[2400AD] Pre-Stutterwarp Trends
May. 11th, 2003 08:42 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rfmcdonaldPart 1 breaks down into four broad divisions: cultural, demographic, geopolitical, and space trends.
CULTURAL
The Third World War had a decisive impact on the surviving cultures of the world, not least by its discrediting of militarism and extreme nationalism. (Neither of these two phenomena would reappear until the 23rd century.) The post-War environment required the peoples of the world to be well-organized, respectful of authorities, and to be conservative--risks were to be avoided, and major decisions of bureaucracies (state or private) were often overturned by fierce popular pressure. To oppose the status quo was dangerous for anyone who wished for power or prosperity. This risk-averse mindset remained dominated well into the 21st century worldwide, for in an era dominated by wrenching change appeals to traditional forms had some legitimacy. Literature, film, and music looked back to the world's pastoral past, often imagined as a halcyon age. Social mores remained moderately liberal but did not progress particularly--women retained their legal equality but quotas disappeared, non-citizen immigrants arriving after the early 21st century had basic civil rights but few political rights, sexual minorities were free from persecution or hostile public opinion but short of true equality. Technology as a whole was not suspected or limited, although technologies directed connected to the devastation of the Third World War (aerospace, biotechnology) were highly suspect.
Beginning in the mid-21st century, however, the peoples of the world became more self-confident in their ability to experiment as the stability of global civilization proved to be enduring and economic and technological growth accelerated. As humanity spread throughout the solar system and the ecology of the Earth was being successfully rebuilt despite continuing problems from greenhouse-gas overheating and radiation, people in First and Second World states once again began experimenting: Interest in Third World musical and literary cultures grew sharply, while in urban areas sexual and ethnocultural minorities became still more prominent. Second-wave feminism took off in Europe and Japan, successfully remodelling these societies to be quite sexually egalitarian, redefining traditional patriarchal structures to be bilocal; to a lesser degree, second-wave feminism achieved similar changes elsewhere in the world. Non-heterosexuals also received, in the second half of the 21st century, the legal right in most countries to marry, establishing legally-sanctioned partnerships indistinguishable from those of their heterosexual counterparts. International migration remained low, but inside blocs--Europe, South America, Australasia--the intermixture of established nationalities and immigrant groups created increasingly homogeneous bloc-wide populations that oriented more easily towards local cosmopolitan cultures, operating in pan-bloc languages such as English, Spanish, French, and Portuguese; to some extent, these phenomena also operate in the Pacific Rim Alliance and in the Trans-Indian Ocean Bloc.
In the meantime, the radical technological advances of the 21st century--particularly in informatics and biotechnology--also impacted popular culture. Despite initial concerns, eugenical genetic engineering of fetuses--first to eliminate congenital birth defects, then to boost intelligence, strength and overall health, and even physical attractiveness--became common in First and Second World regions of the world; exowombs (artificial womb tanks used to grow fetuses to maturity) also became common thanks to the influence of second-wave feminism, while cloning also became popular. This shift away from traditional reproductive methods concerned many observers, who feared a denaturalization of the human species. Similarly, the advances in informatics--allowing the Euronet to evolve into the Réseau, a virtuality environment which possessed such detail as to simulate reality at a relatively coarse level, and introducing direct mind/computer interfaces to allow for direct and rapid informatical exchanges--worried many. The radical developments of the early 22nd century, including the genetic engineering of human subspecies adapted to Martian and microgravity environments, the creation of artificial intelligences in a wide array of informatical environments, and the uplifting to human-level intelligence by Cerean or Cerean-influenced researchers of a dozen species including squids, chimpanzees, and dolphins created a system-wide backlash against further innovations. Legal and social sanctions were placed against further research into the area of radical genetic modification, although many Cerean cultures in the outer Solar System quietly continued their researches.
DEMOGRAPHIC
The Third World War more than halved the global population; by 1985 the world population had fell to 2 300 thousand million from 5 000 thousand million. The massive spike of global death rates--an appalling 180/1000 in 1982 and 290/1000 in 1983--subsidied, but environmental damage and the disruption of global trade pushed post-crisis death rates 30% above pre-War average, finally subsiding only in the 2020s. The difficult circumstances of life in the post-War world accelerated the demographic transition, depressing birth rates worldwide. After a pause immediately after the War, international migration--mainly directed from continental Asia and sub-Saharan Africa to First World countries--resumed with a vengeance, partly compensating for the onset of natural population decrease. By 2030 most First World countries--save major-immigrant-receiving countries like Argentina, Brazil, Australia, France, and Poland--had experienced population declines of between 5 and 20% over their pre-War peaks. Second World countries such as Korea, Mexico, and Azania grew by at least one-quarter over this period, while most Third World countries saw their populations double. However, the relatively small proportion of the global population living in rapidly-growing states ensured that global population growth was small--the world population rose by only 500 million to just over 2 800 million.
