There Were Serious Repercussions After The Exploding Ham Incident.

…which, by the way, I had nothing to do with

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The Doclopedia #1,516

Earth 5-C: Women In Control
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On our earth, the 1918 Spanish Flu Pandemic swept the globe and killed possibly 100 million people. It lasted from January, 1918 until December, 1920.

On Earth 5-C, their strain of influenza began killing people in June, 1805 and continued until October of 1809. It was far deadlier than the 1918 flu for three reasons: a gestation period in the human body of up to 60 days, a very rapid onset after that (with death resulting in as little as 36 hours), and the fact that it was transferable to several bird species. That third fact was not proven until 1930.

With medical science being over a century behind 1918, there was little that could be done to slow or treat victims. It hit people of both sexes who were over 40 hardest, killing 9 out of 10 men and 7 out of 10 women. In people between 20 and 40, it killed men 7 out of 10 times, but only killed about 30% of women. Under age 20, it killed 3 out of 10 males and only 1 in 10 women. Amazingly, very few children under 10 died from it.

By the time the flu finally died out, most likely due to mutating to a non-lethal form, almost half of the world’s population was dead, including most of the adult males.

But life, governments, education and the rest of human endeavors must go on, so women started filling in for the missing men. The adult men who had survived figured this would not last long, just until they were fully recovered and able to teach a new crop of men how things should be. Sadly, the flu had reduced their lifespans to less than 10 years, on average, so they never really got the chance.

Women, having been used, abused, lied to and given second class status (if they were lucky) by men for a few thousand years, were not going to give men a whole lot of power again. There were women speaking out loudly on a variety of subjects before the pandemic even ended. Things changed and changed pretty fast.

One big change was religion, with the Catholic Church being the best example. The flu killed off something like 90% of the male clergy, but only 15% of nuns. The remaining males were either very young or weakened older men. The church was without a pope from 1806 until 1811, when a 50 year old nun named Sister Simone became Pope Mary I. She was pope for 31 years and made enormous changes, most of which empowered women. She was succeeded by another female pope, something that went on for 135 years before Pope James got the job in 1977.

Another big alteration to business as usual was the steady disbanding of armies and navies. Mothers, unlike fathers, were a lot less enraptured with war and battle. The fact that fertility was down for both sexes worldwide made every child even more precious. Raise a generation or two with no war and no warrior heroes and you end up with people for whom war is an old time thing, something we don’t do in modern times like 1880.

Reasons for war were gone anyway. Take away near half of the world’s population and there’s plenty of food and resources to go around. Get rid of armies & navies and you can reduce taxes. Give people even a few years of much lower taxes and they get real salty when you suggest raising them again.

Next we come to the race issue. That was actually a self solver. When men are at a premium for everything from reproduction to sex to doing hard labor, women get a whole lot less picky. If Miss A has two kids that have a black father and Miss B has two kids with a Hispanic father and Miss C has kids whose father came from India, nobody talks shit about anybody else’s kids. Race mixing wasn’t a bad thing, it was a necessity.

Finally, the women of the world wanted their children to get a good education, so they made good educations easy and cheap. Educate more people and you get more smart people. Get more smart people doing stuff and you get all sorts of scientific advancements, like a female astronaut landing on the moon in 1943.

Now, Earth 5-C is not a paradise. They may not have war or much crime, but they still argue about how to do things and they still did a lot of polluting. The good news is, they got on the ball and are working together to fix the problem. In their current year, 2000, they have cleaned up most of their mess. The 2.5 billion people of Earth 5-C have a pretty bright future ahead of them.