The Emptying of Earth
This term is commonly used to refer to the surprising and disturbing demographic observation that the human population of Earth has been in long term decline since an estimated post Season Of Innocence peak in 2645 AF.
Since the beginning of the Foundation Age when the social rules imposed by the Conclave were relaxed, there had been a slow but steady rise in the number of humans living on Earth. It never reached anything like the levels that were believed to have existed before the Great Forgetting and it never threatened the robust ecosystems of the gene sea, established in the Season of Innocence but at its peak it was sufficient to maintain more than a dozen large cities and an uncountable number of smaller settlements.
This began to go into reverse in the late 27th century and in the present day, populations are not much larger than they were at the end of the Season of Innocence.
No single cause accounts for the trend but we can identify three important factors.
Sometime around 2230 AF it was observed that human fertility had declined noticably. The reason for this decline is unknown, but the scientists at Anoomenon, thought it was partly due to some subtle latent genetic instructions which may have been deliberately built into the human genome in the distant past, either by the Guardians Of Earth or perhaps some even older agency. They speculated that this was interacting with the residues of the Love Bombing that ended the Mating Game and had now contaminated the entire planet.
A second factor was the Last Scattering which made no noticable difference to begin with but had an increasing effect from 2483 AF.
It was the Listlessness Plague, which struck in 2646 AF which tipped the balance from growth into decline. When humanity emerged from under this cloud, fertility rates were observed to have declined still further and human populations on Earth have been shrinking ever since.
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