Planet Earth has survived the 2050 deadline, which had been marked as the beginning of the planet's collapse, and finally found a new balance.

During the thirty-year period of environmental, health, economic and socio-political crisis that followed the 2020 Covid pandemic, known as “Trembling Age”, people started to leave big cities in search of a different life: a less expensive, less controlled, healthier, and safer life in harmony with nature.

People were looking for a lifestyle that should have been no longer regulated by money, focusing on human and natural values instead. They repopulated beautiful abandoned villages and rural areas, creating small communities where each person is accountable to the others. Most of the previous political and economic powers, which had brought the mankind on the verge of disaster, ended up losing their appeal, while new movements started arising, calling for a future based on three basic principles: humanity, nature, technology. Philosophy, literature and arts started expressing these new collective ideals, and people began to believe in a progressive, better future again.

People started working remotely while growing their own food at the same time, and producing the energy required to grow it. They started using technologies aimed at improving their own daily life rather than developing new products, and eventually started to have more time for themselves, their families, and friends. They rediscovered and re-invented their identity, while the shared identity of each community became increasingly important and defined its mission. These new rural communities were able to escape surveillance and control, learning how to protect their data. Soon after that, they started connecting with each other again, creating a global, yet local, network.

Life in the cities improved as well: thanks to the lower human density, traffic and pollution had a drastic drop, and so did contagions and new viruses. Small apartments merged into bigger houses, allowing home working and different kinds of social aggregation spaces.

Technology was not a private property anymore, it became public domain. After the “Big Trial” of 2051, Big Tech Companies, held responsible for violating human rights, were turned into non-profit and their surplus was re-distributed through the Common Global Fund for Research and Development. This led to 30 years of major discoveries in IT, Quantum Computing, AI, biology, medical science, transportation technologies, energy production, and space discoveries. As a result, every aspect of daily life had a drastic improvement. Automation had a decisive increase and progressively freed humanity from tiring and dangerous jobs, allowing them to focus on study and research instead. Technologies had a new development phase that was no longer aimed at producing profit: the goal was to improve the life of humans, animals, plants.

Seven of these neo-rural communities, a group of settlements that were mainly established in previously abandoned Tuscan villages during the Trembling Age, joined into a federation called “Ruralia” in 2051. Financed by the Global Fund, they started to develop in different fields, with different scopes. Ruralia became a model for a new way of living on planet earth and for a new global political order, no longer based on national states, but founded on the interconnection between “real communities” united by common principles and goals.

In 2040, the decay of the world's environment eventually started to slow down. Global warming stopped in 2050, and the planet started to recover in 2060. As of 2070, the environmental conditions started improving in a fast and unexpected way: nature and man were finding a new balance, and so did the quality of life on planet earth.

Today, 1 October 2081, Humankind and Planet Earth are safe.

Welcome to Ruralia.

English.....

English..........

La Storia