Prologue, Part I
**This covers the major events of the 21st century which shaped the further emergence of the Third Wave Information Age. I rewrote this a few times and I'm still not thrilled with it -- I think it may be just too long/wordy -- but it should get the general trends across that I'm trying to describe.**
The Energy Crisis
It has been said, to a large degree perceptively, that necessity is the mother of invention. Unfortunately the 'birth' of new technology does not always arrive in time. In 2015 humanity was nearing what various theorists had labeled 'peak oil', the apex of production of petroleum beyond which other fuels would become necessary in order to keep the machinery of the world's economy running. To the man on the street it was well-known that this would mean much higher prices at the pump, but what was not as widely understood was that the cost of everything would go up due to rising fuel costs to produce various products and bring them to market. The recent discoveries of shale oil, increased offshore and Arctic drilling, and periodic other new sources as well as increased refinery capacities delayed the inevitable, but make no mistake the inevitable was coming. It was only a matter of time. New sources of power and fuel were badly needed, and they were not coming fast enough.
Though the eventual need had been apparent for decades, there is something about real economic pain that serves as a great motivator. By the late 2020s the tipping point had been reached, and by 2030 the rise in oil demand, particularly from developing nations, had surpassed the supply, and a sharp rise in worldwide prices almost across the board began. Ongoing research into alternatives, renewable or not, rose drastically as well; but some things cannot be rushed regardless the effort. Meanwhile, most other fields of research were left relatively neglected. Necessity was indeed the driver here; the money followed the need, and very little need was seen in space-based research while the world economy tumbled.
The alarmists had claimed that mankind's lack of foresight in energy issues might be fatal to the species, causing an economic and environmental cataclysm of apocaplyptic proportions. On the other end of the spectrum was the 'ostrich bridgade'-style naive assumption that society would adapt and find the right technologies and solutions when they were required. Both were wrong, and as it usually does, reality fell somewhere in the middle.
The power issue was the easier of the two to resolve. Wind, solar, and especially hydroelectric power had increased slowly over the previous decades, but enough to more than compensate for the increase in demand. Oil had never been a prominent source of electricity: coal, while environmentally damaging, was in somewhat greater supply, though decades only. More importantly, nuclear fission plants returned to prominence, the long-standing objections on environmental and safety grounds largely ignored as the economic necessity of them became more and more important. By the middle of the 21st century, the more plenteous and cleaner process of using thorium instead of uranium to fuel nuclear reactors had allayed most concerns. Nations such as France that had positioned themselves as major users of nuclear power found the transition easiest. Nuclear fusion research continued, and remained a top possibility for a sustainable energy future, but setbacks continued to outpace advances for decades.
Finding alternatives in terms of fuel and transportation proved more difficult. The biggest obstacle was not actually technology itself, but infrastructure. By the early 21st century the capability for hydrogen and solar/electric-powered vehicles was in place, among other possibilities, but the costs and logistics involved were staggering. Transforming entire industries based on over a century of readily available oil in terms of production, distribution, repair, maintenance, new designs and engineering challenges, etc. was a mammoth undertaking. It was here that progress simply did not come fast enough to meet the need, and none of the replacements were quite as convenient.
The hydrogen option was the easiest on the production end, with a combination of electrolysis and any number of power-generating options allowing for relatively inexpensive production of light-weight fuel cells for any number of applications. Unfortunately, infrastructure was another matter and distribution even more difficult, as it typically required 15 times the effort as with traditional oil-based fuels to transport the larger volumes required to market. The combined solar/electric vehicles had a different problem: weather and regular availability of recharging stations made them less viable in many areas, while those with a lot of clear weather and/or dense urban populations resulted in much more success. Various biofuels, derived from sources such as algae, made a small but gradual impact on the market, while propane and natural gas helped prop up the economy but only temporarily, as they accelerated the day when natural gas itself would reach it's peak production point.
The Great Recession, Chaos, & Recovery
The combination of various approaches eventually led the world's leading economies out of long recession, but they had it the easiest as there was enough capital for various tax incentives, research initiatives, and so on to ease the process. With the cost of transportation having risen to painful levels, there were great regional distinctions between what types of fuels were most used; in the majority of cases, it was whatever could be produced locally. Imports were simply priced out of the market by necessity. Many developing nations, having not reached that critical mass, were pushed back into near-Third World status, and the poorest countries in the world had little hope of progression towards a more modern footing under such circumstances. Full-blown regional conflicts erupted in many place; with hope for the future waning, some areas with particularly entrenched regional rivalries devolved into a state of near-constant war with local warlords the only source of real power.
