The World, Circa 2057

The actual year of the world is likely not 2057 AD, though it is what Survivor claims. Years do not matter to those left, as the only thing that does matter is survival. What follows is a physical and historical description of the world as it is in these years, based as one looking back millenia from now might see it, should humanity return. By no means is all information accurate.

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In the year 2012 AD, during the Summer Olympics in London, a small band of Islamic terrorists detonated five bombs simultaneously in the athlete's village. Yet these bombs were not simple explosive devices, but dirty bombs - radiation soon spread throughout Great Britain's capital city. Accusing the nations of the Middle East, Europe declared war. Surprisingly, the Middle East had a vast stock of nuclear weapons.

In the years that followed, England was reduced to molten glass, and much of Europe and the Middle East was destroyed. However, six years into the war, charismatic leader by the name of William O'Conner rose from the rubble that was his homeland of Ireland. He united the Irish, and soon all of Europe united under his banner. Gradually, through peaceful and diplomatic tongues, O'Conner rose as the leader of the world.

O'Conner's charismatic manner managed to sway nearly 97% of the world to join his nation, now known as the World Union of Nations. He only failed to gather a few tribes in Africa, South America, and the Arctic. As a precautionary measure, all armies were disbanded, and atomic weapons were disposed of by sending them to the moon.

O'Conner managed to rebuild the world to greater glory than before the war. For some three years, humanity worked extraordinarily hard to rebuild, and the golden age lasted for only two years.

No one suspected that an alien invasion was imminent. Fossilized bacteria had been found in the polar ice caps of Mars, but no contact with a sentient race had been established. But sure enough, the kryons came, and humanity was ill-prepared. The war was brief, by some estimates lasting only 4 months. Most lost track of time, for the aliens began by detonating EMPs on major cities, destroying much of the electronics that kept the world running. Only one city, Beijing, was spared, and was instead used as a testing ground for a positron bomb, which completely ripped the city into its composite elements.

When the war was over, Earth, which had been growing close to just one supercontinental city, was a huge mass of molten glass. Few people survived the invasion, and those that did lived in perpetual fear of the kryons returning.

Many of the survivors died of radiation poisoning in the following years, and the radiation caused mutations in others. Animals, too, were often the victims of the radiation.

In the end, the horrors of the post-war era drew many people to turn to savagery, and very, very few people still held to sanity. Most people formed small tribes devoted entirely to the gathering of food and the fighting of other tribes.

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The geography of the world remains mostly the same as in the pre-war period. All cities have been reduced to glass fields, except for Beijing.

Beijing, instead, was the target of the kryon's experimental positron bomb. Using large amounts of highly-radioactive isotopes of various actinides, the bomb released massive numbers of the positron antiparticle into the city. These cancelled out the electrons in the city, destroying chemical bombs and completely ripping the city into its composite elements. As such, the chemical structure of the atmosphere was changed upon the bombing. The kryons had been planning on detonating more bombs, but the bombing occurred in the Fourth Month, and there was little reason to detonate more.

As it happens, slightly after the invasion, the magnetic fields of the Earth began changing. This was unrelated to the invasion itself, rather it was a natural occurrence, which has been documented as happening in the prehistoric past. The field simply disappeared, and as such the world was left with little protection from solar wind. Auroras became nightly occurrences throughout all parts of the world, and compasses ceased to work, disrupting the usefulness of surviving maps.

Enough heat was generated from kryon atomic weapons tests that the average global temperature rose by 2^oF, which resulted in the melting of much of the polar ice caps. Low-lying regions were destroyed, however some areas that would have been expected to flood did not, such as the region formerly known as New York City. In this instance, it was caused by the construction of flood walls, meant to prevent against global warming. The rising temperatures also turned many of Earth's remaining fields into desert wastelands.

In the end, the world turned into what enviromentalists had been preaching about for decades, though not due to human error but by an alien invasion. And the situation was likely only to get worse.