2060–2170
Timeline
From the Long Shortage to the three-layer cities, a century of building toward the light.
- 2060–2075
The Long Shortage
Resource prices and shortages become the defining political problem. Groundwater reserves fail, fertile soil shrinks, accessible metals grow ever more expensive to recover, and fossil resources are no longer worth using.
- 2076–2085
The Depletion Crisis
The old economic system breaks down. Recycling becomes mandatory, infrastructure is cannibalized for materials, and cities fight over water, energy and industrial capacity. Solar becomes one of the few truly renewable inputs still available.
- 2087
The Year of Exhaustion
Humanity accepts that there will be no new frontier of resources. Historians later call it the year "everything ran out except the sun."
- 2088–2100
The Ascent Projects
Governments, corporations and engineering consortiums begin building upward. The first vertical cities are presented as environmental salvation: concentrate humanity in dense structures and let the planet beneath recover.
- 2098 / 2102 tbd
Foundation of the first vertical city
The words "Let us ascend, that the Earth below may rest." are born here, as a sincere promise of an emergency era rather than deliberate propaganda.
- 2100–2125
The Great Enclosure
Existing cities are built over again and again. Old streets become service levels, and service levels become industrial levels. Eventually people realize that the city has buried its own ground.
- 2120–2140
The Solar Divide
Haze and ever larger construction mean that useful direct sunlight belongs more and more to the upper structures. Heliostats and lens networks appear to redistribute it downward, and they gradually become controlled resources.
- 2130–2150
The Vertical Order
Wealth migrates upward. What began as an engineering distinction becomes a social one. The early ideology of ascent is formalized by those who will become the Stewards of the Dawn.
- ~2160–2170
The ETH CodeClash era
The three-layer civilization has matured: Umbral City at the bottom, the Lumen Belt in the middle, the Helio-Citadels at the top. Many who live below are the second or third generation never to have seen direct sunlight.