As I’ve sort of explained, every universe that includes a populated Earth
will begin at the same start value. This means that they should be
accompanied by two planets closer to the sun, and another farther out before
a small asteroid belt, before moving onto the gas giants, and icy worlds.
And all of these celestial bodies should follow predictable patterns, and
they should be the same for all versions of Earth. But they’re not. I don’t
know enough about astrophysics to tell you why, but I have been able to see
the consequences of these variations. On one Earth, astronomers uncovered
the irregular orbital pattern of an asteroid from deep space, which
was—apparently perturbed by other gravitationally-bound objects—on a
collision course towards Earth. This gave them an eight-year warning, but
that didn’t mean they could send up a bunch of space cowboys to blow the
thing up. They possessed telescopic technology capable of detecting the
asteroid, and the mathematical skills to predict its movements, but the
space programs had barely reached the moon. Had this happened to them a few
decades later, they might have stood a chance to stop it, but they had no
hope of that now. All they could do was run and hide. Fortunately, the right
people were given the latitude to jump into action, and preserve the human
race. Private corporations and world governments started working together to
an impressively harmonious degree. They built massive cities deep
underground to protect them from the impact. The asteroid was destined to
strike the continent of Africa, which meant their bunkers would have needed
to be farther down than they were capable of digging. So other nations took
in refugees, so the entire population of the planet could be saved. They
didn’t even fight about it, they just did it. In only eight years,
construction was completed. A few stragglers chose to remain on the
surface, but very few of them were far enough away from impact to survive.
The reason they were able to complete the project in the short time allotted
was that they planned the bunkers in stages. They knew that it was more
important to finish the overall structure first, and stuff it with enough
resources for the people to survive on. But they didn’t build individual
units and rooms until later, in case it took them too long to finish Stage
One. They didn’t build amenities until after impact, because they knew they
could be okay until then. They just needed to get people down there, and
they wouldn’t have been satisfied with anything short of the survival of
everyone who wanted to survive. An impact winter reigned over the planet for
decades to come after the incident, forcing the survivors to make their
homes here, and forget about ever seeing the sky again. That was a dream
that could be fulfilled by their children’s children, or beyond. Progress
and development did not end here, though. They kept studying science, and
coming up with advanced technology. They were able to tap into their
undersea communication lines, and reestablish contact with each other across
the continental divides. Within a couple decades, they were back to about
where they were when this happened. They were just an underground species
now. While they were down here, the Ochivari visited, and went on the hunt
for evolved life, pleased to find this to be one world that they did not
have to worry about. For some reason, they didn’t notice how few dead bodies
were left behind, and foolishly concluded the humans were not a threat. But
below, a source of recruitment into the Transit Army brewed.
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