In the century after 2030, population growth in First and Second World countries accelerated rapidly despite the rapid decline of international migration. Rapidly improving standards of living in these countries and sustained pro-natalist policies by their governments boosted once-declining birthrates above long-term replacement levels, while vastly improved medical technologies sharply reduced death rates everywhere. Inside Europe and the South Atlantic region, balances of population shifted, as regions characterized by slow or even negative population growth (Iberia and the eastern Mediterranean in Europe, the Andean and Caribbean states in the South Atlantic) were marginalized relative to rapidly growing areas (Azania, Venezuela, and the Southern Cone in the South Atlantic, northern and western Europe in Europe). Second World countries located outside the two major confederations experienced relatively slow growth often compensated by immigration from their Third World hinterlands--Mexico absorbed millions of Salvadorans, Hondurans, Yucatecans, and Americans over this period, while Azania likwise received immigrants from across southern Africa and Korea had its own pool in its puppet state of Dongbei. Third World countries experienced a rapid of rapid growth in the 2030-2080 period, but stagnant standards of living and the lack of opportunities for large-scale immigration combined to produce stable population levels.
The end of large-scale immigration after 2030 assimilated the trend towards the assimilation of immigrant communities. In the member-states of the South Atlantic Community, and in the major immigrant-receiving states of the Pacific basin (Japan, Korea, Mexico, Australia, and Thailand), immigrants assimilated fairly easily to national influences, leaving few traces of their presence apart from new cuisines, new religions, and broader phenotypes. (Members of the Chinese and Indian diasporas were partly excluded from this trend.) In Europe, the relatively deep integration of the continent allowed many of the more numerous populations to survive, becoming quasi-diasporic--the Francophone diaspora formed by pre-2007 immigration from across Francophone Africa was a notable example, somewhat endogamous because of its distinct racial and religious makeup, as was the Algerian diaspora. Some new diasporas presented themselves on the stage: the Iraqi in the eastern Mediterranean and northern Europe; the Ismaili Bengali diaspora in Asia; the Anglo-American diaspora worldwide; the Russian diaspora in Europe; and so on. In areas badly devastated by the Third World War, ethnic compositions of territories were changed by massive immigration, as Thai settlement dominated mainland Southeast Asia, Tamils and Bengalis resettled Indonesia, Dongbei acquired a strongly Korean character, most former American land west of the Mississippi became Mexican, and Russia (outside of the city-state of Leningrad) devolved into a patchwork of communities of diverse Slavic, Finnic, Turkic, and western European origins.
In the early 22nd century, an increasingly important factor in global demographics was the exodus to space. Although only four million people emigrated before the introduction of stutterwarp (most going to Mars or to various points in cislunar space), these people were disproportionately drawn from the well-educated and upwardly-mobile segments of the major First and Second World nation-states and confederations. The successful establishment of human societies outside of Earth in the Solar System marked an entirely new stage in human development, particularly as some human societies off-Earth (particularly on Mars and in microgravity conditions in the Cerean diaspora) genetically modified their offspring to create literal races adapted to the conditions prevailing off Earth.
GEOPOLITICS
The decline of the League of Nations after its peak of influence in the 1990s may have been inevitable once the outstanding challenges to the world had been dealt with. The League's apolitical nature allowed it to peacefully evolve into a mediating and coordinating body that derived its influence almost entirely from the willingness of its leading member-states to share their power
The European and South Atlantic confederations became truly integrated entities in the early 21st century. None of the member-states of these confederations ceased to exist; indeed, Zulia seceded from Venezuela just as did Tyrol from Austria, while Spain was radically reorganized into a confederation of sovereign states. Some non-state minorities did fade away (Sámi in the Nordic states, Frisians on the shore of the North Sea, various native peoples in Guyana, the subgroups of South Africa's Azanians) but others thrived (Bosniaks in Yugoslavia, Afrikaners in South Africa, Sorbs in Saxony, Mapuche in Chile) and others were created anew (the vast Algerian, Georgian, and Libyan diasporas in "mainland" Europe, the Ethiopian diaspora in the eastern Mediterranean, the Yoruba communities in Brazil, and the American diaspora in both countries. The rounding out of the frontiers of the European and South Atlantic confederations were completed in the last quarter of the 21st century, with Turkish accession to the European Confederation and Mozambican accession to the South Atlantic Community. The societies on the margins of these two blocs in North America and Africa faced various fates, ranging from Mexico's ascent to First World and Great Power status to the utter marginalization of Morocco. States tried to establish preferential links with one or both blocs, drawing upon shares cultural links--West Africa tried to appeal to Europeans and South Americans using (respectively) its Francophone population and its status as source of the African diaspora.
