History Main / EarthThatUsedToBeBetter

* In Creator/MCAHogarth's ''Literature/ParadoxUniverse'' Earth sent the [[TranshumanAliens Pelted]] out in GenerationShips then had a bloody war with Mars and turned isolationist. Centuries later the Pelted discovered Well Drive, colonized dozens of stars, then found their way back home. Neither of them handled it well.

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* Blomkamp's ''Film/Elysium'' has the Earth overpopulated where entire Los Angeles looks like one giant slum. The wealthy live on titular Elysium, a space station orbiting Earth.

* ''Anime/LegendOfGalacticHeroes'' has Earth relegated to this position thanks to having used up its own resources during humanity's spread to other worlds. Earth was still okay for a while, since those worlds were indentured colonies, until a bloody war of independence turned it into an impoverished barely populated backwater that's only visited by the members of some obscure religion. The old Imperial Capital is a far more popular tourist destination.

* ''Manga/DesertPunk'' is set in the "Great Kanto Desert", which is a wasteland with some remnants of old cities. At present, the Kanto region of Japan is not only a plain (i.e. somewhere fertile), but it's also a very industrialized and populated area, being the place where Tokyo is located. It's indicated that due to a combination of nuclear and/or biological weapons and a RobotWar, humans almost drove themselves to extinction. Also, it could be just CreatorProvincialism, but there's no indication of what if anything is left of the rest of the world.

* By the time of ''Film/BladeRunner2049'' things are even worse. Total environmental collapse has occurred, virtually no life but humanity remains and what food there is consists of slimy GM worms that are implied to taste about as good as they look. Meanwhile environmental damage has triggered an ice age that causes snow to occur in LA in late June/early July and LA itself is even more of a hellhole than the first film with civilization on the brink. Needless to say the only remaining option is to try to get off that rock and for most that simply isn't an option...

nSilence Dwellers in Silence]]":

* Living on the Earth of ''VideoGame/ColonyWars'' is little more than a status symbol, as the entire planet is a sickly brown color. The eponymous war happens because the government on Earth and the upper-class it represents expect the colonies to exist solely for the purpose of funneling resources back to them, until the colonies rise up against the abuse and declare independence. In the first game's best ending, most of the people of Earth simply leaves to make new lives for themselves on the colonies.

* ''Manga/YokohamaKaidashiKikou'': There isn't any real cataclysm, and most of the Earth's populations simply left for a greener pastures, leaving their less adventurous brethren back home. Definitely of the "still pleasant" variety.

* ''VisualNovel/VirtuesLastReward'': The ending reveals that [[spoiler: they're on the Moon in the year 2074, Earth is currently post-Apocalypse, and a vast portion of humanity's survivors now colonize the Moon. Although certain characters, including the protagonist, thought it was still their present year of 2028, many others actually came from the current present, but were keeping it to themselves for various reasons. This goes on to make sense of various odd sounding lines of dialogue regarding Earth and various things about it. ]]

* Earth in VideoGame/SpacePiratesAndZombies is a low-level backwater. [[JustifiedTrope justified in-universe]] as Rez, the lifeblood of galactic society, is found in increasing amounts as you head closer to the galactic core.

* ''Literature/CarrerasLegions'' has United Earth, a corrupt and declining [[DirtyCommies socialist dictatorship]] (basically, a jaundiced view of the present-day European Union taken UpToEleven) that can hardly even maintain its star-spanning Peace Fleet anymore. Their enemies are the humans of Terra Nova, and especially the [[UnitedSpaceOfAmerica Federated States of Columbia]], who are as yet less technologically developed, but rapidly advancing.

* By the time of ''Film/BladeRunner2049'' things are even worse. Total environmental collapse has occured, virtually no life but humanity remains and what food there is consists of slimy GM worms that are implied to taste about as good as they look. Meanwhile environmental damage has triggered an ice age that causes snow to occur in LA in late June/early July and LA itself is even more of a hellhole than the first film with civilisation on the brink. Needless to say the only remaining option is to try to get off that rock and for most that simply isn't an option...

