Humanity is back.
Once upon a time, in a galaxy far away, there was a planet called earth. With an ever-changing surface and a multitude of climates and ecosystems, it was an ecological paradise. It's cool, blue oceans were teeming with fish and the land was bustling with grazing herds. Earth had six continents- Eurasia, Africa, Australasia, Antarctica, North America and South America. They were all full of life of some sort, and life even managed to survive in the deserts of Northern Africa and the frozen wastes of Antarctica.
In the tropical wilderness of Eastern Africa, a slow yet monumental change was happening. The earth's constantly changing weather patterns had shifted again and less rain was being dumped in the lush forests of Eastern Africa. As the forests wilted and died in the dryness, grasses flourished and soon huge herds of grazing herbivores such as zebra and antelope moved into Eastern Africa to graze on the abundant grass. It was a change that had happened many times before, and as a result grazing herds of all different types, from scaly reptiles to hairy mammals, had evolved to move around and make the most of the wet season, when grass grew abundantly. The zebra and antelope had also been followed by lions and hyenas, pack-hunting carnivores that feasted on their flesh and kept their numbers in check. Another ecosystem had been created.
Unfortunately, many creatures that were accustomed to the rainforest were faced with two choices- adapt or die. Giraffes, who had been browsing in the rainforest's canopy for millennia, were forced to grow taller and feed off the spiny acacia trees that dotted the dry grasslands. They adapted, and thus thrived in the new ecosystem. Other creatures, however were not as lucky. There were creatures called apes that climbed in the trees as they foraged for food. Big-brained, omnivorous and with dexterous digits, the apes were adaptable creatures. When the East African apes were faced with the choice to either adapt or die, they had more than two solutions. Some receded with the forest and ended up stuck in the forested highlands or the Jungles of Central Africa, some simply stayed and died, and some migrated away immediately.
Out of all of the apes that stayed and died there was one ape that hadn't died yet. Maybe it was dumb luck or maybe it could exploit a wider range of food sources, but it had survived nevertheless. Eventually the new conditions were proving to be too much for the ape, and it was forced to adapt even more. It had to get out of the trees and walk in the dangerous grasslands of Africa. At first the ape walked on all fours using its knuckles, but eventually it mustered the strength to walk on its hind limbs. Unlike the theropod dinosaurs before it, who walked on their hind legs in a horizontal position, the special ape walked vertically. In other words, it could walk upright.
With its taller body able to loose heat quicker and have a better view over the tall grass, the special ape thrived. Over generations it changed very slightly, but many generations made the great changes that were its growing brain and increasingly upright stance. Predators were a problem though. When trying to fend them off, it became clear that the special apes could not fling their shit at enemies like their forebearers did to solve problems. They needed something harder and more painful, so they decided to throw stones.
Over many generations the special apes were starting to lose their hair. It was simply too hot to have shaggy hair on the African grasslands, and like the hippopotamus they became largely hairless. They also found that banging rocks together could break pieces of them off and create sharp edges. These sharp rocks made useful weapons, and their ability to cut skin and flesh made the now hairless apes feared among the predators of the African grasslands. The apes had also learned of a nutritious food source called meat. By scaring animals away from the carcasses of the grazing animals, they were able to cut pieces of meat off with their sharp tools and eat the protein-rich meat. Over many generations, this rich food fuelled brain growth among the hairless apes, which in turn allowed them to invent better tools. The hairless apes now had enough intelligence that they didn't need claws, fangs or armour, as they could make tools that were just as deadly.
When the wet season began in the African grasslands, thunder would strike the dry grass before rainstorms. The intense heat of the thunder would set the grass alight, and fire would spread across the tall grass like... well... wildfire. The inquisitive hairless apes soon tamed the fire, and they managed to keep it burning with wood. Fire was a valuable tool for these intelligent creatures, and rather coincidentally they discovered a revelation.
If you banged two flint rocks together you could create heat. This heat would give off a spark not unlike a tiny thunderbolt, and if it hit something flammable it could start a fire. This means that the hairless apes could now light their own fires whenever they wanted to if they had flint, and luckily for them flint was a very common rock.
Soon clans of hairless apes were spreading across Africa and Southern Asia. Their stance was now fully erect and they were starting to speak in a different way. Instead of communicating like apes, they used combinations of sounds to create things called words. Each word had a different meaning, and a whole sentence of them could tell a story. A sentence could tell where food was, how to make a certain tool or even let a tribe know what happened to Johnny after that bear carried him away.
They created long, sharp stone-tipped sticks called spears, they tied blades to sticks to make axes, and they even used rubbery substances tied to sticks to create sling shots and bows. All knowledge collected by an individual was passed down through the generations using words and humans had even learned how to make their meat easy to digest. You see, they simply heated it up with some fire and cooked it to make it tastier and easier to process. The hairless apes were now eating softer foods, meaning that their appendixes were shrinking and their jaws weren't as strong as they used to be. That was no problem, though. The hairless apes knew how to survive.
