Buttons #Project Constellations

Fiction met reality, but not in a good way

So, we did it. We finally did it. We destroyed the Earth. We destroyed it good. It was a bit of a relief, actually. News stories about the next impending disaster and infinite works of fiction about causing, living through, surviving (and not) The Apocalypse. The tension was just building up and up and up. 

So I guess someone in some missile silo somewhere just finally snapped and pressed the big red button saying 'DON'T PRESS ME.' I kinda sympathise, I've nearly pressed those buttons. They are big, and red and everything about them screams 'Push me,' except for the actual words on them. Who wants to read words anyways? 

I digress. I do that a lot. Hopefully you'll stay with me though. It's a real good story. And I think my digressions are awesome. Back to destroying the Earth! 

Have you guessed what destroyed the Earth yet? Yup. Freaking nuclear missiles. I don't even know who sent the first missile, but once that first nuclear missile was launched, all the rest of the nuclear armed countries launched. Boom. All large cities gone. And radiation slowly crept across the Earth. 

Our population of nearly nine and a half billion reduced to ... well, it's hard to know. We didn't do a census. Maybe a billion? Didn't really matter, people died in the tens of thousands each day from radiation poisoning, injuries, disease, then starvation.  

The governments were gone, but enough tech remained for the nerds to consult and create a plan - put all our resources into leaving Earth. Nuclear winter would be decades if not centuries long, which didn't matter, because radiation would spread and kill us, or sterilise us quicker than nuclear winter. Once again the nerds triumphed, creating plans for generation ships we could build in the few livable years we had left on Earth. 

 Generation ships? As advanced as humanity was in 2053, wouldn't generation ships be near impossible to create? You ask. Yes, turns out if we don't have to preserve energy and resources, or worry about polluting the Earth (too late for that) we can achieve what was thought to be impossible. Also, there were copious amounts of metal lying around that no one needed anymore.

So, each ship can carry 2,500 people. All the sustainable innovations that no-one bothered to use when cheaper options were available on Earth finally got their day in the sun. Algae grown oils and biofuels. Self sustaining tanks that grew veggies on the top and fish at the bottom. 3-D printers that melted and reused the plastics of the item they had originally made, when it was no longer useful. Plastics grown from algae decomposable within a year, if you are done with 'em. Much better than the 1000 years of the old petroleum based plastics. 

Forty ships were built, capable of carrying one hundred thousand people. But even though building went incredibly quickly, there were not one hundred thousand healthy enough people to disembark. Most were too old and/or slowly dying of radiation poisoning. Just over fifty thousand of us were fit enough to continue the species (gross). For those keeping track, 0.0005% of the world's population before the Nuclear Apocalypse was healthy enough reproduce. We took many old, sick and dying with us, because they were the people who actually had skills and knew stuff, mostly. And who wants to leave mom behind? 

Now. There's one final kicker. Though we made great strides in sustainability, we never invented a clean, renewable source of energy. There was only one energy source we could use to power our generation ships. Nuclear power. 

The human race is trying to save itself using the very thing that nearly destroyed it. Nuclear energy.