History of Rhenium
By the year 2666 Earth experienced what became known as The Great Catastrophe. The planet became uninhabitable as a result of the inability of political leaders to deal with:
- man-made climate change
- overpopulation
- international wars and terrorist activity
- the proliferation of false and divisive Media material
- cyber terrorism
- a series of terrible natural disasters and
- the pandemics that spread across the world when the conflicts reached a perfect storm
In 2666, almost 90 million survivors from Earth’s Great Catastrophe evacuated the mother planet in 183 gargantuan space carriers. Each space carrier aimed towards wormholes leading to one of seven distant planets identified as theoretically hospitable for humans. Knowledge and memories of Earth were preserved in digital archives. Each space carrier contained protected bio-environments preserving examples of Earth’s flora and fauna. Many species, but not all, survived the space odyssey.
29 of the carriers headed towards Rhenium and 26 reached the planet. One of the three missing carriers (The Voyager) malfunctioned and all living creatures on board died. The fate of the other two carriers (The Liszt and The Xavier) is unknown; contact was lost two generations before arriving in Rhenium’s orbit.
During the galactic odyssey seven generations of human life passed, so knowledge of Earth and its customs and practices could only be transmitted through AV-records and storytelling. Each space carrier developed its own culture during the two centuries of space travel but all communicated to plan the society they would build when they arrived
Almost 200 years after departure, around 9 million descendants of Earth’s survivors landed successfully on the planet Rhenium, after a decade of Orbiting. The first two generations, however, were seriously reduced in numbers during a 30-year period of conflict known as The Second Catastrophe. The first 73 years after Landing was labelled The Old World Order (OWO).