Clans and tribes of them spread out across the world and soon they were present on all of Earth's continents except for Antarctica. They were also hunting large, slow-breeding animals, causing a wave of extinctions wherever they went. The hairless apes now had a sizeable affect on the world's biosphere.
In North America, Asia and Europe, ice sheets grew into the temperate regions. The Earth cooled down and entered an ice age. The hairless apes in higher latitudes were now faced with freezing temperatures and blizzards, but that didn't kill them off. They simply wrapped themselves in the fur of their dead prey, and this new "clothing" kept them warm. The hairless apes were now the masters of adaptation, as they could adapt over very short time periods by using tools.
Many different species of humans evolved in the wide variety of climates that earth had to offer, but eventually a species known as Homo Sapiens eradicated the others. They were the most intelligent of the bunch, and even after gaining world domination they wouldn't stop moving forward.
The hairless apes would often gather fruits and roots from the plants in the forest for eating. Homo Sapiens, however, soon developed a convenient solution. A group of Homo Sapient in the Fertile Crescent, a triangle of fertile land Stretching from Mesopotamia to Turkey to Egypt, had learned to grow their own edible plants. They could grow more than what would naturally grow, and soon their populations boomed with their new food source. They also domesticated grazing animals such as Bovines for breeding and eating and they kept wolves to help them with hunting. Vast fields of edible plants and grazing pasture for domesticated animals made the human population boom even more. The domestication of other lifeforms soon spread around the world, and there was soon a surplus of food. With more food, people could spend less time gathering and hunting and they could dedicate themselves to art, science and other fields of interest that were coming into existence. In Egypt and Mesopotamia, tribes and clans came together to form Nations. These nations were simply organisations that made laws, governed the people and claimed land. Pharaohs and kings would govern the first nations, and later a government system called a republic would give the people more say.
Ever since their ancestors started flinging their shit at each other, It became clear that humans were violent creatures. Eventually nations, which fought over the most fertile lands, sent out huge armies of weapon wielding hairless apes to fight for their nations. Eventually the hairless apes began mixing metals, melting metals and making metal tools and weapons, allowing for swords, shields and armour. In addition to becoming better fighters, the apes had become better lovers, with beautiful forms of music and poetry being developed. Science enabled humanity to discover how the world worked, and it also allowed them to exploit these systems. They created an explosive powder for firing projectiles and making colourful displays in the night sky, they made new elements and they even managed to split the atom. Eventually they created computing systems that advanced in intelligence exponentially.
Soon the humans were powering things with electricity and oil, creating more and more powerful technology. These things were now called "machines" and profit-making factories made many machines for the public to use.
Soon the machines rivalled humanity in intelligence, and the factories were pumping out noxious clouds of smoke. These clouds contained carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas, and they warmed the planet. Bigger storms and melting ice sheets became commonplace as humanity struggled to keep up with the changes. Low lying areas, places where billions lived and much of the world's food was farmed, faced a deadly threat. The ice sheets in the polar regions were melting in the warmer climate, sending massive amounts of water gushing back into the ocean. Sea levels were raised as a result.
Also, the Homo Sapiens' ability to split the atom was a great danger. Even though nuclear power created cheap, free energy, many of the larger nations possessed explosive atomic weapons that could be used on their enemies. Eventually, when the all-important oil resources had been largely depleted, nations fought for oil and the risk of nuclear attacks grew frighteningly high.
the hairless apes were producing more waste than ever before, and it was beginning to dump it in the Earth's waterways and oceans. Toxic chemicals from manufacturing also leaked into the water, turning many rivers into a toxic brew of pollution. Many species of aquatic creatures went entirely extinct. They also cut down trees and cleared land for housing and farming, destroying exotic ecosystems and causing even more extinctions. The warming earth soon turned the equatorial regions into hot deserts, and the oil soon ran out. Coastal farmland was obliterated by the rising tides, and the Homo Sapiens' grip on earth was starting to loosen as the environment spiralled out of control.
The Homo Sapiens soon turned the earth into a desert. They had caused a mass extinction, something that had only happened 5 times before in the history of their world, and they were the first species to cause such an event. Eventually resources became very scarce, and many nations were going without them. Many regions collapsed into poverty, war and anarchy, while others' governments jealously hoarded the resources while their citizens lived near starvation. Eventually, when tensions became too much, the Homo Sapiens unleashed their atomic weapons.
They nearly obliterated themselves in an atomic hellfire. Their population plummeted from several billion to several million, and those last tortured souls were forced to wander the radioactive wastelands just to survive. Not even the Homo Sapiens could adapt to these hellish conditions, and after a few thousand years the last one died. His emaciated body would never be found, but there would be nobody to find him anyway.