* Subverted in Elizabeth Bear’s ''Literature/JacobsLadderTrilogy'': In the last book it's revealed that the GenerationShip that had been the setting of the series so far had indeed set out with what we would today consider "the elite" – but more in the financial and power sense of the word. The rich and powerful abandoned the Earth for a new planet once Earth's environment was ruined, and they left everyone else behind. Then their ship got stranded for a few hundred years, with a badly damaged drive and just circling a star to survive, and due to their Evangelist-, Social Darwinism- and "Meritocracy"-based attitude, their society turned on itself and devolved into the neo-feudalist, [[{{Transhumanism}} transhumanist]], BioPunk, "survival of the fittest" hellhole that the books start with, before the protagonists take over the government and make peace between the warring factions. In the third book, they finally meet up with the descendants of those that were left behind on Earth, though we only see them in the form of another colony planet and don't find out about the state of Earth itself. It turns out the poor masses found themselves having to pick up the pieces on the ravaged Earth, and they did so by developing a form of eco-socialism that is as close as humanly possible to real democratic communism. Granted, to achieve this, they had to remove all urges towards religion and greed from their population.[[note]]They had identified religious zealotry and sociopathic selfishness as the causes for wars and ecological destruction, and eventually decided to get rid of even the mildest forms of these socially destructive personality disorders.[[/note]] This involves education and cultural values instilled in children, but also [[BrainwashingForTheGreaterGood mandatory therapy, drugs and if necessary even brain surgery]] for those who cannot conform. And kids have to spend their teenage years collecting "social points" by doing things like baby-sitting or other helpful stuff in order to gain full adult citizenship rights like being able to vote. (Unusually for American scifi literature, this outcome is not presented as dystopian or particularly oppressive – the society seems pleasant to live in and it works well for most people, who all genuinely care about working together for the common good - kind of like in Star Trek. But the characters through whose eyes we see this society do feel somewhat alienated because one has a form of incurable epilepsy that gives him hallucinations – and even though he knows it’s not God talking to him, and this disability does not prevent him from being elected to a high political office, he still can’t find anyone willing to have children with him. The other viewpoint character is a woman who works in the security forces and as such has to retain a certain capacity for violence, which is considered somewhat sociopathic by civilians and so she doesn't really have friends.) The space-faring characters that we read about so far in the series find that they really cannot re-integrate into this new human society because they are very individualistic and too ready to solve problems with violence, and because they are unwilling to undergo the "rightminding" proceedure. Also, the left-behind people think the GenerationShip people are creepy and barely still human, due to their extensive body augmentations. So most of them decide to fully embrace the [[BrainUploading transhumanist]] route instead and upload into their ship’s nanotechnology to keep travelling the universe in that form. In terms of technology levels, the GenerationShip society seems far more advanced – but that was mainly because their ship's A.I. developed sentience and because their weird mix of [[{{Nanomachines}} nanotechnology]] and OrganicTechnology kept evolving on its own during their centuries of being stranded as an isolated mini biosphere. It's not clear whether the left-behind people lost this technology in the chaos and wars of the disintegrating society on Earth, or if they intentionally outlawed it, or if the GenerationShip colonists really developed it themselves after they left – or if their sentient A.I. did mot of the innovation work, applying the laws of evolution to its own tools to see how they could be improved. In any case, the eco-socialist society obviously still had or re-developed the spaceships they needed to colonize many new planets, but once there, they seem to have decided to live somewhat simply and with a standard of living much like developed countries have today, except that everything is powered by renewable energy and they try to affect the ecosystem of the colonized planet as little as possible, limiting each colony to the population size of a small city.

