About a hundred and twenty years after nearly the entire human population of
Earth retreated into underground bunker cities to survive an asteroid
impact, the surface was ready to support life again. The impact winter was
over years prior, but the descendants of the original survivors wanted to
make sure the planet had enough time to recuperate before they started
messing with it again. Plantlife returned on its own, but most of the animal
life was gone. They were able to bring a few individuals down to the bunkers
with them, but the majority of species would be lost forever. Some did
manage to survive on the surface after impact, but their lives had been
really difficult, and none of them was available to eat. What cows, pigs,
chickens, and other livestock the people managed to hold onto would not be
able to repopulate the world for a very long time. Fortunately for them,
there had never been enough meat for it to be part of the people’s diets
anyway once the event occurred. Everyone was vegetarian, whether they would
have chosen the diet on their own, or not. When they emerged, that still
couldn’t change, and it probably never would. They set free the animals they
had, and let them do whatever they wanted with their lives. It was time to
rebuild. At this point in history, the people were pretty advanced. In the
underground cities, they focused on technological advancements that they
could actually use underground—medicine and longevity, efficient energy
production, etc.—but that didn’t mean they abandoned all else. They had not
been able to do much space exploration for real, but they developed quite
sophisticated simulations, so they came out with a great deal of
understanding of the concept. They were brilliant engineers, and masters of
architecture, and they were ready to expand.
The bunkers at the end would be unrecognizable to anyone who first stepped
down into them over a century ago. The original creations were simple,
fairly empty, and available for heavy modification. This was what they did
over the years; continue to improve their living spaces. Now that they were
back outside, they adapted these skills to towering buildings in the open
air, and they did it extremely quickly. Within a single lifetime, it would
be difficult to tell that the people of this world ever lived exclusively
underground. And it really was exclusive. The few survivors who both chose
not to go to the bunkers, and manage to survive the impact, did not last
very long during the winter. They didn’t have enough resources, enough
skills to figure out workarounds, or enough people to propagate the species.
As for the descendants, not everyone wanted to live as their ancestors. They
were born underground, they were comfortable down there, and that was where
they wanted to stay. No one had a problem with that. Their choice was only
going to serve to protect the environment, which needed as much help as it
could get. A high number of people wanted to live on the sea, as it was
something most of them could barely fathom. Pictures and movies could just
not do it justice. Likewise with space. They had fusion power, excellent
life support systems, and a particularly strong desire to see what else was
out there; even more so than other cultures experienced. So they sent out
their probes, and built their passenger ships, and began the interplanetary
expansion, followed by the interstellar one. All things considered, they
probably weren’t too far behind where they would have been had the asteroid
not struck. Now they could do it faster, easier, and without making as many
mistakes. The people prospered.
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