A Lesson to Learn

 

        Planet earth has seen many changes in its 4.5 billion years of existence; Ice ages, impacts from giant asteroids, mass volcano eruptions. It has housed thousands of different creatures and has lost just as many. One thing though has always stayed constant, and that is the Earth itself. It bounces back from whatever happens to it. Or so was thought.

        It is the year 2088,(1) the arctic ice cap has melted entirely and the rest of the world has been seeing record droughts. Many of the humans in third world countries have started to drop like flies. All the world superpowers have been trying to find a way to help fix the environment but it’s too late. Andrew Carson, a multi billionaire environmental scientist has known about the Earth’s rapid decline, and tried to warn everyone but no one listened to him. He wasn’t a normal scientist though. And he was not trying to warn everyone about global warming caused. Everyone thought that CO2 and greenhouse gasses were causing this rising temperature and changing climates but Andrew knew. It was not humans causing this, but the earth itself. Andrew knew that the earth has natural cooling and heating cycles,(3) such as the multiple different ice ages the earth has had. This time is unique though. Humans took for granted what they had, they chopped down their forests, polluted their water and destroyed the chemical makeup of the atmosphere. Causing this acceleration in global warming.This warming would soon get rid of the human race,(4) just as a fever kills off whatever virus is attacking the human body.

        After no one listened to Andrew Carson he decided to take action to try and save his family and others. He along with a few friends funded a new spacecraft(2) which would get them off earth before it was too late. Sea level was rising and soon the land that was still dry would be too hot and barren from the heat that earth could not hold life anymore. Andrew and his group of associates gathered DNA from thousands of different creatures, their plan was to leave earth, enter an orbit of earth then once all was ready enter a cryosleep for a certain amount of years then wake up 100 years later to hopefully a renewed earth and reintroduce everything back to earth through cloning.

In the year 2095 it happened, the ice on both poles had melted completely, much of the land that used to be was now underwater,(5) global unrest was at an all time high as hundreds and thousands of people died every day from heat, starvation, and thirst. Now was the time to leave. The average temperature had risen to 88 degrees, 31 degrees higher than it was in 2014. Much of the world was inhospitable and the only places that were able to support life were overcrowded with astounding crime rates. Governments had fallen apart and the world was in chaos. Andrew and his remaining associates and family launched into space. Quickly slipping into cryosleep after setting up an orbit of the earth.(8) 20 years after their launch life on earth ceased to exist.

That was not the end of the record heats. Earth turned into a molten wasteland,with average heats well into the 100’s. No life could be found and it stayed this way for 40 years. Then one day a volcano erupted 5 times the size of the eruption of mount Tambora in indonesia.(7) This cast so much ash and aerosols into the atmosphere that it acted as a shield against the sun, which blocked some of the energy the earth would gain from the sun. This loss of energy led to a drop in the temperature by about 15 degrees celsius or 59 degrees fahrenheit. The ash cloud lasted 5 years  and resulted in a small ice age. The north and south poles soon regained their ice caps and the earth once again became habitable.

It had been over 65 years that Andrew his family and associates had been in cryosleep. They had woken up every year for new years to celebrate but besides that most of them stayed asleep through it. Now was the hard part. After making sure it was safe to land their ship, which they nicknamed the Ark, they had the responsibility of reintroducing all the creatures and plants to the world through cloning. They had learned their lesson. Never again would the human race take for granted the perfect planet they had. From then on pollution was kept as low as possible to make for a greener earth.