordination between Russian navy and army again left the Russians unprepared as in the First Asteroid War. KV and Atlas Mars exchanged limited orbit-surface strikes as both sides laid out demands, Atlesian positions on the ground secure but their habitats vulnerable to an space-based attack.
The Martian Corporate War became the Third Asteroid War when Ceres took advantage of the KV’s deployment to Mars to attack their weakened positions throughout the Belt. Cerean stealth missile carriers devastated the Hygiean Defence Force and strike teams seized key resupply depots. Hygiea was under siege, it’s surface installations eliminated and Cerean commandos clashing with Russian marines around the airlocks. Atlas Mars, Singreal, and the KV had tense negotiations which resulted in Singreal losing its claim to their Martian colonies in return for indemnities from Atlas, a face-saving measure allowing the KV to return its military strength to the Belt (Russian concerns at this point were secondary to the KV’s own power base).
The remaining Kosmicheskie Voyska ships in the Belt rallied to retake control of a key deuterium depot near Psyche, in what is now considered the pivotal battle of the war as it allowed the KV fleet to refuel prior to the following engagements with the Cerean fleet through the Belt. The novelty, and reserves, of Cerean stealth missiles had been depleted and the KV’s professional leadership and discipline proved decisive in a series of fleet engagements across the Belt over the next few years, beginning with the relief of Hygiea. The Third Asteroid War would be bitter and bloody, and even survivors would suffer drastically shortened life spans as a result of radiation exposure caused by close maneuvering around friendly ships’ fusion drives. Despite the advanced positions taken by Ceres in the early stages of the war the KV succeeded in pushing them out of much of the Belt and coercing many independent habitats to support them in the war effort. In the end Ceres was forced to sue for peace, losing its outlying habitats and compelled to demilitarize its fleet, dependent on the KV for protection from pirates. The government was upended as the hydroponics syndicates ousted and broke up those tied to the naval efforts.
Relations between Russia and its autonomous space forces were abysmal in the aftermath of the war. For the second time, the KV’s own interests had threatened Russia’s Martian colonies, this time fatally, as Russia would never recover Novokiev despite several years of blockade and a dismal attempt at a contested orbital landing. The Russian government attempted to exercise its theoretical authority over the Kosmicheskie Voyska’s leadership, who had none of it and enacted their long-prepared plans to declare formal independence as the
Belt and Moon Independent Corporation, claiming corporate sovereignty under Neuquen. Overnight a new power would take primacy in the Belt, with three successful interplanetary wars as a legacy.
There’s a coda to this saga. The Fourth Asteroid War was the first to not involve the entity formerly known as the KV: it was instead an internal conflict within Ceres. Technically it is still ongoing: radicals dissatisfied with the peace treaty and the new government on Ceres attempted to overthrow the administration and were beaten back in several weeks of bitter close corridor fighting throughout the station. The rebels, calling themselves the Free Cerean Navy, seized many ships in Cerean dockyards (some of which were in the process of being scuttled) and fled, vowing to continue the fight against oppression and corporate power. The Free Navy were experienced naval personnel and veterans of the Asteroid Wars and returned to the early days of the Cerean militia, making a legal living through ice mining and occasionally raiding corporate shipping lanes in defiance of the Belt and Moon Independent Corporation. They maintained their cohesion with a strong ideological commitment to demarchy and socialist principles, attracting new recruits from across the Solar System to reinforce their numbers.
The context of the Asteroid Wars provided insulation for the development of human colonies in the Outer Solar System. The military strength of the big fish in the system was locked in a delicate cosmic dance with their opposition for much of the century, restricting assets that could be deployed to enforce claims and control elsewhere. Privateering and conflict also meant instability in supply chains and logistics, allowing the development of mini-economies without immediate domination by a larger power.
The third influence on the course of events in the 23rd century was economics. Specifically, energy economics. Advances in solid state batteries had been revolutionary for space travel, but they were unaccompanied by a corresponding revolution in energy generation. Solar power, the mainstay of the 22nd century, suffered as the polysilicates needed for high quality photovoltaic panels were in higher demand than supply. Exotic ideas like antimatter failed to find fruition even as the energy demands of human technology continued to increase. Mankind had more ideas on how to spend energy than on creating it, as ambitious military designs for laser-armed warships were tabled due to the ruinous energy costs. But the development of the outer solar system offered a solution. Few bodies in the region were mineral rich, but there were limitless reserves of water and hydrocarbons, along with the silicates that were suddenly in short supply. Energy refineries that were dismissed as crude and harmful on Earth were built turning stellar resources into usable energy. This Jovian Rush funded a wave of settlement of the outer solar system.