* ''[[{{Videogame/Starcraft}} Starcraft]]'' doesn't give the player a whole lot of information on the subject, since the series takes place in and near colonies that are very far from Earth, but it is clear that Earth is controlled by a fascist world government and very overpopulated and messed up at the time the colony ships left carrying hard criminals, twisted minds, budding psychics, and other undesirables. Those undesirables founded the human civilization in the Koprulu sector, where the main plot takes place, beginning several hundred years after the exile from Earth. When Earth makes contact with the Koprulu sector again, the same fascist government is apparently still in power.

* Played with in ''Literature/{{Aeon 14}}''. After the Earth colony ship ''Intrepid'' is [[TimeDilation time-dilated]] 5,000 years further into the future, they learn that the Sol system they left has fallen on hard times due to the advent of FasterThanLightTravel (which enabled interstellar warfare): [[LostTechnology a lot of technology from their time has been lost]] and most of the orbital megastructures, e.g. docking rings, other than High Terra have been destroyed. On the other hand, by the ''present day's'' standards, Earth is still fairly important, as it's now part of a major power bloc that serves as TheEmpire.

* ''Radio/DimensionX'': In [[Recap/DimensionX37PebbleInTheSky episode thirty-seven]], an [[AudioAdaptation adaptation]] of Creator/IsaacAsimov's ''Literature/PebbleInTheSky'', Dr Arvardan, an archaeologist, believes that because Earth is unique, the only inhabited planet with non-habitable radiation, this means that Earth may have been the origin of humanity. Meanwhile, Earth's leadership [[DystopianEdict mandates]] [[WeWillHaveEuthanasiaInTheFuture euthanasia at sixty]], large areas of the planet are completely uninhabitable, and [[spoiler:rebel elements are plotting a mass viral genocide of other worlds]].

* Averted by the ''Bio of a Space Tyrant'' series, in which interplanetary colonization allows Earth to revert to nature. The only nation ''not'' to migrate wholesale to another planet is India, which has become the caretaker to what is rapidly becoming a planet-sized nature preserve.

* Also explored in ''Literature/EarthAnd'', a prequel trilogy following Jarra's summer before the main trilogy.

** There's also [[spoiler:[[Recap/DoctorWhoS38E3Orphan55 Orphan55]]]], where the Doctor and Earthling companions don't even ''recognize'' it for most of the episode.

* ''Series/DoctorWho'' does this repeatedly. By 2059 ("[[Recap/DoctorWhoS30E16TheWatersOfMars The Waters of Mars]]") Earth is overpopulated and horribly polluted; in the 22[[superscript:nd]] century the Daleks occupy the planet for a whole decade ("[[Recap/DoctorWhoS2E2TheDalekInvasionOfEarth The Dalek Invasion of Earth]]"); in the 29[[superscript:th]] century the environment is ravaged by solar flares and humanity flees on giant refuge ships, country by country ("[[Recap/DoctorWhoS31E2TheBeastBelow The Beast Below]]"); in the 51[[superscript:th]], World War VI triggers another wave of colonisation ([[Recap/DoctorWhoS14E6TheTalonsOfWengChiang "The Talons of Weng-Chiang"]]); in 6067, it's solar flares again, and Earth is evacuated for ''10000'' years ("[[Recap/DoctorWhoS12E2TheArkinSpace The Ark in Space]]"). In the year 5-billion-or-so Planet Earth, long since abandoned, is engulfed by the sun ("[[Recap/DoctorWhoS27E2TheEndOfTheWorld The End of the World]]"). We assume it was a relief.
** There's also [[spoiler:Orphan55]], where the Doctor and Earhling companions don't even ''recognize'' it for most of the episode.

