The Third World War was the last, longest, and quietest of Earth’s three great planetary wars, fought by a shifting set of alliances and independent militias from 2099 to a gradual fizzling out sometime in the late 2100s. The war was characterised in propaganda as a battle of ecological ideologies between the “Brights”, who supported large-scale geoengineering to counter the human effects of climate change, and the “Profundos”, who sought to protect Earth’s biosphere for its own sake. Other factions included the syncretic “Golden Path”, conceived as the optimal solution by the technogenic administration of Chile, as well as a slew of ethnic and religious militias complicating the Asian and African fronts.

The chief cause of the war was a diplomatic dispute between Brazil and the River Niger Union (colloquially and hereafter just “Nigeria”) over the proposed “Lake Gigachad”, a behemoth reservoir the size of Poland, part of a series of “Great Green Lakes” planted up across the Sahel and Sahara to combat desertification and provide residence for Nigeria’s ever-booming population. An internal Nigerian government report leaked to the public suggested that the lake, in smothering a particular depression in northern Chad, would cause the amount of nutrients blown across the ocean onto the struggling Amazon to plummet. A succession of international lawsuits and digging-in of heels culminated in the Battle of Null Island, a direct aerial confrontation over the world’s first spacelift, control of which had been shared by the two former allies.

Other major engagements included the Burning of Jaguarápolis, the N’Djamena Flood, and the Siege of Bangalore. Incidents in the Astrapelago were limited but deadly — most infamous was the “Great Cut”, wherein Nakaiy, the planet’s only operational spacelift at the time, was severed with several dozen spacecraft docked and a shipment on the way up.