The consolidation of the Pacific basin in the Pacific Rim Alliance from the early 2020s on helped stabilize the devastated Pacific basin region, where international rivalries had precipitated the Third World War that had devastated the world a generation earlier. The structure of the alliance was dominated by the major status quo powers, which sought to preserve the region's stability by establishing high-level cooperation between the region's Great Powers, in a fashion similar to that of the Concert of Europe in the European continent in the half-century after the Napoleonic Wars. The reunification of China simply added a sixth power to this bloc. Australia, unopposed in the South Pacific, set about creating an Australasian federation encompassing New Guinea, Bali, and the Pacific Confederation but dominated by Australian population and wealth; Thailand similarly strengthened the Indochinese Federation. Japan and China established a mutual alliance, as did Korea and Mexico; Mexico also closely cultivated friendly relationships based on migration and trade with China and Thailand. For a time, the crosscutting alliances helped stabilize the region, but in the early 22nd century the growth of mutually competitive and exclusive alliances in the Pacific region and the resurgence of local nationalisms made the Pacific Rim Alliance begin to collapse. By the 2150s, trade and border disputes--on Earth and in space--had taken on an all-time high, and the alliance's Secretariat became nonfunctional.
The Indian Ocean was the largest region excluded from the spheres of influence of the major blocs. The Indian diaspora--present in large numbers in Persia, East Africa, Indonesia, and the Mascarenes--helped knit the area together, as did the smaller Arab and Bengali diasporas. In the end, the Trans-Indian Ocean Bloc made the Indian Ocean littoral states a united entity for the first time since the peak of the British empire in the area in the early 20th century, if a relatively incoherent and weak entity. Other fragmented areas, including central Africa and North America, were not so lucky and saw repeated armed conflicts.
SPACE
In the 21st century, the major manned spacefaring powers that had survived the war--Europe, South America and Japan--began to venture out again. These were soon joined by Mexico, Korea, Australasia and Persia. These programs began with the launch of unmanned satellites--at first communications and Earth-observation satellites, then astronomical-research satellites and long-range probes. The growth of a manned space presence took longer, but by the 2040s ambitious long-range projects by private businesses (including Selfort SA) and a strong popular-culture movement to establish human societies away from Earth in order to ensure the species' survival in the case of another Earthly calamity. As technology developed, new rationales for space colonization--including the mining of helium-3 on Earth's Moon and in the Saturnian system, the exploitation of Europan biological resources, solar-power stations in various cislunar orbits, and tourism--developed. Although space enterprises began as expensive operations which were consistently unprofitable, by the early 22nd century extensive funding by national and confederal governments produced some niche industries (particularly tourism and power exports) which were profitable.
By the time that stutterwarp was developed, almost six million people lived offworld--the Islandia space habitat in L-4 was the single largest concentration, but a quarter-million people lived in the mining and solar-power facilities on Mercury and Earth's Moon. Another million people lived in the rapidly growing Cerean diaspora, with the largest concentrations on the asteroids of Ceres and Vesta and in adjacent habitats but including large populations scattered as far as the Kuiper belt. The largest population, however, was to be found on Mars, which benefitted from the massive funding of the Mars ecopoesis project; Mars' 3.5 million inhabitants, living in four major and several dozen minor colonies, lived on a world which was steadily being transformed into an Earth-like world. This ecopoesis project worked through the modification of the world's climate (primarily orbital mirrors and heat-retaining fluorochlorocarbon compounds), the introduction of water through the guided impacts of Kuiper belt objects and the melting of Mars' polar ice gaps, and the introduction of genetically-engineered life forms to create a skeletal ecology. By the mid-21st century, the ecopoesis project had succeeded in introducing a relatively dense carbon dioxide-dominated atmosphere and large bodies of water to the planets surface, and in creating a relatively temperate climatic belt around the Martian equator, but Mars was still far from being a self-supporting world.
