AD 2006: They warned us back in the early 2000s—in the book The Long Emergency—that resource scarcity, climate disasters, and failed governance would lead us here. Humanity thought they had time to change, but it was too late to reverse. Humanity was literally living through the Long Emergency, just as it was described.
AD 2052: The world had been on the brink for decades, but it wasn't just human grudges that pushed it over the edge—it was the Earth itself. Long before the first nuclear detonation, the planet had begun to turn against humanity. Irreversible climate disasters of unprecedented scale ravaged the globe, reshaping not just the environment but the entire geopolitical landscape.
The oceans surged higher every year, swallowing entire coastal cities. Cities like Jakarta, Shanghai, and New York were reduced to abandoned wastelands, their towering skyscrapers submerged beneath relentless waves. Desperate governments erected seawalls, but they crumbled under the combined force of rising tides and ever-stronger storm surges. Whole islands vanished, and millions were displaced, forced to flee inland to overcrowded regions ill-equipped to handle the influx.
On land, massive droughts swept across continents, turning once fertile farmlands into barren deserts. The Sahara spread northward, swallowing parts of southern Europe, while desertification claimed vast swaths of the American Midwest, India, and Australia. Rivers that had sustained civilizations for centuries, like the Yangtze, the Nile, and the Colorado, ran dry. Crops failed on a global scale, and the world teetered on the brink of mass starvation. Desertification became unstoppable.
Meanwhile, the poles melted faster than predicted, releasing ancient diseases from the permafrost while raising global sea levels to unprecedented heights. The loss of Arctic ice disrupted global weather patterns, triggering mega-storms that pummeled coastlines. Hurricanes became superstorms, with winds topping 400 kilometers per hour, leaving behind nothing but ruins. In places like the Caribbean and the Gulf of Mexico, hurricane season stretched the entire year.
Mass extinction events decimated biodiversity. Iconic species like polar bears, elephants, and orangutans became extinct, while the collapse of pollinator populations caused global food shortages. The delicate ecosystems that had once supported life on Earth were unraveling, and humanity was too late in trying to stop the chain reaction they had set in motion.
Humanity's failure to mitigate the effects of climate change led to the rapid destabilization of ecosystems and global economies. Resource scarcity—particularly fresh water and arable land—became the new currency of power, as nations and regions began to crumble under the pressure. Climate refugees flooded into the few areas where survival was still possible, triggering political instability and internal strife. As crops failed and famine spread, governments found themselves at odds with their populations—and with each other.
The global competition for dwindling resources spiraled into open conflict. Nations scrambled to secure what little remained—water sources, agricultural land, oil reserves, even basic necessities like breathable air. Diplomatic efforts to resolve the crises failed as governments turned inward, focused on their own survival. Tensions grew, and alliances fractured under the strain of trying to safeguard collapsing infrastructure and desperate populations.
It was this environment of panic and despair that sowed the seeds for nuclear war. As the climate disaster became unmanageable, the global powers grew more paranoid and desperate. Border disputes escalated into skirmishes, then into regional wars. As governments weakened, rogue military factions gained control of nuclear arsenals, willing to gamble humanity's future for temporary dominance.
The belief that nuclear deterrence could maintain the balance of power was crushed by fear and faced the reality of Mutually Assured Destruction.
Humanity's uncontrollable selfishness toppled the first domino.
AD 2068: A sudden cascade of multiple nuclear detonations tore through the fragile peace of the world. Mushroom clouds ascended with terrifying speed, their ominous forms towering into the stratosphere, as incandescent orange and crimson flares ignited the horizon. These were no ordinary fires—they were the final, violent exhalation of humanity's hubris, nuclear fission unleashed with cataclysmic force.
Humanity's unleashed and ungagged grudge had triumphed over ethics and naïve hopes. Centuries of simmering geopolitical tensions, resource scarcity, and ideological divides culminated in the unspeakable—global nuclear wars on a nightmarish scale. The world, once fragilely balanced on the precipice of peace, was now plunged into the unimaginable inferno of mutual annihilation. Obsolete nuclear facilities and outdated control systems—neglected relics of past conflicts—failed spectacularly, their safeguards buckling under the weight of chaos. The world's defenses crumbled like paper in a storm.
Mutually Assured Destruction became a grim reality.
The first blast tore through the atmosphere, shattering the sky with the unimaginable release of energy as uranium and plutonium cores rapidly achieved supercritical mass. Within a single microsecond, temperatures at the epicenter exploded to tens of millions of degrees Celsius—hotter than the core of the sun—creating an immense fireball that vaporized everything in its path. Thermal radiation radiated outwards at the speed of light, so intense that it instantly set the air itself ablaze.
Within a 10-kilometer radius, the air became an incinerating furnace. At ground zero, there was no time to react—buildings, trees, human bodies, animals—everything was obliterated in an instant. Concrete vaporized, steel liquefied, pooling into molten rivers before evaporating in the inferno. The very atoms of life were stripped away, reduced to vapor. Shadows of people were seared into the ground as carbonized phantoms, forever etched into what remained of the earth, mere imprints of the lives they had lived.
The thermal pulse—a burst of intense electromagnetic radiation—ignited anything even remotely combustible. The asphalt beneath the explosion boiled and bubbled, releasing toxic gases, while vehicles turned into twisted, melted sculptures of metal. The landscape was alight with the blinding glow of radioactive firestorms.
And then came the blast wave, an expanding wall of sheer destructive force. Supersonic compression waves radiated from the fireball, flattening everything in their path. Air pressure surged beyond comprehension, collapsing lungs, and tearing buildings apart from the inside out. Skyscrapers crumbled like sandcastles in a hurricane, ripped apart by forces that defied human comprehension. The ground itself quaked, seismic tremors spreading from the epicenter, splintering roads and tearing the earth open as if it were flesh being torn by claws.
In the outer periphery, where the fireball's core no longer reached, secondary fires ignited from the thermal radiation, sending flames snaking across the horizon. Debris—glowing red-hot—rained from the sky, igniting what little had survived the initial wave.
As these fires grew, radioactive fallout began to descend, microscopic particles of plutonium and uranium falling like ash from hell's furnace. Each particle carried with it the invisible death of ionizing radiation, which silently invaded the cells of any living thing that had survived the initial devastation, corrupting DNA at the molecular level.
The world became a death zone. Fallout clouds ascended into the troposphere, drifting with the winds and spreading their poison over hundreds of kilometers. In days to come, survivors would die agonizing deaths from acute radiation syndrome (ARS).
A vision of a scorched Earth where the living envied the dead. The first detonation had been identified somewhere in the Middle East, and with it, the irreversible path humanity had chosen was clear. The nuclear apocalypse had begun.
Almost nothing remained. Most of the world's civilizations were devastated, reduced to ruins and dust. In the wake of the catastrophe, a few regions—small areas in Asia, Europe, and America—miraculously survived. Whether through sheer luck, natural barriers, or fate, these regions were spared the worst of the devastation. Though their survival felt like a fleeting mercy, these pockets of life became isolated remnants of what was once a thriving global civilization.
300 years later, the descendants of the survivors referred to these remaining places as 'God's Last Mercy to Perish.' The survivors might have been spared the immediate destruction, but they were left to bear the scars of a broken world—one where nature and humanity were forever altered by the fallout of their ancestors' madness.
YOU ARE READING
Point Nemo (Star Ark Mission)
Science FictionThis is a story about humanity's interstellar travel.
