Critical Futures

This is the third installment in the second sequence of the Trailing Edge story. Read part one here, or part two. I once again leave you in the very capable hands of Mr. Leon Winter.

In the century before the riots, many of the cities on Earth were incased in large series of domes. The “pro-Earthers,” for lack of a better term, thought the domes were the solution to all of Earth’s problems. he idea was that a dome would help stabilize the increasingly erratic weather patterns, solve many resource concerns by making urban cities nearly closed environmental systems. As it turns out, closed dome systems made colonization–not life on Earth–viable.

It was almost as if, people were so entranced by the possibility of space colonization that they couldn’t wait to get to space so they decided to bring space colony-like environments to Earth. Earth, however, unlike the early colonies made no effort to monitor or control the birth rate, and life under the domes was considerably easier than it would be for any of the colonists. A baby boom followed in short order, the domes–built for centuries, based on historical population growth curves–overcrowded in a generation, and the integrated systems fell apart.

Somehow, Marrakesh Dome didn’t riot. The dome was built bigger, the population density was lower, the baby boom hadn’t been so intense, the visa controversy wasn’t taken as an attack on the citizenry. All of these factors, likely, combined to save Marrakesh, though I’ve never been to suss out what happened in enough detail. It’s hard to find historical records of something that didn’t happen, particularly when the records of what did happen were destroyed by the event.

In any case, Marrakesh became the seat–and focal point–of the last significant age of Earth politics and culture. And while that era has come to a seemingly abrupt end, there’s something that almost passes for a community underneath this dome–London and New York domes (and others) have been totally abandoned for decades.

And so this is where I always come looking for answers, when I need to make sense of this part of our past. I’ve recovered vast amounts of pre-riot history, some records from the mirror of the spaceport authority, and although it has never been central to my own interests, I’ve taken advantage of my trips here to record interviews and accounts of contemporary life in the dome. I’ve thought about sending this material in a tight beam to the outbound fleets and convoys, but I don’t see the point really. Maybe I can put it in my will.

This is the second installment in the second sequence of the Trailing Edge story. Read part one here. I once again leave you in the very capable hands of Mr. Leon Winter.

Earth is where our history–in a very real sense–still lives, even if we no longer do.¹ This is complicated by the fact that, not much of Earth remains.

This is a superficial effect: much of the planet has simply been abandoned. A generation or two after the riots, Titan and Europa sent in withdrawal teams that tried to consolidate the Earth population in a number of key population centers. For the general safety, or some such.

But more importantly it’s a historical effect: for hundreds of years humanity to rebuild Earth, to fix the problems, and though some small gains were made, Earth never really recovered from the Visa Riots.

The Visa Riots, or more precisely records from that time are what have brought me back to Earth on this occasion.

It’s almost too obvious in retrospect. There were too many people on Earth–not based on survival. Humans, we’ve found, can survive much in closer quarters than the estimated average space allotment on Earth at that time., but there were only so many resources, only so much space, only so much opportunity.

So when the colonies and outposts started opening up to people. Colonies with equity clauses in their charters. Going to Mars or the Moon wasn’t just the chance of a lifetime as it had been for the initial explorers and scientists, but it was–quite literally–the chance of generations. And understandably, when the Colonial Consortium tried to limit what everyone had expected to be “open colonization. The people of Earth Rioted.

The issues that sparked the riot were quickly resolved–though arguably the result was a disaster in its own right–but the damage was never really resolved, but that is the way with such historical explosions.

This is the first installment in the second sequence of the Trailing Edge story. I once again leave you in the very capable hands of Mr. Leon Winter.

So here I am, sitting here, on a bench in an urban park in the Marrakesh Dome, on Earth. It seems so quaint to sit on a bench and wait for someone to come by with a file, a physical record. I deal with a lot of files but they’re never really physical, and they never take this long to arrive. But I’m in no particular hurry.

The massive dome that still encases the city clashes somehow with all of the stone masonry that predates the dome by a millennia and some change. You could almost smell the age of this place, it was easy to get lost in the history and just sit and watch time pass. That wasn’t such a bad thing: despite the general ruin, I never felt more alive and connected as I did here. That clash probably kept most people away from Earth, though: stewing in the middle of so much history–and an often unpleasant history at that–can turn the stomach. And yet I keep coming back.

Not many of us come to Earth any more, sure some people still live here–I couldn’t fathom more than ten million world wide, probably less, and all under the domes. Most of the people left in the system were born off world–myself included–and are used to a lighter gravity. But I’ve been coming pretty regularly for more years than I really want to talk about, and by now I have friends that I enjoy seeing that expect me to visit. I like to see how the people are doing pretty regularly: for a world that is supposedly so degraded, the places and faces of Earth society change very fast quickly.

Most importantly, it was in the way. It helped that I was, as they say, “in the neighborhood.”

The domes were built over the mega-cities to consolidate populations when it became clear that the ozone layer was a lost cause, but the exoduses started soon after, and as a result all the domes seemed too big and too empty and too far apart. It was a big planet and while there were raw materials Earthside that you couldn’t mine space or Titan for, but there were fewer and fewer of them and thanks to automation, no one had to make the trip unless they wanted.

With the exodus, the new habitats throughout the solar system and a few hundred years to detach it was like Earth had become impractical: too much space, not enough infrastructure, and enough history and guilt to make it downright uncomfortable for most.

Why then, am I on Earth? Funny you should ask…