CULTURAL
The Third World War had a decisive impact on the surviving cultures of the world, not least by its discrediting of militarism and extreme nationalism. (Neither of these two phenomena would reappear until the 23rd century.) The post-War environment required the peoples of the world to be well-organized, respectful of authorities, and to be conservative--risks were to be avoided, and major decisions of bureaucracies (state or private) were often overturned by fierce popular pressure. To oppose the status quo was dangerous for anyone who wished for power or prosperity. This risk-averse mindset remained dominated well into the 21st century worldwide, for in an era dominated by wrenching change appeals to traditional forms had some legitimacy. Literature, film, and music looked back to the world's pastoral past, often imagined as a halcyon age. Social mores remained moderately liberal but did not progress particularly--women retained their legal equality but quotas disappeared, non-citizen immigrants arriving after the early 21st century had basic civil rights but few political rights, sexual minorities were free from persecution or hostile public opinion but short of true equality. Technology as a whole was not suspected or limited, although technologies directed connected to the devastation of the Third World War (aerospace, biotechnology) were highly suspect.
Beginning in the mid-21st century, however, the peoples of the world became more self-confident in their ability to experiment as the stability of global civilization proved to be enduring and economic and technological growth accelerated. As humanity spread throughout the solar system and the ecology of the Earth was being successfully rebuilt despite continuing problems from greenhouse-gas overheating and radiation, people in First and Second World states once again began experimenting: Interest in Third World musical and literary cultures grew sharply, while in urban areas sexual and ethnocultural minorities became still more prominent. Second-wave feminism took off in Europe and Japan, successfully remodelling these societies to be quite sexually egalitarian, redefining traditional patriarchal structures to be bilocal; to a lesser degree, second-wave feminism achieved similar changes elsewhere in the world. Non-heterosexuals also received, in the second half of the 21st century, the legal right in most countries to marry, establishing legally-sanctioned partnerships indistinguishable from those of their heterosexual counterparts. International migration remained low, but inside blocs--Europe, South America, Australasia--the intermixture of established nationalities and immigrant groups created increasingly homogeneous bloc-wide populations that oriented more easily towards local cosmopolitan cultures, operating in pan-bloc languages such as English, Spanish, French, and Portuguese; to some extent, these phenomena also operate in the Pacific Rim Alliance and in the Trans-Indian Ocean Bloc.
In the meantime, the radical technological advances of the 21st century--particularly in informatics and biotechnology--also impacted popular culture. Despite initial concerns, eugenical genetic engineering of fetuses--first to eliminate congenital birth defects, then to boost intelligence, strength and overall health, and even physical attractiveness--became common in First and Second World regions of the world; exowombs (artificial womb tanks used to grow fetuses to maturity) also became common thanks to the influence of second-wave feminism, while cloning also became popular. This shift away from traditional reproductive methods concerned many observers, who feared a denaturalization of the human species. Similarly, the advances in informatics--allowing the Euronet to evolve into the Réseau, a virtuality environment which possessed such detail as to simulate reality at a relatively coarse level, and introducing direct mind/computer interfaces to allow for direct and rapid informatical exchanges--worried many. The radical developments of the early 22nd century, including the genetic engineering of human subspecies adapted to Martian and microgravity environments, the creation of artificial intelligences in a wide array of informatical environments, and the uplifting to human-level intelligence by Cerean or Cerean-influenced researchers of a dozen species including squids, chimpanzees, and dolphins created a system-wide backlash against further innovations. Legal and social sanctions were placed against further research into the area of radical genetic modification, although many Cerean cultures in the outer Solar System quietly continued their researches.
DEMOGRAPHIC
The Third World War more than halved the global population; by 1985 the world population had fell to 2 300 thousand million from 5 000 thousand million. The massive spike of global death rates--an appalling 180/1000 in 1982 and 290/1000 in 1983--subsidied, but environmental damage and the disruption of global trade pushed post-crisis death rates 30% above pre-War average, finally subsiding only in the 2020s. The difficult circumstances of life in the post-War world accelerated the demographic transition, depressing birth rates worldwide. After a pause immediately after the War, international migration--mainly directed from continental Asia and sub-Saharan Africa to First World countries--resumed with a vengeance, partly compensating for the onset of natural population decrease. By 2030 most First World countries--save major-immigrant-receiving countries like Argentina, Brazil, Australia, France, and Poland--had experienced population declines of between 5 and 20% over their pre-War peaks. Second World countries such as Korea, Mexico, and Azania grew by at least one-quarter over this period, while most Third World countries saw their populations double. However, the relatively small proportion of the global population living in rapidly-growing states ensured that global population growth was small--the world population rose by only 500 million to just over 2 800 million.
