Earth

Earth is the homeworld of humanity, home to 12.5 billion people, and is the capital planet for the Interplanetary Systems Alliance.

Earth in Decline
After the new millenium, Earth faced increasing hardships on its natural resources due to human overpopulation. The Energy Boom that occurred between the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries enabled an unsustainable population growth and realtively unequal resource allocation. While human population increased, more people fell into poverty as weaker nations could no longer afford to sustain their bursting populations due to high energy costs and increasing food shortages due to climate induced drought.

The Energy Boom also had one other side effect. Pollution and the failure of not planning for future population growth led to massive cities congested with populations of decreasing health and shorter lifespans. Making matters worse, ineffective and often gridlocked governments made no efforts to correct or alliveate their population's problems. With broken government, a failing planet, and lack of natural resources, conflict soon erupted, first in weaker nations, and then in stronger ones. Entire countries collapsed into warring city-states, billions of people were displaced by war, and billions more died of hunger, disease, and famine.



A New Golden Age
At the turn of the twenty third century, the Synthetic Life Program successfully demonstrated its ability to develop into a fully functional synthetic organism. Promising new energy sources and faster food production, sentient synthethic organisms helped the struggling humans repair two centuries worth of pollution, bad agricultural planning, and failing health. However, this only served to buy the planet a few more years. A new solution was needed to ensure Earth's survival.

With Earth on the brink of complete biosphere collapse, the few stable countries left pooled their last resources into a promising device called the Quantum Subspace Tuner, or the QST. Designed by sentient synthetic and human scientists, the QST device enabled faster-than-light travel to distant stars and planets for which to colonize. With a functional device installed on the first colony ship, the Constellation, humans for the first time made another world, Terra Alo, their new home. Now empowered with the means to expand, humanity soon achieved total peace that it hadn't seen in thousands of years. Humans were now a galactic power.

As more and more humans migrated to the new colony in the coming century, Earth slowly recovered both environmentally and economically. Now a hub for the manufacture and development for new colonial ships, colonial supplies, and manpower, the population of Earth stabilized and allowed humanity and their synthetic partners to begin repairing centuries of pollution, over population, and war. While many native Earth species went extinct over the course of human history, humanity's new attitude of maintaining and protetcting the homeworld allowed the planet to recover exponentially as humans converted from a fossil fuel based economy to an abudant hydrogen one. As a gesture of extreme gratitude towards their new creation, human governments granted civil rights to the sentient synthetic lifeforms that had saved them from the brink of extinction.

With a stable environment, booming economic activity, and a sustaiable population Earth soon became the dominant political and economic player in colonial politics. This gave the planet significant leverage when the largely independent colonies were faced with the Singulus Invasion. Earth would agree to join the colonial govenments on the condition that Earth would be declared the capital of the newly formed Interplanetary Systems Alliance, and adopt its laws of equality for humans and synthetics. Faced with destruction, the colonies agreed.