Earth is the 3rd planet in the Sol System, the cradle of Humanity. Earth is the mother world, the locus of all culture and trade; still home of over half of humanity, and indeed the font of life itself. No other place in the Solar System has anything close to the panoramic diversity of natural wonders that Earth does. And that, indeed, is the problem. For thousands of years, human beings tore into Earth’s crust, cut down its forests, plowed over its jungles and plundered its oceans. Never since the great asteroid hit Earth and killed off the dinosaurs have so many species been extinguished.
Only after the close of the Second Cold War and the discovery of ZG technology did human beings begin to come to their senses and begin to restore Earth to her majesty. Since the formation of the EGS in 2090, things have come a long, long way. Two billion people have been relocated to orbit, and another billion have found their way to various parts of the Grange. Population growth has been reduced nearly to zero, and the rivers, forests, streams, and oceans have been slowly and painstakingly restored. The ugly scars of millions of miles of roads and highways have been removed, and whole swaths of countryside have been restored to their natural state.
It has taken some draconian laws to achieve these hard-fought environmental victories, and not all agree that protecting the source of life is as important as protecting the self-interest of humans. The Zero Tolerance Laws are an especially egregious and hated set of regulations. The slightest infraction of a population, environmental, or human welfare Zero Tolerance Law and you can be Exiled from Earth forever. In this manner a huge number of Earth denizens have had their citizenship revoked and been cast into the Grange. None of this, good or bad, would be possible without the EGS, the Earth Gravity Sphere Government. Formed in the wake of the first Grange War (during which Earth suffered a strike from a intentionally diverted asteroid), the EGS finally united Earth’s governments to found the Armada and protect Earth from Grange forces.