The poster child for Jovian mining was the
Federated States of New Columbia. Founded out of North American corporate mining outposts, New Columbia became a haven for libertarians and patriots in the aftermath of the collapse of the Union of America. America may be dead, but the American Dream lived on in the orbit of Saturn on a rough frontier filled with nostalgia for an America long past, where instead of gold and oil they mine hydrogen and oxygen from Saturn’s rings. The nominal capital of the new Columbians was on Enceladus but the bulk of their population was scattered in tiny habitats among the 82 moons of Saturn, a decentralized mess in stark contrast to the centralized states of the inner system.
Titan, in the same planetary system as New Columbia, was also settled, but as a direct European initiative rather than as wildcat mining settlements. Unlike the other European colonies, which were nominally under the control of one or another member nation,
Arcadia was independent and autonomous from the get-go. Titan was also meant to be the off-world testing ground for the same environmental sciences reaching maturity on Earth, albeit with a twist. Instead of working to cool the planet they would work to heat it, using the massive reserves of liquid methane already present on the surface. The project ran into issues from the get-go: questions of short vs long-term profitability came into play, as that methane and other liquids could be sold, now, for a profit on Earth to keep the colony afloat. These internal tensions would define the political life of the colony as the capital habitat pushed for long-term terraforming while also developing into the central energy refinery of the Saturn system, clashing with its satellite habitats who simply wanted an export-oriented economy.
The third player in the Saturn system was the strangest. The
Neo Exodus Evangels were a bizarre techno-religious group originating from corporate and research interests on Deimos that incorporated themselves and gained sovereignty under Neuquen. Described as more of a cult than a university, Deimos was the center of outlandish research into cybernetics and physics. On top of the traditional concerns about cults, there was the element of cyberpsychosis: neurological issues prompted by the replacement of body parts with mechanical systems. The Deimans invested heavily in radical cybernetic modifications among their adherents that was the cause of significant suspicion and alienation elsewhere in the solar system. But their adherents found a niche as ice miners in the energy rich Jovian moons, their cybernetic implants reducing their life support requirements and boosting profit margins.
It’s no accident that independent powers formed in the furthermost Jovian. Jupiter was astronomically closer to the stellar powers operating out of the Belt and became dotted with their colonies and those of their partners. Europe, as mentioned, was interested in Europa, establishing a small colony there (and finding none of the xenobiological treasures present on Ganymede). Ganymede, along with Io, were dominated by Russia and Singreal, establishing a strong presence with significant cooperation on both planets. All powers actively searched for extraterrestrial life across the Jovian systems, making key findings that excited xenobiologists but few others.
But this doesn’t mean Jupiter was devoid of independent interests. The
Directorate for Refugee Resettlement Services was a UN-aligned non-governmental organization funded by corporate interests. Nominally aiming to resettle refugees from the various conflicts in the Western Hemisphere elsewhere in the Solar System, along with the large underclass in the Corporate Cooperative, the Directorate identified Ganymede as one of the best bodies in the Solar System for long-term human habitation and established itself alongside the Russian and Singreali outposts there. Settlement would occur, but the first priority of the Directorate was terraforming. Excess volatiles from the Jovian systems and the Belt were directed towards the planet, along with direct combustion of its own icy mantle, to begin to produce an atmosphere for the body. The resulting thin atmosphere was a boon for operations on the planet, benefitting the Directorate’s neighbors and transforming the planet into the Outer Solar System’s center for farming and organic production when combined with the existing magnetosphere. However, further terraforming carries risks as biologists warn that proposals to heat the planet, melting the outer layers of the mantle and producing a standing ocean, would threaten the native Ganymedan life under the surface.
