The Solar Republics
Mankind's first permanent homes beyond Earth were not in other star systems, but on other bodies orbiting our home star, Sol. Though humans had been capable of reaching Luna as early as the late 1900s, serious colonization of other worlds did not (and could not, some historians maintain) occur until after Unification in the early 23rd century. At first, the only offworld settlements were permanent scientific outposts - in the case of Luna and Mars, as early as the 21st century - but with time, better technology, and the development of more reliable and cost-efficient space travel, settlement booms eventually brought millions of people who meant to make these desolate worlds home.
Life on Desolate Worlds
Science fiction of the 20th and 21st centuries often painted an intensely optimistic picture of interplanetary colonization. Alas, the reality is much harsher.
Humans are creatures evolved for life on Earth. Life on other worlds, without proper technological (and, often, social) adjustment, can and will wreak havoc on body and mind. Almost no element of human existence is exempt from danger of severe disruption by life beyond Earth. A selection - by no means exhaustive - of these problems:
- Low gravity will degrade and destroy the body over time. Even with constant, grueling exercise multiple times daily, bones and muscles will atrophy into uselessness. In low gravity, human reproduction is unreliable, and pregnancy is outright dangerous for both parent and child. Eyes will swell, sometimes hazardously so, and can result in blindness.
- Solar radiation, without a strong atmosphere and magnetic field to intercept, will barrage and destroy the body's cells. Over time, this exposure renders the body less capable of fighting disease, and can spur dangerous cell growth (cancers).
- Chemicals in alien soil can make growing crops all but impossible without prior treatment.
- In vacuum or near-vacuum environments, the slightest equipment malfunction can expose the human body to the effects of uncontrolled decompression. In the most dire scenarios (exposure beyond 90 seconds), saliva and blood boil, the circulatory system fails, and lungs collapse entirely.
- Ultraviolet rays received directly from a star will cause extreme sunburn.
- Variable and non-Earth standard day/night cycles heavily disrupt natural circadian rhythms, causing extreme fatigue and sleep loss.
- The psychological effects of all of the above, combined with the claustrophobia inherent to long-term confinement in small areas, cause stress and interpersonal tension far above normal rates.
Why, then, would anyone live in such conditions? For citizens of the UNE, the incentives were economic, the solutions technological. By the late 22nd century, several designs for artificial gravity habitats had been developed, preventing the most dangerous effects of off-world living by way of constant spinning. The development of virtual reality technology, though not quite matching popular dreams of
Star Trek holodecks, nevertheless became invaluable to space settlement and exploration by giving people a chance to retreat from the confinement of a vessel or habitat into the world of their choice. So ubiquitous was VR by 2200 that even on Earth, it was considered unusual to not own a system. Film and television had long embraced the medium, entirely changing the way people spent their leisure time. Perhaps most notable was the shift towards acceptance of artificial gestation; many parents, unwilling or unable to carry a child, found instead that using an artificial womb was much safer and less disruptive than pregnancy. Since these devices function just as well in offworld environments as on earth, being entirely sealed, they became integral to the development and growth of the early Solar Republics.
Republic of Luna
For centuries, the moon represented the highest of mankind's immediate horizon. After the United States of America landed humans on the moon six times between 1969 and 1972, no humans returned until 2024, when the United States again landed a crew on the lunar surface. Unlike the first set of moon landings, which had marked the end of the First Space Race, the 2024 landings kicked off a series of high-stakes, high-prestige space endeavors, by the USA, China, the European Union, Russia, and later India.
The compounding crises of the 21st century overtook the Second Space Race by 2050, and though by that date all five main participants had made Lunar landings and the USA and China both maintained permanent outposts, dwindling public support, high costs, and political apathy eventually rendered the moon lifeless once more by the outbreak of the Third World War in 2087.
Over the next century and a half, a few tentative moon missions took place, mostly by the East African Union and India. In 2169 (the two hundredth anniversary of its first landing), the United States made an abortive attempt to reclaim its
Armstrong base, but its condition was found to be too degraded for habitation, even with repair.
UNE President Liliane Delmas authorized the Luna Colony in 2229, asserting for the first time the executive's constitutional right to approve the creation of a directly-administered territory. The colony's first "city" and
de facto capital was established at the location of the decrepit
Armstrong Base, in order to make use of the raw material. Additionally, scientists hoped to use its equatorial location as the site of a space elevator, taking advantage of lower lunar gravity that would make such an endeavor impossible on earth using materials known to mankind in that era.
Luna Colony became the Republic of Luna not because of some massive swell of population, but because of legal necessity. Unlike crew in 21st-century Antarctica, for example, the cost of moving personnel between Luna and Earth routinely was extremely expensive. The goals of the UNE increasingly called for a leg up into the Solar System, and with an exponentially growing number of lucrative work opportunities available on the Moon, "crew" became increasingly replaced by "residents" willing to stay permanently, with their families. These first families required services, entertainment, civil society, and - most importantly - representative government. Thus did the first offworld society come to be.
