The story of Terra's birth is an enthralling yet tragic one. A world consumed by the flames of nuclear war, and the rise of a new one from its ashes. However, this old tale does not provide answers to many of the enigmas that torment Terra: How the...
Death of a world, dawn of a new era (2030 - 2085 AD aprox.)
There is a lack of consensus among modern historians as to when did exactly the flames of World War III die out, but it is certain that the tear 2030 will be forever remembered as the greatest tragedy in human history. The Great Disaster, denomination given by the war's survivors to the nuclear apocalypse and which would be used to refer to this event from there onwards, engulfed every corner of the planet and burned the old world in a matter of hours, leaving behind a trail that can only be described as one of horror, death and utter despair.
Given the nature of the cataclysm that hit Earth, the exact number of victims is unknown, but estimates published by statisticians from Stockhausen University as part of a state-sponsored investigation in the year 2896 suggest that the final exchange of the world war saw the deaths of more than 79% of the global population, which it is believed to have been around 8.2 billion people at the time, and the in the years that followed the Great Disaster, a third of the remaining 21% perished as a direct consequence of the nuclear contamination permeating the land. Even with these small chunks of information, one can start to imagine the hideous hell that survivors were met with, but in order to grasp the full magnitude of the catastrophe and its impact, we first need to dive into the general characteristics which defined the postwar era.
The first and most distinct feature of all is the nuclear fallout. As it has been previously mentioned, radiation was the prime cause of death among survivors of the Great Disaster, and many of the calamities that devastated the planet during those decades are a byproduct or are closely linked to it. The World War did not affect all regions equally, yet the devastation brought upon by the nuclear arsenals of the world's superpowers left no inch of land untouched. Thanks to radiological studies carried out by professor Adam Langdon from the Julius Oppenheimer National Institute of Physics, it has been determined with fair accuracy that the flames of the Armageddon rendered an approximate of 331.500.000 square kilometers uninhabitable, which equates to 65% of Earth's total surface. Most of this contaminated land is located in the northern hemisphere (Europe, Asia and North America), but sizeable areas can also be found in regions such as India, southern Africa and, oddly enough, Antarctica. Even today, some of these places are still radiologically active after almost a millennium.
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(Graphic of areas affected by radioactive contamination and The Eternal Winter. Stockhausen University - 2192)
The consequences of the widespread radioactive contamination were huge and numerous. Food production, which before the Great Disaster was, on itself, barely enough to feed the world population, experimented an extremely sharp decrease and nearly hit bottom, causing a famine of colossal proportions that would persist for decades to come. It must be noted that contemporary sources from the postwar era are really rare and unreliable at best, but those few whose veracity has been confirmed by modern historians narrate that anything that looked comestible was considered as the most precious of goods, even going as far as becoming objects of worship in certain regions of present-day Lappland. This chronic scarcity of food was only exacerbated further by a phenomenon popularly known as nuclear winter, an artificially-induced glaciation caused by thick clouds of dust which did not let the sunlight reach Earth's surface and which led to a general drop of temperatures worldwide. Coupled with the famine, the so called "Eternal Winter" was the main factor behind an estimated of 186.900.000 deaths and prompted an equally large number of survivors to flee south, to where the climate was slightly less harsh. Regarding the survivors themselves, their direct exposure to the omnipresent radioactive contamination had a very profound impact on their lives, and a negative one to that matter, but as the decades went by, it would lead to the rise of a new, distinct race which would become one of the key players in the future that was yet to come: the demi-humans.
