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The knowledge of the desolate
Photo from PxHere
In the years leading up to WW II, scientists and military explorers received funds from their respective governments to carry out expeditions into earth's forbidding polar regions. They began to map out land and frozen masses and find passageways through the icy waterways and over the mountainous passes of the stark terrain. However, it was not until after that war that any significant scientific research began. The United States and the Soviet Union were now world superpowers, and they were constantly competing with one another over scientific discoveries or advancements. It was no different for their forays into these forbidding territories. Each was determined to one-up and outdo the other in scientific findings, and they rarely cooperated on anything.
At first, the information coming back to the United States Government from these regions was not unexpected or even that interesting. But, as teams began to take core samples from the layers of snow and packed ice, the analysis started to ring alarm bells. This new and shocking data caused secret meetings to be held behind closed doors deep within the Pentagon and the various alphabet agencies of the Federal Government.
A lot of knowledge was gained from these expeditions, and some of it would certainly help with our understanding of weather and other natural occurrences. However, the most shocking takeaway was that extinction-level events happened a lot more often than anyone had suspected. The worst news was that the ice cores revealed that these extinction events happen regularly, approximately every six thousand years, and we were fast approaching the six thousandth year since the last event.
The details of what had been learned from this new data had been declared top secret and filed away. Cover stories were initiated to handle any information leaked by the expedition members before it was deemed too sensitive to release to the public, especially to the USSR. But it was soon discovered that the Soviets had also conducted expeditions and drilled their own ice cores and had come to the same conclusions.
More secret meetings between Nations were held, and a multilayered master plan was hatched to save civilization from a disaster they knew was coming. Yet, they still had little idea about what the cause of the coming disaster could be attributed to. There were many theories but little evidence to support any single possibility. The planners thus concluded that they must try to account for each view and prepare for every plausible scenario in hopes that one or more of their plans would succeed and save mankind from extinction.
The next big hurdle would be over how to pay for the drastic measures needed, and it was critical to determine as precise a timeline as possible to budget and prioritize these plans. It was decided that the only way the public would accept the burden of these expensive preparations and still be kept in the dark about what was coming would be if their lives depended on it. The population needed something else to be afraid of, which could be used to generate years of almost unlimited funding. They would need something to justify millions of man-hours of labor by a frightened and willing workforce. This then became the beginning of the great cold war between these two superpowers with its threat of nuclear annihilation. This provided the excuse to build elaborate, well-stocked, and expensive underground shelters worldwide, and it birthed the space race. Billed as a matter of pride for the Nations people, in reality, the space race was simply a bid by the planners to learn if people could escape to the moon or some other planet to avoid a catastrophe.
Somewhere along the way, It was determined that the world had between sixty and eighty years to prepare, so they set their sights on the year 2024 to complete the preparations. Trillions of dollars worth of resources and labor from thousands of corporations, government agencies, and military units began work immediately. During all of these massive preparations, the people cowered at the news of nuclear buildups and were terrorized by the constant threat of war while their children grew up learning to duck and cover for fear of atomic bombs.
Men walked on the moon, so they say, and the people eventually grew weary of the constant threat of war. So the tactics of the elite planners changed, the Soviet threat was dismantled, and a new era of cooperation began. It was discovered that the people didn't care how much money the Governments wasted as long as they had plenty of food for their families and affordable entertainment beamed into their homes. The work continued to progress, and citizens were distracted by politics, sports, and scandals of all flavors. They were kept worried about the future through tactical "Terrorist" attacks. Terrorism then was used to justify more military overspending, which was diverted to preparations. Stories of visitors from outer space and such evidence as crop circles provided cover for continued space development and exploration. More and more essential people were let in on the truth. But billions of people were just living their lives, never looking for that truth. Most people were happy with their distractions of life and the occasional staged mysterious events, which took their attention away from what was happening behind the scenes.
It was realized early on that it would be impossible to provide space to save everyone, and in-depth ethical discussions were held to decide who would receive the chance to enter the shelters and live and who would be left to find a way to survive on their own.
No method of a selection process ever received unanimous approval until 2005. Before that time, every government formulated a plan that best suited their culture and moral mindset. But as Internet technology matured and the idea of social media took shape, a young technician with training in psychology came forward and proposed a new idea. Thus it was decided to utilize social media to gather intel on populations worldwide. By doing so, they could determine who would be most suited to survive the apocalypse and who was skilled enough to be an asset during the rebuilding of civilization.
To accomplish this, every possible trait and skill was considered, and hundreds of scenarios were tested until, at last, they had a near-flawless algorithm to help achieve their goal. This algorism would run in the background and glean the personal information, schools attended, hands-on training, health, DNA purity, and work history of every connected citizen of the world. But, most importantly, a psychological profile was started on each citizen, and every social media platform was flooded with games, puzzles, quizzes, cognitive tests, and every gimmick or trick available. The goal was to determine personality types and the mental makeup of everyone who used an app or socialized on the Internet. In addition, blogs and comments were scanned for keywords and behaviors to determine mental stability and the likelihood of an individual living peacefully with others in a confined space for prolonged periods.
Then a scoring system was designed, and it was determined at what point a human would be considered an asset during an end of the world scenario and at what point a person became a liability. The acceptable score that would allow a person to enter a prepared survival shelter or be loaded on ships and blasted off of the planet was determined mathematically and strictly adhered to. When the time came, people would be selected by an encrypted computer program starting from the top of the list, which would then work its way down the highest score first until all available billets were filled. Special military units would be tasked with bringing in the selectees and protecting them until everyone selected was sealed inside; neither the military personnel nor those chosen would be told of the purpose of the process. The algorithm, the needed score, and the final list were kept strictly secret, even from world leaders and top military brass. This, so that even those who knew what was happening could not determine if they were on the list or off, thus they were in no position to blow the whistle or stop doing their job lest they sabotage their own chance of survival.
As the time of the end approached, there were many entities, corporations, governments, military leaders, think tanks, major news outlets, and universities that had been filled in on what was going on. Still, they all kept silent so that they could preserve the possibility of a spot in the survivor's pool (SP) for themselves and their qualified family members. Governments began to make final preparations and update all of the equipment in shelters and rocket ships to the latest technology and most up-to-date supplies. Every Nation had spent themselves into a vast monetary deficit during these preparations, and, in the end, they simply began printing money to pay for needed supplies. Of course, the money was worthless to all but those still blind to the truth anyway. But it was still printed up and paid out just to keep up the ruse and so that everything seemed normal.
The last few years had been spent trying to scare the general population into making at least some preparations of their own. The threat of war was always kept at the forefront, and conspiracy theories of impending disasters were thought up, repeated, and then debunked. Because of these tactics, people all over the Internet were always scared of something. They were confused and misled by every kind of half-truth or fake data that could be dressed up and made plausible. People were told everything but the truth; maybe some would make some preparations and survive the end of the world, it could happen.
The only thing these insiders and great scientists of the world had determined for sure was that a cataclysm was coming, and it was somehow tied to a very long solar cycle. A cycle that had been happening with incredible precision for as far back as determinable history itself. And it was time for it to happen again.