In the wake of the asteroid devastation of Earth's biosphere. Offworld colonies had to find new ways to undertake things that were assumed to be taken care by the parent nation. Therefore, the colonies within the Solar System realized that the path to stars was the only way forward. Proto-jump was being worked upon in the safe confines of the Asteroid belt by the Ceres Cybernetics Corporation but it was the brilliant mathematicians on the Indian Colony on Luna that feed the work of the construction sites on Mars. These colonies were finding new ways of doing things that meant they would not interact with mother nation on a devastated Earth but things that were more homegrown. Leading some to sever their ties with national governments and work directly under one of the United Nations Agencies, and in turn, the UN granted them a UNO travel document that allowed them free access to not only international organizations but also unhintered access national installations as per the protocals embedded within the Treaty of New York.
Perfecting tight beam communication was of paramount importance. Because of the vast distances involved this facilitated the development of smart systems computering in which fuzzy logic could emulate the intelligence of the user by responding to preassigned variables by providing instant answers. Far from being a pure artificial intelligence, it distributed computual power across a number of different information silos that Earth's Internet had not been able to do.
The United Nations which was already accumulating much more power since even before the Treaty of New York sought to reorganize the nations of the world along ecological zones as a way of coping with the disaster. To this end INGOs cooperated with NGOs of getting aid to where it was most needed.
Herculean efforts were attempted in rescuing the biodiversity and huge funds were poured into genetic research at preserving what was lost. Vast new industries were incubated by the Earth and off world zaibatsu to create and preserve the Earth. New technologies and long ago abandoned pattens were resurrected and made freely available in a last ditch effort to kick start innovation to save the planet. Overseeing this colossal was the United Nations which acted as a clearing house and discriminator of new innovations - UNESCO which had long argued for such a position realized that it was not central control but central guidance which was necessary to uplift the world. Faced with the overwhelming scale of the disaster of the zaibatsu had to no choice but to comply.
Notwithstanding, even in the middle of the 21st century, there were still rogue nations led by the likes of the United States along with the Confederacy of India which sought to modify or adjust these efforts to benefit its industries and its people. This rivalry between national power and international authority resulted in numerous wasteful proxy wars both on Earth and in the High Frontier. But, as no single national government wished to confront the United Nations High Command directly...lots of proxy forces or mercenary companies were created to fight these dirty and tragic wars. Again and again, the blue helmets were called in to quell these insurrections tightening the repressive arms of the United Nations to police conflicts. Furthermore, the different factions of the zaibatsu would sometimes fund mercenaries/terrorists to "take out" their opponents. This required that the Blue Helmets become more agile and quick to respond to problems, as soon as they manifested...gone was the large standing army but hundreds of battalions and thousands of squads equipped to with the latest and best hardware to deliver surgical strikes.
The UN, at the same time, thought of instituting a intraplanetary draft in which one would have to serve in either disaster relief or the armed forces but this idea was quickly dropped. Nonetheless, the discussion prompted many nations to adopt these measures of international service thereby solving their domestic unemployment problems along with exposing their populations to the latest developments within the emerging global culture that had been incubating.
Offworld colonies seemed to provide a relief for those who wanted a pure life but those offworld soon found the Solar System was equally cosmopolitan. Scattered groups throughout the Solar System sought to break and find nirvana and utopia in the most unlikely of places. So, while, these fragments claimed to be pure cultural memes of a distant and lost past...they contributed to a sense of a lost heimet which Terrans longed for and hoped they would find once the doorway to the Stars could be opened up. This prompted many innovations especially in propulsion techniques for spacecraft and space stations.
Furthermore, the birthrate in wake of the disaster was exploding as different ways of repopulating the Earth led to successful extrovirto incubation setting off a craze of the wealthy - trying to live forever by creating copies of themselves. This "cloning" whilst primative and time consuming and liable for failure and mutation feed the geneering industries to create customable offspring for the wealthy.
