
[2212-2262  Conquest of the Solar System]

With the successful completion of the 1st fifty year plan,
industry began to get heavily involved in space interests,
particularly in asteroid mining and shuttle services. Thus, when
it came time to draw the 2nd fifty-year plan in 2212, the U.N.
conferred heavily with business leaders to form an opinion on
what was possible and what was financially feasible. At the 2212
conference, the Aster Corporation unveiled its prospects for the
construction the Von Neumann Robotic Miner. Once complete, the
spacecraft would be capable of self-replication, it's sole
purpose to find mineral deposits among the asteroids, mine them,
and reproduce itself. By 2220, the first VNRM set sail for the
belt, and within four decades, hundreds of the miners existed,
plying the asteroids for minerals which manned vessels could
later find neatly deposited with a homing beacon and refine in
the deep of space.

   Planetary population stress, however, proved to become an even
more serious issue than the plundering of the belt. Despite the
numerous microworlds and planetary settlements created during the
first fifty-year plan, the Terran population pressures were more
evident than ever, and by 2212 every nation on the globe
practiced some variety of population control. It was therefore
critical that some form of large-scale terraforming be undertaken
by the world community. Again, the corporations came to the
rescue with a number of exotic ideas involving the biological
terraformation of Mars, Venus, and Titan. Forming into a
cooperative combine latter to be known as the Solar Planetary
Trust Corporation, these companies demanded exorbitant property
rights on the planets to be terraformed, rights which bordered on
the creation of sovereign states beyond the United Nations'
traditional jurisdiction. With the world community's grudging
acquiescence in 2217, the long process toward terraformation was
begun.

