I saw the image above on Reddit, it’s a picture of the World Trade Centre after the events of September 11th 2001, taken by the only American not on earth and I had a story idea.
What if the threat of impending nuclear war or some other catastrophe has lead the UN or some other Global body to take representatives of each and every Nation and put them in space for safe keeping? Orbiting in a space station are 2 people from each and every Nation on Earth, or maybe just the ambassadors to the UN of each member state?
The inevitable happens and all human kind on Earth are wiped out, the people on the space station are the last survivors of a dying species.
What would happen?
An alternative would be for them to be safely stowed at an “unknown” location under the sea, like the recently revealed DARPA project.
Alternatively the UN might have “set aside” a cross section of Humanity for safe keeping, either underwater, in space, of underground. These people would have had regular contact with the surface to keep them up to date with the happenings, but their goal was to be a disaster recovery backup for humanity, isolated from any natural or un-natural disasters or disease.
What are these people’s lives like? What happens when the signal from Earth suddenly goes down?
What kind of people are these people?
You’d have to have people trained as builders and farmers as well as scientists and engineers. Politicians
How Many people are there?
Assuming they have been down there for a few generations, you’d need to have a large enough population to prevent inbreeding being an issue.
How would you train them?
If the containment is to last several generations how do you train them? Training people in engineering and science is easy enough, at least in the theory, but how do you train farmers and carpenters who are trapped underground/in space/underwater without fields to farm and wood to work on?
When they eventually come out do they know what they are doing?
How long will they have stayed away?
Are there actually other survivors who don’t know about this program?
I think my thought track is heading away from the original premise and going towards a Fallout type situation where survivors of a nuclear war live in a vault, but I think the key difference is that these people don’t start out as “Survivors” they are a disaster recovery backup for humanity, akin to the Seed Vault in Svalbard but for people rather than plants.
I’ll maybe post some more thoughts here once I’ve had a chance to incubate the idea…