In the century after 2030, population growth in First and Second World countries accelerated rapidly despite the rapid decline of international migration. Rapidly improving standards of living in these countries and sustained pro-natalist policies by their governments boosted once-declining birthrates above long-term replacement levels, while vastly improved medical technologies sharply reduced death rates everywhere. Inside Europe and the South Atlantic region, balances of population shifted, as regions characterized by slow or even negative population growth (Iberia and the eastern Mediterranean in Europe, the Andean and Caribbean states in the South Atlantic) were marginalized relative to rapidly growing areas (Azania, Venezuela, and the Southern Cone in the South Atlantic, northern and western Europe in Europe). Second World countries located outside the two major confederations experienced relatively slow growth often compensated by immigration from their Third World hinterlands--Mexico absorbed millions of Salvadorans, Hondurans, Yucatecans, and Americans over this period, while Azania likwise received immigrants from across southern Africa and Korea had its own pool in its puppet state of Dongbei. Third World countries experienced a rapid of rapid growth in the 2030-2080 period, but stagnant standards of living and the lack of opportunities for large-scale immigration combined to produce stable population levels.
The end of large-scale immigration after 2030 assimilated the trend towards the assimilation of immigrant communities. In the member-states of the South Atlantic Community, and in the major immigrant-receiving states of the Pacific basin (Japan, Korea, Mexico, Australia, and Thailand), immigrants assimilated fairly easily to national influences, leaving few traces of their presence apart from new cuisines, new religions, and broader phenotypes. (Members of the Chinese and Indian diasporas were partly excluded from this trend.) In Europe, the relatively deep integration of the continent allowed many of the more numerous populations to survive, becoming quasi-diasporic--the Francophone diaspora formed by pre-2007 immigration from across Francophone Africa was a notable example, somewhat endogamous because of its distinct racial and religious makeup, as was the Algerian diaspora. Some new diasporas presented themselves on the stage: the Iraqi in the eastern Mediterranean and northern Europe; the Ismaili Bengali diaspora in Asia; the Anglo-American diaspora worldwide; the Russian diaspora in Europe; and so on. In areas badly devastated by the Third World War, ethnic compositions of territories were changed by massive immigration, as Thai settlement dominated mainland Southeast Asia, Tamils and Bengalis resettled Indonesia, Dongbei acquired a strongly Korean character, most former American land west of the Mississippi became Mexican, and Russia (outside of the city-state of Leningrad) devolved into a patchwork of communities of diverse Slavic, Finnic, Turkic, and western European origins.
In the early 22nd century, an increasingly important factor in global demographics was the exodus to space. Although only four million people emigrated before the introduction of stutterwarp (most going to Mars or to various points in cislunar space), these people were disproportionately drawn from the well-educated and upwardly-mobile segments of the major First and Second World nation-states and confederations. The successful establishment of human societies outside of Earth in the Solar System marked an entirely new stage in human development, particularly as some human societies off-Earth (particularly on Mars and in microgravity conditions in the Cerean diaspora) genetically modified their offspring to create literal races adapted to the conditions prevailing off Earth.
GEOPOLITICS
The decline of the League of Nations after its peak of influence in the 1990s may have been inevitable once the outstanding challenges to the world had been dealt with. The League's apolitical nature allowed it to peacefully evolve into a mediating and coordinating body that derived its influence almost entirely from the willingness of its leading member-states to share their power
The European and South Atlantic confederations became truly integrated entities in the early 21st century. None of the member-states of these confederations ceased to exist; indeed, Zulia seceded from Venezuela just as did Tyrol from Austria, while Spain was radically reorganized into a confederation of sovereign states. Some non-state minorities did fade away (Sámi in the Nordic states, Frisians on the shore of the North Sea, various native peoples in Guyana, the subgroups of South Africa's Azanians) but others thrived (Bosniaks in Yugoslavia, Afrikaners in South Africa, Sorbs in Saxony, Mapuche in Chile) and others were created anew (the vast Algerian, Georgian, and Libyan diasporas in "mainland" Europe, the Ethiopian diaspora in the eastern Mediterranean, the Yoruba communities in Brazil, and the American diaspora in both countries. The rounding out of the frontiers of the European and South Atlantic confederations were completed in the last quarter of the 21st century, with Turkish accession to the European Confederation and Mozambican accession to the South Atlantic Community. The societies on the margins of these two blocs in North America and Africa faced various fates, ranging from Mexico's ascent to First World and Great Power status to the utter marginalization of Morocco. States tried to establish preferential links with one or both blocs, drawing upon shares cultural links--West Africa tried to appeal to Europeans and South Americans using (respectively) its Francophone population and its status as source of the African diaspora.
