“In the future will our technologies help stabilise our planet and population, leading to a very long lifetime for us? Or will we destroy our world and its inhabitants, after only a brief appearance on the cosmic stage?” Jill Cornell Tarter, astronomer.
“This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to future events is purely coincidental. Ahem … it is, isn’t it?” The Author.
Prologue Mars, June 2500
The man felt the files downloading to his embedded chipset just in time, a few hours before his departure for the Kepler-1638b Super Earth. He had required data on the original unedited sources of his genome. The vast majority of records had been lost during the Genome Wars, so this was an unexpected gift from fate. The files contained the names of four of his sources, all from the 20th and 21st centuries. This suited him fine as he was a historian fascinated by this period. His teammates laughed about his passion, and the few who were versed in old tales preferred delving into more interesting events such as the Climate Decay of the 22nd century, the Genome Wars of the 23rd century or the Pre-Asteroids Period. But he saw the 20th and 21st centuries as a golden age for humanity. He had tried to understand this fascination as if making it rational would render it more acceptable. He had studied the language of those times and all the information he could find, but of course, data were scarce: the global devastations that had taken place during the previous centuries had wiped out most goods and storage units. They had been real history equalisers, and now the 20th and 21st centuries felt as distant as the Middle Ages or the Roman Empire. At that time, people lived shorter but richer lives, he thought. The Earth was still a functioning ecosystem, and most people were convinced that the future would, overall, be better than the past. There was hope. He remembered from his studies that, back then, cancer was a common cause of death, despite the fact that machines to diagnose and often cure it were available in many countries. This was partly thanks to CERN, an old organisation which contributed to cancer treatment research. Improvements in environment and medicine increased life expectancy at birth by reducing early and mid-life mortality. The total world population increased, although longer lifespans were most common in rich countries, thanks to the greater level of infrastructure.