By the turn of the 24th century, the Republic of Luna had a population of roughly 850,000, spread across a network of twenty-nine bases, and connected by a magnetic rail system to the capital "city" of Armstrong. The space elevator, successfully erected during the 2240s, made Luna a reliably low-cost hub for transportation to and from the rest of the Solar System.
Republic of Mars
The United States attempted to land humans on Mars in 2032. Unfortunately, a major equipment malfunction nearly caused a tragedy, and the Mars program was grounded for years as a result. China became the first to land humans on Mars, in 2046. During the 21st century, the United States and China alike built small outposts for research, but as with those one the Moon, abandoned them in the years leading to World War III.
India sent a series of major missions to Mars during the period from 2150-2190, establishing a base that would become the core of modern Mangala at Valles Marineris. When Mars Colony was established in 2231, the government of India accepted the accession of its small station into the new polity. Mars, as a result, started with two real cores; Mangala, or "Old Mars", the mostly-Indian habitats of the Valles Marineris, and "Young Mars" the much more multicultural area that would evolve into modern Elysium and Huǒxīng. The cultural divide, in time, would come to dominate Martian politics and society, though not for many decades.
Mars was the most Earthlike of the original Solar Republics, and the dream of a red planet made blue motivated the most aggressive early settler boom of any Solar System colony. Unfortunately, terraforming planets is no small endeavor, and the optimists of the earliest years that had speculated about breathable air within a single lifetime were quickly disappointed. For the first hundred and fifty years of its existence, the Republic of Mars was a republic of habitats, bound together much like those on Luna by maglev trains and shuttlecraft.
There was one exception, however. While large-scale terraforming had indeed proven only tentatively plausible, at the geographically unique Valles Marineris, a smaller-scale operation successfully "tented" the canyon. The project, which contained the entire valley in a superstructure of unprecedented scale, established a breathable atmosphere within. For the first time, the foundations of an Earth-like biosphere were established on another world. While it remained impossible to permanently live outside a gravity-controlled habitat, the "Mangala Project" turned Mars into a true beacon of human ingenuity.
By 2300, Mars was thriving, with a population well over three million and growing rapidly. Unlike the other Solar Republics, however, Mars' size meant that by the turn of the century, several significant cultural and political fissures had developed. In time, these would be the cracks along which the Republic would dissolve into its modern multitude of states.
Republic of Ceres
Ceres, the smallest of the Solar Republics, became one rather by accident. Rather than a planned colony, the dwarf planet's haphazard array of mining stations and temporary-turned-permanent settlements gathered residents by accretion over years. Eventually, in 2243, the UNE was forced to acknowledge it as a Member State, lest a political crisis develop between competing earth-based interests over "the Rock".
In many ways, Ceres is the anti-Mars. While Mars' size allowed it to become a frontier world for dozens of groups, Ceres' small size (roughly the size of Argentina) meant that all its settlements were packed tightly together, relatively speaking, especially around the richest mining areas. Where Mars was the beneficiary of concentrated efforts by the UNE to establish and maintain a colony, Ceres has mostly found it necessary to fend for itself.
Cerean culture, for these reasons, prizes toughness, ingenuity, and independence. Instead of individual habitats connected by mag-lev trains, Ceres is essentially one immense habitat, as much under the ground and connected via tunnels as it is on the surface. By 2300, the Cerean government had sponsored small settlements on other small bodies in the Asteroid Belt, though the legal status of such a move at the time was unclear at best.
Republic of Europa
Europa was colonized only reluctantly, at the request of the scientific community. President Meng Liang initially found the idea of large-scale habitation on such a far-off, inhospitable moon to be a vanity project unworthy of investment. No life had been found by the science outposts set up there during the 2240s, and the surface was uneven, frigid, and icy. Scientists on Europa, however, insisted that the moon could potentially become a hub for research, on account of the world's unique subsurface oceans. Warmed by a geothermically active core, Europa's seas are rich in the microscopic material from which life is speculated to have arisen.
The Europan habitats were constructed half-submerged, cut deep into the ice in order to access the relative warmth of the seas below. Settlement was sporadic, as expected, but the scientific community there and the associated services and staff gave it a population of roughly 270,000 by the turn of the century. In 2300, one main habitat existed, alongside a handful of smaller, entirely submerged habitats.
Republic of Mercury
Mercury was settled only late in the Early Colonial Period. Sun-scorched and inhospitable, it only received attention as a target for settlers in the late 23rd century, once the deployment of advanced solar cells revealed the lucrative potential of living and working on the little planet.
The vast majority of Mercurians live in the largest habitat, a sprawling affair that connects underground to the vast solar fields to the east. While most of its 110,000 residents were employed in fields somewhat related to the planet's main industry in 2300, it also had a growing population of tradespeople and service industry employees, eager to make use of Mercury's central location in the system and swift orbital period as a base from which to connect with the rest of Sol.