* Subverted in Elizabeth Bear’s ''Literature/JacobsLadderTrilogy'': In the last book it's revealed that the GenerationShip that had been the setting of the series so far had indeed set out with what we would today consider "the elite" – but more in the financial and power sense of the word. The rich and powerful abandoned the Earth for a new planet once Earth's environment was ruined, and they left everyone else behind. Then their ship got stranded for a few hundred years, with a badly damaged drive and just circling a star to survive, and due to their Evangelist-, Social Darwinism- and "Meritocracy"-based attitude, their society turned on itself and devolved into the neo-feudalist, [[{{Transhumanism}} transhumanist]], BioPunk, "survival of the fittest" hellhole that the books start with, before the protagonists take over the government and make peace between the warring factions. In the third book, they finally meet up with the descendants of those that were left behind on Earth, though we only see them in the form of another colony planet and don't find out about the state of Earth itself. It turns out the poor masses found themselves having to pick up the pieces on the ravaged Earth, and they did so by developing a form of eco-socialism that is as close as humanly possible to real democratic communism. Granted, to achieve this, they had to remove all urges towards religion and greed from their population.[[note]]They had identified religious zealotry and sociopathic selfishness as the causes for wars and ecological destruction, and eventually decided to get rid of even the mildest forms of these socially destructive personality disorders.[[/note]] This involves education and cultural values instilled in children, but also mandatory therapy, drugs and if necessary even brain surgery for those who cannot conform. And kids have to collect "social points" by doing things like baby-sitting or other helpful stuff in order to gain full adult citizenship rights. (Unusually for American scifi literature, this outcome is not presented as dystopian or particularly oppressive – the society seems pleasant to live in and it works well for most people, who all genuinely care about working together for the common good - kind of like in Star Trek. But the characters through whose eyes we see this society do feel somewhat alienated because one has a form of incurable epilepsy that gives him hallucinations – and even though he knows it’s not God talking to him, and this disability does not prevent him from being elected to a high political office, he still can’t find anyone willing to have children with him. The other viewpoint character is a woman who works in the security forces and as such has to retain a certain capacity for violence, which is considered somewhat sociopathic by civilians and so she doesn't really have friends.) The space-faring characters that we read about so far in the series find that they really cannot re-integrate into this new human society because they are very individualistic and too ready to solve problems with violence. So they decide to go the [[BrainUploading transhumanist]] route instead and upload into their ship’s nanotechnology to keep travelling the universe in that form. In terms of technology levels, the GenerationShip society seems far more advanced – but that was mainly because their ship's A.I. developed sentience and because their weird mix of [[{{Nanomachines}} nanotechnology]] and BioPunk technology kept evolving on its own during their centuries of being stranded as an isolated mini biosphere. It's not clear whether the left-behind people lost this technology in the chaos and wars of the disintegrating society on Earth, or if they intentionally outlawed it, or if the GenerationShip colonists really developed it themselves after they left – or if their sentient A.I. did mot of the innovation work, applying the laws of evolution to its own tools to see how they could be improved. In any case, the eco-socialist society obviously still had or re-developed the spaceships they needed to colonize many new planets, but once there, they seem to have decided to live somewhat simply and with a standard of living much like developed countries have today, except that everything is powered by renewable energy and they try to affect the ecosystem of the colonized planet as little as possible, limiting each colony to the population size of a small city.

* ''VisualNovel/VirtuesLastReward'': The ending reveals that they're on the Moon in the year 2074, Earth is currently post-Apocalypse, and a vast portion of humanity's survivors now colonize the Moon. Although certain characters, including the protagonist, thought it was still their present year of 2028, many others actually came from the current present, but were keeping it to themselves for various reasons. This goes on to make sense of various odd sounding lines of dialogue regarding Earth and various things about it.

** There's also "[[spoiler:Orphan55]]", where the Doctor and Earhling companions don't even ''recognize'' it for most of the episode.

** There's also "[[spoiler: https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Recap/DoctorWhoS38E3Orphan55 Orphan55]]", where the Doctor and Earhling companions don't even ''recognize'' it for most of the episode.

** There's also "[[spoiler: https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Recap/DoctorWhoS38E3Orphan55 ]]", where the Doctor and Earhling companions don't even ''recognize'' it for most of the episode.