The Up and Up

-1

The world has changed since the twentieth century. The people haven't.

Eleven billion people occupy the planet's surface, and thirty million above, aboard Jamestown. Human life expectancy beyond the atmosphere is up, thanks to AI-developed cures for every serious illness, available for those who can pay. It's not unusual for a station resident to live into their early hundred teens. Townspeople vacation via elevator trips to visit the last remaining forests and ogle at the few hundreds of remaining animal species. They turn noses up at the poor, who live on ocean islands of debris, dying young and sharing the nothing they have amongst themselves. Jamestown blots out the sun, hopeful children look upon it with awe: that is where the heroes live, heroes who look on their lowly lives with disdain and mockery, hating them -- simple parasites sucking the life from their sky, the Mother Earth.

It wasn't until the politicians decided on a space station, a space station to test the earth's strength and durability, that the true damage was sdone. The politicians went through hundreds of millions of cubic yards of alloys, natural gases for petroleum, and ran out of materials long before a fraction of the space station was completed.

They looked to Mars, and the moons of Jupiter for materials. Solar system mining was now king. Children grew up wanting to help robots mine alloys on Io or staring into the rusty iron rich landscape in Valles Marineras on Mars. So much of the labor was done by artificial intelligence, there in place of humans. While some robots had robots to fix them, the maintenance robots didn't. Space shuttles were manufactured newer and better Each year, unlike the NASA program of the 20th century.