A Space Apocolypse Discussion

[PTTG]

Let's get this out of the way: It's Fallout plus The Stand minus magic IN SPACE!

Now then.

Consider a hypothetical future. Let's advance time a hundred years, and we'll assume a moderate level of safetech. No brain uploading (excluding, perhaps, the lab, and even then it's crude), no explicit superscience at all. Our miracles for this setting - all science fiction needs a few - are mainly enhanced fusion and matured materials science.

We'll call this TL 8+1 to distinguish it from GURPS' standard TL 9 assumptions, but it's safe to say that it's most like TL 9.

Population growth continues and stabilizes around 12 billion, still climbing. Humans have settled throughout the solar system, lifted by space elevators and propelled by something like inertial fusion drives or torches. Let's say that H3 is used for our miracle fusion reactors and it's plentiful in asteroids, so there's a large population in the asteroid belt and several major bases on Mars to support them (lower delta-v requirements than Earth). The Jovian moons have permanent research bases and maybe a thousand people there full-time. All in all, a cautiously optimistic space-flight fan's dream.

Now, let's add the final touch. Given 12 billion individuals, the odds that one of them are going to be a one-in-ten-billion*, honest-to-god, genius psychopath sociopath misanthrope is... about 70%. So let's assume that this guy exists. We can ignore his motivations.

Suppose he manages to convince everyone he's sane (he's one-in-ten-billion, he gets to be lucky). He goes to med school. Eventually gets access to a desktop gene sequencer (a bit of a bio-science miracle, but I think it's reasonable enough to call hard science) and makes, eh, 20 distinct strains of super-disease** and disperses them throughout the solar system. He defeats or subverts whatever security system might exist to counteract this because he's one in 10G people.

So we've killed off 98% of the population. Even the best psychopath isn't perfect, so we can assume that isolated space communities are more likely to be either totally spared or totally killed, while Earth and Mars (and Ceres and Luna) had no hope of containing it.

Skip forward 60 years.

We have a harsh world, one where a working spaceship costs practically nothing (if you don't care about decontaminating it), but a team of good, skilled slaves (well, indentured servants) is hard to beat. The perfect conditions for boarding parties of slavers and pirates, exploring ruined spaceport tunnels in the jungles of old LA, running guns to the Free Luna Republic, stepping through the shattered dome of Ares Colony into a thriving forest of engineered flora, or claim-jumping a wealthy H3 deposit out in the belt.

Player Characters are going to be diverse and high point value. They need Spacer unless this is their first trip out of the gravity well. (Maybe the elevators needed regular maintenance, which kind of fell behind schedule when the entire work team was bubonicing it up.) No matter who they are, they are going to be more self-reliant than us savages, skilled with repairing the tech they have and with defending themselves from people who want to take it. That said, there's plenty of room for specialization, and a team of mercenaries with a couple techs and a medic could find themselves at a disadvantage to a merchant, his pilot, two stevedores, and a priest when it comes to getting suspicious, cultish Ceresans to turn over an old data file you need to give to this guy in a bar who knows a lady in Madrid Free Zone who can get you in contact with the cousin of the guy who knows how to unlock this crate you got that you're SURE is full of elevator-grade carbon filament, and you know how much THAT stuff's worth!

P.S.: The reason the psychopath didn't ram a ship into earth at moderate relativistic velocities (besides the fact that it would be pretty tough even with the miracles we're giving this setting) is because he likes the biosphere. Maybe that's his main goal, maybe not, but he didn't want to destroy earth, just humans.

P.P.S: Fine. It's The Expanse minus spoilers times The Stand minus Magic. Plus the root of Fallout.

*Selected randomly. Sounds pretty unlikely.
**High contagiousness, long incubation, extremely high fatality. Airborne HIV? Spanish Flu.0? Since there's several of them and LOTS of starting points, I imagine it would be hard to stop even if you knew it was coming.