Earth’s Legacy

Source: 10 Years: Looking Back Down the Well (excerpt)

A decade has passed since transhumanity evacuated Earth, leaving it to the TITANs. On this anniversary of the Fall, we look back at the loss of transhumanity’s birthplace and all that it entailed.

Processing the Loss

The Fall of Earth was a paradigm shift for transhumanity. Virtually everyone lost friends and family. Most lost their own lives but were restored off-world. Homes, pets, careers, and personal effects were gone in a flash of radioactive dust. Entire governments, cultures, and languages went extinct. Not only did people need to restart from scratch, many had to learn how to live their new lives: in new morphs, in new gravities, under new economies, in environments that were completely alien to them.

Some have been more than willing to put Earth behind them, going so far as to filter all mentions out of their feeds. The pain is too great, the memories too horrific. This is especially true for those who suffered trauma in their last days on Earth — even more so for people whose lives on Earth had been a struggle to begin with, due to wars, climate crises, or personal relationships.

For some, processing the Fall requires more than just treating their PTSD. These transhumans treat the change as the open door it is, a chance at new possibilities. This can mean diving headfirst into exploring new identities, new personalities, new sexualities, new morphs. For the masses of refugees that became the Scum swarms, this was an embrace of experimentation, an opportunity to experience new lifestyles and push the limits of hedonism. When you’ve barely survived an apocalypse, and extinction is knocking, you may as well live your life to the fullest. There’s no point in holding onto the past because it could all end at any moment.

The Longing for Earth

Not everyone has been willing to give up on Earth. To the people living on Luna or in Earth orbit, it remains a visible reminder in the sky overhead, a monument that is not easily overlooked.

The debate on whether or not to “retake” Earth is regularly revived by pundits. Fervent reclaimers insist that it is our responsibility to reverse the mistakes of the past, to prove transhumanity’s autonomy or dominance, to take back what is rightfully ours. Those critical of transhumanity’s current path undoubtedly see it as a chance to return to a mythologized state of affairs, to resurrect the old and proper ways of doing things. In this view, Earth remains a powerful symbol of redemption.

The reality, of course, is that no one knows what retaking Earth will entail. Talk of orbital bombardments and troop landings are conjecture. No one is entirely sure that the TITANs are gone. Invading the planet might stoke them into activity once again, with disastrous consequences for everyone throughout the Solar System. Even if they are absent or dormant, their machines and nanoswarms remain a significant threat. Earth’s climate itself has been irrevocably altered by the Fall. Revitalizing our homeworld’s biosphere would require a vast terraforming effort with significant cost. And so popular opinion remains against such efforts … for now.

The Blockade

No parties have publicly claimed responsibility for placing the blockade around Earth, shortly after the Fall. Originally it was assumed to be a containment effort — to keep the TITANs in — but it clearly operates to restrict traffic both ways. Most people are convinced the Planetary Consortium is quietly behind the effort, but they have remained silent on the topic. In truth, it could be other parties: the Jovians, a cabal of oligarchs, perhaps even the TITANs themselves.

What we know is that any ship that tries to traverse between 300 and 350 kilometers in altitude, just below low Earth orbit, in either direction, is targeted by a number of lethal killsats. No warning is given. Even if the weapons platforms are avoided, there are other dangers: cloaked smart mines and clouds of high-velocity space junk left in orbit, the detritus of past battles. Over the years, many ships have made efforts to run this blockade; most have failed.

The Datapocalypse

One aspect of the Fall that continues to have an impact was the staggering loss of information. Massive amounts of archives, records, and data were lost. Cultural treasures and physical media that were not digitized were wiped out. Governments and hypercorps lost their organizational memories. Debt, bank balances, criminal records, ownership records, legal code, and even some history and scientific knowledge were deleted. People’s entire lives and identities were erased.

This chance to start fresh was seized by some, rebranding themselves with new identities. Others watched their positions and achievements fade into obscurity.

Ten years later, we still struggle with missing data. Scientists recreate past work. Investigators track down and reunite separated relatives. Courts adjudicate contested claims. Historians fill in the gaps.

Earth Relics

One method of coping with the past is by collecting relics from Earth. Before the Fall, relatively few objects were transported off world, due to the cost and impracticality. After all, most things could be locally nanofabricated. Now, those objects are immensely valuable. Even a small toy or souvenir could be worth more than a brand-new designer biomorph. A new black market has emerged for Earth relics, leading to salvage operations to smuggle more relics off Earth, despite the great risk.

Criminal cartels and reclaimers have financed and dispatched numerous teams to break the interdiction. These operations are incredibly risky, as they must circumvent an armada of killsats and a toxic hellscape populated primarily by TITAN war machines and exsurgents. Even if they survive and locate valuable relics, getting them off-world again is even more difficult. This amounts to a suicide mission, but the payoff can be worth it.