The consolidation of the Pacific basin in the Pacific Rim Alliance from the early 2020s on helped stabilize the devastated Pacific basin region, where international rivalries had precipitated the Third World War that had devastated the world a generation earlier. The structure of the alliance was dominated by the major status quo powers, which sought to preserve the region's stability by establishing high-level cooperation between the region's Great Powers, in a fashion similar to that of the Concert of Europe in the European continent in the half-century after the Napoleonic Wars. The reunification of China simply added a sixth power to this bloc. Australia, unopposed in the South Pacific, set about creating an Australasian federation encompassing New Guinea, Bali, and the Pacific Confederation but dominated by Australian population and wealth; Thailand similarly strengthened the Indochinese Federation. Japan and China established a mutual alliance, as did Korea and Mexico; Mexico also closely cultivated friendly relationships based on migration and trade with China and Thailand. For a time, the crosscutting alliances helped stabilize the region, but in the early 22nd century the growth of mutually competitive and exclusive alliances in the Pacific region and the resurgence of local nationalisms made the Pacific Rim Alliance begin to collapse. By the 2150s, trade and border disputes--on Earth and in space--had taken on an all-time high, and the alliance's Secretariat became nonfunctional.
The Indian Ocean was the largest region excluded from the spheres of influence of the major blocs. The Indian diaspora--present in large numbers in Persia, East Africa, Indonesia, and the Mascarenes--helped knit the area together, as did the smaller Arab and Bengali diasporas. In the end, the Trans-Indian Ocean Bloc made the Indian Ocean littoral states a united entity for the first time since the peak of the British empire in the area in the early 20th century, if a relatively incoherent and weak entity. Other fragmented areas, including central Africa and North America, were not so lucky and saw repeated armed conflicts.
SPACE
In the 21st century, the major manned spacefaring powers that had survived the war--Europe, South America and Japan--began to venture out again. These were soon joined by Mexico, Korea, Australasia and Persia. These programs began with the launch of unmanned satellites--at first communications and Earth-observation satellites, then astronomical-research satellites and long-range probes. The growth of a manned space presence took longer, but by the 2040s ambitious long-range projects by private businesses (including Selfort SA) and a strong popular-culture movement to establish human societies away from Earth in order to ensure the species' survival in the case of another Earthly calamity. As technology developed, new rationales for space colonization--including the mining of helium-3 on Earth's Moon and in the Saturnian system, the exploitation of Europan biological resources, solar-power stations in various cislunar orbits, and tourism--developed. Although space enterprises began as expensive operations which were consistently unprofitable, by the early 22nd century extensive funding by national and confederal governments produced some niche industries (particularly tourism and power exports) which were profitable.
By the time that stutterwarp was developed, almost six million people lived offworld--the Islandia space habitat in L-4 was the single largest concentration, but a quarter-million people lived in the mining and solar-power facilities on Mercury and Earth's Moon. Another million people lived in the rapidly growing Cerean diaspora, with the largest concentrations on the asteroids of Ceres and Vesta and in adjacent habitats but including large populations scattered as far as the Kuiper belt. The largest population, however, was to be found on Mars, which benefitted from the massive funding of the Mars ecopoesis project; Mars' 3.5 million inhabitants, living in four major and several dozen minor colonies, lived on a world which was steadily being transformed into an Earth-like world. This ecopoesis project worked through the modification of the world's climate (primarily orbital mirrors and heat-retaining fluorochlorocarbon compounds), the introduction of water through the guided impacts of Kuiper belt objects and the melting of Mars' polar ice gaps, and the introduction of genetically-engineered life forms to create a skeletal ecology. By the mid-21st century, the ecopoesis project had succeeded in introducing a relatively dense carbon dioxide-dominated atmosphere and large bodies of water to the planets surface, and in creating a relatively temperate climatic belt around the Martian equator, but Mars was still far from being a self-supporting world.
