
[2295-2367  Problems on Earth]

Despite the colonization and population control efforts of the
23rd century, the population stress on planet was insidious with
a purported demographic summary of sixty billion people by the
turn of the century. In order to combat this problem, the U.N.
began a large scale sterilization movement in 2295 combined with
the marketing of propagation rights three years later. Any
children who were found to have been born without proper
processing after the turn of the century were confiscated by
the newly created World Peace Agency. Isolated rebellions against
the policy were quickly put down, and political leaders, many of
them in their 2nd rejuvenation with families of eight or twelve
children, argued that enforcement of these extreme measures were
the only way to quell population growth from bursting the seams
of the world order.

   To compound the crisis already forming, the U.N. initiated a
policy in 2318 of forced deportation and/or cryogenic sleep for
repeated law offenders as a means of humanly screening the
undesirables from society's ranks. In 2329, a group of protesters
broke into a cold berth confinement area in order to try and free
the captives. The government responded by shutting down power to
the sector, thereby killing the occupants in the low berths
before they could be freed. This incident led to the London
uprising of the following year in which an additional 1.3 million
people were arrested and cryogenically frozen.

   In 2315, corporations began responding to the crisis by
building colossal Arks in which humans could travel
cryogenically frozen for hundreds of years before reaching any of
the various settlements promised to be robotically constructed
before their arrival. Over the next five decades, some four
hundred and eighty million people signed on for interstellar
colonization. However, when compared to the size of the overall
problem, the colonization effort seemed more like the proverbial
drop in the bucket. The vast majority of population relief came
due to the U.N. propagation restrictions, unpopular though they
were, and by 2367 the legislation achieved its benchmark goal of
a fifty billion population level with sustained negative growth.

