To truly understand how humanity functions and lives today in 2479 you must first understand what got us into this mess in the first place. In the year 2050, a "scientist" by the name of Igor Karma was fired from the UN on account of his "misuse" of sanctioned funds and "hostile" ideas which he worked on and preached to everyone around him. As one of the most brilliant minds since Albert Einstein and Sir Isaac Newton, Dr. Karma was favored since birth with exceptional wealth and teachers from throughout the world through his parent's and family's connections. This was only the start of his brilliance, because of one of his earliest discoveries as a Graduate Student at the Leipzig University in Germany. The cure to cancer.
Now as you can expect no one much less Igor expected to find a cure to cancer among animal test subjects at a graduate level research center but Igor was able to, over the next decade, capitalize on his work through his personal wealth and innovate mind to systematically find and isolate each type of cancer and tweak the original "Cure All" to fit each new type. His parents and family were no doubt as excited as anyone could expect with the marketing and power that comes with such a discovery and made Igor the head of the family and gave him all the best resources and people the family had gathered over the years. Within 20 years since Igor Karma's original discovery, Karma Pharmaceuticals was the worldwide leader in both cancer research and cutting edge treatment methods. They were able to surpass Berkshire Hathaway in stock prices, and even were featured in medical journals and news coverage across the world with Igor looking to be one of the richest men in the world soon alongside giants such as Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos.
And you would think that this is the part of the story where Igor has a unexpected tragedy and loses everything?
Maybe this would happen in a normal novel but this is real life. Igor, of course, was not satisfied with just having the cure to cancer and lead and gathered even more great minds in an almost biblical quest to cure or eradicate all "incurable" diseases and viruses they could. This resulted in the average life expectancy increasing up to 150 years and a worldwide golden era where some people believed Igor to be an angel and his company to be the heavenly host. After finishing his quest, and succeeding in changing the world through his actions and discoveries, Igor announced a final decision to the world. At the 2030 Nobel Peace Prize awards he received his award and turned over his company to his family to manage as he proclaimed to want to continue to help humanity and to do so through the United Nations. With an enormous amount of funding he was able to create the United Nations Health and Research Branch which focused on helping and improving humanity as a whole. With all these innovations, how could anyone be sad in this era and be anything but expectant and hopeful at Dr. Igor Karma's success and probable future successes.
Now the year is 2050 and Igor has just been fired from the UN branch that he created in the first place. His grand ideals never stopped being grand but at some point during his journey crossed a line that people believed should never be crossed and couldn't be done. Igor as researching one of the most common and disastrous projects that humanity only dares to dream about. This project? Eternal Life. Igor through his money and connections was hell-bent on researching eternal life "for both himself and humanity's future" he was once quoted saying. This research and its methods were at first only known by Igor and his team but eventually in 2050 the whole world knew and was appalled. Igor's research was by 2045 almost completely on unwilling human subjects and involved concentrating radiation in a bid to develop human's cells to indefinitely reproduce which was a novel idea which was always stopped by cancer before. With a record of tens of thousands of people dead in his "delusional" experiments and no sign of progress the UN finally pulled the plug. Igor, on the other hand, could never look at anything but the result which he believed would be worth any sacrifice.
Under the financial power of his world leading company, which had only grown in his absence, Dr. Karma led one final test which he believed would be the final straw that broke the camel's back in his research. The final test? A cross between a biological and nuclear warhead with the power to complete irradiate and transform a country. This led to the eventual WWIII when the subsequent launch of these warhead led to declarations of war from the United States, People Republic of China, Japan, Russia and the UN as a whole against the base HQ of Karma Pharmaceuticals but it was already too late. The result of the war speaks for itself but the reduction of the world's population by a third and 1/10th of the world now considered uninhabitable for the people who once lived there. "Today, in the year 2479, Igor Karma is considered by many to be both as evil as Hitler and as intelligent and progressive as a cross between Einstein and Elon Musk." As Mark a young college student finished his report on one of the most infamous men in history to his VR college class Business Ethics 301.