Nations of Humanity

Okay so I was going to post the final part of my Two Americas project, but I lost the file that had my history for that part (I keep them all separate). So this was going to be the epilogue for the project after the finale, but I find I keep tweaking it over and over and I'm tired of it so I'm posting this before the finale, since I'm still looking for where I put it.

Human civilization has reached a zenith, marking a milestone that we ourselves could accomplish if we quit acting like a bunch of children running in little gangs on a playground. They have launched a craft capable of traveling faster than the speed of light, and established a human presence in the closest system to us, Alpha Centauri; on this, the eve (or day, in some places) of the new year 3100. Mankind has for over seven centuries had a unified space exploration initiative, although a few independent nations refuse to contribute. In mere centuries that accomplished on Mars and Venus what took nature nearly four billion years on Earth. They have been completely terraformed, and a little over 18 billion humans live in the solar system. Phobos and Deimos, being used as anchors for space elevators in the American Martian States have been world-housed; that is to say a kind of greenhouse has been built around the entire moons to trap in atmosphere and heat. They are like worlds the size of countries, and they are not the last. Ganymede and Titan are paraterraformed, with Ganymede having an atmosphere constantly replenished by industry. Titan hosts many "bubble cities" interconnected by underground maglev trains. Similar efforts are taking place on various moons of Jupiter and Saturn's moon Enceladus, although they are subsurface rather than bubbled cities.

Communism and imperialism are for the most parts relics of the past, although in Russia and China there are growing neo-imperialist movements focusing on nationalistic space colonization rather than conquest (although similar movements on Venus are proving to be the opposite). The Russians and Chinese are expanding their empires in the solar system, and the Global Earth Space Institute have all kinds of adventures dealing with them. Both Mars and Venus* have their own nations with their own distinct cultures, many of which have been developing over centuries. Some even have their own unique languages, and many have their own planetary dialects of common Earth languages. There are even unique religions and sects to some of the planets, such as the interesting version of Islam practiced in Islamic Commonwealth members on Venus. The lunar colonies have been largely abandoned, with the exception of those under the control of Russia and China respectively. They have been replaced by mostly automated mines to gather helium-3 to fuel Earth's ever growing energy demands. Interplanetary trade has created economies unlike those on the Earth we know. Almost nobody goes hungry, and there hasn't been a recorded instance of poverty in over a century anywhere in the solar system. That isn't to say that it's a paradise, plenty are poor and some are still homeless, but there is no such thing as a "third world" country (except the ones on Earth, but that's just semantics ).

*An interesting little fact, if you notice East and West Babyl appear to be on the wrong sides. But Venus rotates the opposite way of Earth, and since East and West are determined by the direction of the suns movement across the sky they are backwards on Venus.