The same demand for energy that fuelled Jovian settlement also led to an explosion in Mercurian mining. The same infrastructure that delved under Mercury’s surface also supported extensive solar farms on it and made its corporate backers incredibly wealthy at the peak of the KV-Cerean conflict. And the same historical forces at work elsewhere in the solar system saw the prisoners on Mercury seize control of the colony and declare independence. Corporate efforts to re-establish control were bloody wastes of resources and lives, and the First and Second Mercurian Wars of Independence resulted in an independent
Republic of Mercury establishing sovereignty under Neuquen. A harsh feudal structure founded in the criminal organizations that many prisoners hailed from on old Earth underlaid the trappings of a modern planet-state (indeed, Mercury would provide the model that other would-be planet-states like Atlas Mars would aspire to be). And Mercury’s economic growth continued unabated, with the profits off their resource operations now reinvested into planetary enterprises.
Earth’s sister planet, Venus, also attracted renewed interest as a potential colony with the advent of practical terraforming. The lonely European outpost in orbit was joined by Singreali interests in Ma Shun’s
Cloudy Skies corporation. The solar shades developed for use in the Eden Initiative were soon constructed around Venus, starting the laborious process of cooling the planet to be viable for human settlement in a century or two. This long time frame meant Cloudy Skies was far from profitability, profitability wasn’t the point, and its finances were a jenga tower of monetary innovations and bonds from across human space. Ma Shun certainly wouldn’t live to see his dreams reach fruition and it remains to be seen if his heirs would follow through on making them a reality.
The break up of Atlas Earth has left
Atlas Belt, its corporate holdings in the system, independent (it was either that or be incorporated into Europe). It grew significantly from an influx of capital and personnel thanks to Atlas Mars, which found the Belt a good place to dump undesirables. The colony became heavily militarized during the Asteroid Wars to defend itself against pirates and maintain its neutrality: every Atlesian ship was as much a warship as a mining vessel or transport. While the efficacy of part-time craft such as this has been called into question by the Asteroid Wars, it goes a long way towards deterring pirates and providing cheap power projection.
Atlas Mars’s clear ambitions to gain a controlling interest on the Red Planet prompted reevaluation among corporate powers about continued investment into the planet. Most chose to sell their holdings and vacate the planet, a few of the largest powers like the Corporate Cooperative attempted to strike bargains with Atlas, but the
Ares Colony is a remnant that has claimed sovereignty in its own right following abandonment by their earth-based headquarters. Their exact relationship with the Atlesians is unclear going forward but the colony remains profitable through its mining operations in the short term, even if they’re having a hard time buying insurance.
The existing powers are undergoing major changes of their own: the European Union needs serious internal reforms to accommodate the absorption of North America, limiting the resources available for expansion despite its formidable domestic base. Russia and the Corporate Cooperative are grappling with their military decline compared to the powers in the Belt and Mars, particularly disturbing for the former given its military legacy. Singreal and Belt and Moon Independent Corporation laid down modern fleets of gun and missile frigates, establishing a dominant position in control of the Belt and space commerce across the system. Atlas Mars consolidated control over its majority on Mars and considered its next moves. And Ceres, while suffering under BMIC’s control of the trade lanes, nonetheless possessed considerable mineral and industrial wealth within itself that it used to rebuild its economy.
With all of these actors in the Solar System, it became an increasingly complicated place. An increasingly crowded place. Everything that moves is heard in the void, but the volume of activity makes tracking from radar stations near impossible. Both KV and Ceres had pioneered the use of both active stealth, the deployment of decoys on both a strategic and tactical scale, and passive stealth, the minimization of drive signatures and radar profiles, to allow deployments to be concealed from the other and these practices became commonplace. Continued advances in technology significantly reduced travel times: transfer orbits still remained the standard for bulk cargo, but direct travel times from the Earth to Saturn had been cut to a month by 2300 (and two weeks for a high-power military ship). The fledgling colonies of the Outer Solar System are closer than ever to the established inner powers. Uranus, as far from Saturn as Saturn is from Earth, is now within reach of the interplanetary economy. And, for the first time since the 21st century, the human population has passed the ten billion mark.
Things are looking up.
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Action Points for Update Three are irregular and split by polity. They are assigned with consideration for relative income and political situation. Any new powers will have 4 action points to begin with. Orders can now be sent via PM, but some in-thread content is still required. This will be the last of the Phase One updates.
Atlas Earth has launched copyright lawsuits against Atlas Mars and Atlas Belt for sole use of the Atlas name, citing both sovereign states military and political actions as impacting the brand’s favorability on Earth. Mars and the Belt are outside the jurisdiction of the European Union, but this may affect business operations in the Earth system. Your lawyers recommend reaching a settlement.
A new round of preliminary stats will be going up through the week.