After the hairless ape's extinction, the Earth's lifeforms managed to recover. The flora and fauna after the mass extinction largely consisted of insects, crows, rodents, flowering weeds, creeper vines, pollution-resistant fish and rodent-eating snakes, but through the slow process of evolution they evolved into many different forms. When the radioactivity died down, there was a massive radiation (Heh heh heh) of life comparable to the Cambrian Explosion. Vines such as kudzu began climbing on top of eachother, producing tree-esque dogpiles of greenery, and weeds grew to gargantuan sizes. Some crows became dangerous flightless predators, and some rodents burrowed into the ground to access the weed's roots. Soon the first forests had formed and grass spread across the ground once more. Fish repopulated the rivers and new species of phytoplankton evolved to replace the extinct types.
The hairless apes may have technically been extinct (nobody was alive), but they weren't dead. Just sleeping. You see, several million humans, along with cloneable DNA samples of their crops and livestock, were cryogenically preserved and shipped off into space. Every nation had sent out a fleet carrying the smartest, strongest and the best of its citizens to one day repopulate the earth and not repeat the mistakes that the hairless apes had once committed. This mass evacuation was called Operation Last Resort, and the name was quite fitting. It had saved humanity.
After 250 million years of frozen slumber, the many cryogenic storage ships scattered across the solar system finally managed to start up their immensely powerful software. The ships were cold and the only energy they got was from now disintegrating solar panels, so after system checks it became clear that they needed to return to earth now. Several probes were sent out from the ships, and it had become clear that earth had changed- It had recovered, but it had also gone through several mass extinctions and massive amounts of geological upheaval. This, of course, was natural for earth, and changes such as these were the ones that had caused the hairless apes to appear. If they could survive back then, they could survive now.
The ships began to head towards earth with whatever power they had left. Like a school of now-extinct salmon rushing upstream, many weakened and failed on their trips, with power failures and collisions with asteroids claiming countless frozen lives. Some tried to refuel on earth's former colony on Mars, but it had been wiped out by a massive asteroid strike many years ago. Other ships were severely damaged and burned up when entering earth's atmosphere. In the end, only a handful of ships managed to reach the bizarre, alien planet that was once their earth.
Even a view of earth from space showed that it had changed. much of China, which was once the most populous nation on earth, was sandwiched in the middle of a massive continent. The earth's landmasses had been drawn together and had created a supercontinent, just like the Pangea of old. The Pacific had closed, the Mediterranean had become mighty mountains that had been weathered into scrubby highlands and the former Arctic ocean was a land of mountains and a massive ice sheet that stretched from Newfoundland to France.
It is now the year 0 AR (after return), and the first ships are landing on earth's supercontinent. You, the commander of one of the lucky few ships to survive, have the rare choice of what path your new nation will take. Will it collapse into disorder and be reclaimed by the ever-changing earth? Will it abuse the earth and suffocate itself under a cloud of pollution and death? Or will it rise to become the greatest civilisation on earth? It's all YOUR choice, and I hope you choose your path wisely. You wouldn't want to doom humanity, would you?
NOTES:
*You have future technology, but it is in short supply. While a few hundred trained men might have gauss rifles, everyone else is probably going to be armed with swords, bows and other mideival technology.
*You aren't going to have glittering cities. Considering the fact that you've crashed a ship on earth and your technology is little more than solar pannels and futuristic guns, prepare to build your own housing.
*It's a cruel, cruel world out there, and most people don't want to be eaten by flightless crows. They're going to seek protection in a lord's manor, so expect some form of neo-feudalism to take hold.
*If neo-feudalism isn't your style, you can always go techno-tribal. If you're lucky you might have a means of nomadic transportation (solar dune buggies?), and then you just need the weapons and resources to stay alive.
*For the love of god, don't start in the middle of a desert. That's just stupid. I'd suggest you start in a breadbasket like Antarctica, Eastern North America, Southeast Asia, Northern Lemura, or South Africa.
*get creative. Make a map of your nation's provinces if you like, and I might divide it into those divisions on the map.
*be prepared. Natural disasters can strike at any time.
*Sebtopiaris is my Co-Op!
RULES:
No spamming
No godmodding
No trolling
No flaming/flamebaiting
Be realistic
Don't forget to have fun!
- Code: Select all
APP:
[b]Nation/faction name:[/b]
[b]location:[/b]
[b]Population (no more than 50,000):[/b]
[b]five cloned crop/livestock species:[/b]
[b]five starting technologies:[/b]
[b]culture:[/b]
[b]objectives in this RP:[/b]
[b]Anything else:[/b]
GEOGRAPHICAL MAP OF PANGEA RENATUS: http://i.imgur.com/I6VBY8T.png[/quote]
Sebtopiaris made the OP and the Original RP!
IC:http://forum.nationstates.net/viewtopic.php?f=31&t=294055
You kid are amazing. 