Complicating matters, some of the relics retrieved from Earth have harbored dangerous nanoswarms or even the exsurgent virus, spawning dangerous outbreaks. With every relic a potential vector, artifact hunters and dealers are high-value targets for authorities and bounty hunters. Of course, the black-market value of TITAN technology can be even higher, making it worth the risk to reckless graverobbers.

Relic hunting has led to a booming market for forgeries and fakes, not only to dupe rich collectors, but as mass-market goods. Artifacts can be scanned and reproduced with nanofabrication, making authenticity difficult to determine. Owning faux relics has become fashionable in some circles, proving that nostalgia is still a powerful influence in popular culture.

Not every relic is physical or valued solely for its connection to the past. Treasure hunters are also driven to uncover secrets buried on Earth, from corporate plans hidden away in server farms to ancient art forms and languages that exist only in the lost cortical stacks and backups of egos that were left behind. Millions of animal and plant species and even some uplift projects were also lost, including elephants, denisovans, and some whale species.

Old Identities

Even if Earth will never be reclaimed, many still base their identities on who they were before the Fall. Despite the efforts of the Consortium and other powers and factions to shed the trappings of the past, various holdouts see themselves more as exiled citizens of their home nation than whatever planet or habitat they currently live on. They seek to uphold the traditions of their old culture, including rivalries with other nations and ethnic groups. This mentality is particularly predominant in the Lunar-Lagrange Alliance, where many refugee communities remain segregated by culture and language. Some have grown more insular in an attempt to protect their identity, rejecting outside influence. This has led to divisiveness as conflicts between groups flare up, leading to legal disputes and sometimes actual violence. Those seeking further isolation have formed brinker communities in remote regions of the Solar System, cutting themselves off from the rest of transhumanity in order to preserve their way of life. VR simulspaces that recreate areas of Earth remain incredibly popular, especially among infugees.

Despite these efforts, cultural isolation continues to erode. Resleeving undermines the outdated conceit of ethnic differences. The initial tendencies of people to sleeve morphs of the same ethnicity or to hold biased attitudes about specific models when the technology was first made available diminishes further and further each year. Modern biomorph models are a blend of genetic traits that further illustrate that ethnicity is nothing but a social concept. Mesh interconnectivity also makes it easier to transcend ideological barriers and escape cultural bubbles. Sociologists speculate it is just a matter of time before most old-Earth nationalism and cultural identities are driven all but extinct, relegated to small bioconservative enclaves.

It is worth noting that, more and more, even the traditional human template is being eschewed. Designers increasingly steer towards non-human pods and biomorphs, as well as synthmorphs with non-anthroform body plans and functions. Though these morphs are often considered exotic — or sometimes even banned — their presence is becoming normalized, especially in the outer system. As more transhumans become familiar and acclimated with non-human sleeves, this is only likely to accelerate. After all, while the human form is quite functional, it evolved to fit specific conditions; in many situations, other morph designs are simply more adaptive.

A New Homeworld

The most aggressive counter to Earth’s legacy comes from the Planetary Consortium itself. The conglomerate strongly pushes Mars as transhumanity’s new homeworld, soon to be terraformed into an Eden superior to Earth, and the centerpoint in a new galactic civilization spread via the gates. By positioning Mars in this way, the Consortium also places itself as the leader of transhumanity. Consortium media outlets regularly downplay mentions of Earth, focusing on Martian affairs and the Consortium’s expansion and futurist ideas. This forward-looking stance is welcomed by most Consortium citizens, who are eager to push aside past horrors and failures.

This agenda is not lost on the reclaimers, who believe that the resources spent to terraform Mars could be better used on Earth, or by the other political factions, who side eye the Consortium’s grandstanding and soft imperalism. However, the Consortium is not the only power to push forward and minimize the past. Morningstar and the Ultimates both celebrate transhumanity’s unfettered future. Even the Titanians and autonomists highlight transhumanity’s potential, while noting Earth not just as a tragedy but as a lesson in our social and economic failures. Throughout the Solar System, Earth serves as an abject lesson of what can go wrong. For this reason, expansion to exoplanets is encouraged, to spread transhumanity out and increase our chances of survival.

Earth Survivors

No one knows how many survivors remain on Earth. Some estimate that tens or even hundreds of thousands may still live, secreted away in sealed habitats, cut off from the TITAN machines and outside world. Others might survive in the ruins, somehow avoiding the deadly grasp of the nanoswarms, radiation, extreme weather, lack of food, and polluted atmosphere. Entire storage facilities may still hold sleepers in cryo-tanks or data banks loaded with uploads and backups. The only known concentrations of transhumans on the surface are exsurgents and TITAN puppets, entire metropolises still running according to the whims of their abdicated machine masters.