Confidence in the status quo was also badly shaken. The general 'man on the street' opinion was that a major political change was needed: loose coalitions of the nations had proven themselves ineffective in forestalling the meltdown. Those in control of large energy reserves such as OPEC often blustered that they would withdraw from the world market and take care of the own, letting every one else fend for themselves. The very real possibility of another world war was on the table at a few tense moments, but in the end the very globalization that had brought about the rapid depletion of fossil fuel reserves also forestalled any such disaster. Rational heads eventually concluded, albeit narrowly in some instances, that they would lose more than they would ever gain from such actions; the world was interconnected and the energy producers needed the money and manufacturing that other regions of the world provided for them, and vice versa. So the saber was rattled, but always returned to it's sheath in the end.
By 2060, the picture had finally begun to brighten. The majority of the world now operated on at least partly renewable energy, a fact which allowed prices to slowly decline as they gained greater acceptance and market share, making use of efficiencies of scale. In turn, the poorer nations also benefited as what was left of fossil fuel resources such as oil, coal, and natural gas was increasing available to them at gradually more acceptable terms. On the whole, the world had largely weaned itself off from non-renewables, and in so doing entered more fully into the Third Wave.
It was far from a panacea, however. The process had been slow and costly, and would continue to be so for generations.
Fallout
Human society exited the Great Recession much different than it had entered it three decades prior. Some Third Wave trends were greatly accelerated by the economic pressure, others were mitigated or even reversed. Urbanization had been on the decline with more and more people working in a 'virtual office' out of their own home. The virtual office is alive, well, and flourishing, but most large cities grew, reshaped around massive 'arcologies' as large as a city block. These were mostly self-contained subcommunities, with underground manufacturing, various common commercial enterprises on the first few floors, and residential space on the rest of the structure rising above them. At the very top, hydroponic farms provided much of the needed sustenance. Most everyday staples could be produced, if not at the arcology where you live then at one nearby within walking distances. Anything that couldn't be had locally was shipped in via bulk transit; smaller orders were generally prohibitively expensive, so for many items the purchase would be delayed until a sufficiently large local delivery was required by the residents as a whole. Many online-only distributors diversified into more and more varied products in order to economically provide faster service in this environment. With 'technetronic', automated solutions replacing more and more professions that once required human labor, the need for travel was reduced still further and to considerable degree it became a luxury of the upper classes.
Politically speaking, the nation-state was merely a shadow of it's former self. The allegiance of some was to ideology, but to most it was the economic needs of it's immediate region that held sway. An entire generation had grown up in a world filled with uncertainty, rapid change, and ample evidence that the national boundaries no longer made sense. They weren't big enough to tackle the truly global problems that humanity faced, nor were they agile enough to be responsive to local needs. It was in this environment that the International Research Council(IRC) was formed, an agency independent of the UN or any other governing body that was tasked with finding scientific and technological answers to any existing or emerging issues of global importance. Though the IRC was formed with a quite modest annual operating budget and had no direct political authority, it was considered to have vital importance and it's pronouncements were heavily weighed. The advance of science has never been cheap, but increasingly more and more resources were required, and the importance of continued advance had never been more readily apparent.
Microgravity and other space-based research were not the primary driving force in these days, but it was in the late 60s that they began to be revisited as significant topics. Much advancement in areas such as physics, superconductivity, and the very nature of matter itself was either more difficult or completely impossible in a higher-gravity environment such as that on Earth. The various iterations of space stations had long been abandoned, and global spending on space-based efforts had been largely limited to small satellites for communications purposes during the recession. The best scientific minds on the planet had been dedicated to matters of environmental, power generation, fuel production, and economic theory for so long that little progress had been made in these fields -- but the IRC maintained they were a necessary part of mankind's future. Put in simple terms, space was what was next. There were few frontiers left on the Earth itself that were not explored, but every time a new probe was sent, whether to the Sun or Mars or the outer reaches of the solar system, new and surprising things were discovered.
The more that was learned, the more obvious it became that we knew nothing.