However, fearing ostracism by the crew, Aïda starts a battle for control of Endurance that fails, but reduces the population even further. The 11 Swarm survivors, led by a woman named Aïda, negotiate reuniting the Swarm with Endurance. By this time, Flaherty's Swarm has been decimated, resorting to cannibalism to survive, while fallout from Probst's ship has killed most of Endurance 's crew.

Using the ice comet, the remaining third of the Cloud Ark and the ISS (now dubbed Endurance) take three years to reach the Cleft, a Grand Canyon–sized crevasse on the now-exposed iron core of the Moon.

They bring the ice to the Cloud Ark, though MacQuarie is the only survivor of this mission. Probst's crew has died of radiation sickness caused by nuclear fallout from his ship's nuclear reactor. Meanwhile, leader Markus Leuker and robotics engineer Dinah MacQuarie take a small crew to an ice comet fragment that billionaire Sean Probst has gotten into Earth's orbit for the purpose of providing propellant for the space station. Flaherty persuades the majority of the Arklets to abandon the ISS and to move to higher orbit in a decentralized swarm, in the process causing ISS to be struck by a bolide and suffer catastrophic damage that kills 300. US President Julia Bliss Flaherty manages to get herself up to the Cloud Ark despite provisions that members of government would not be launched into space. Human civilization, as well as nearly all life on Earth, is obliterated. The world's leaders evacuate as many people and resources as possible to a swarm of 'arklet' habitats called a 'Cloud Ark' in orbit with the International Space Station (ISS), bolted onto an iron Arjuna asteroid called Amalthea, which provides some protection against Moon debris.īy the time the Hard Rain begins 701 days after the destruction of the Moon, approximately 1,500 people have been launched into orbit.

As the pieces begin to collide with one another, astronomer and science popularizer 'Doc' Dubois Harris calculates that Moon fragments will begin entering Earth's atmosphere, forming a white sky and blanketing the Earth within two years with what he calls a 'Hard Rain' of bolides, causing the atmosphere to heat to incandescence and the oceans to boil away, rendering Earth uninhabitable for thousands of years. In the near future, an unknown agent causes the Moon to shatter. The story tells of the desperate efforts to preserve Homo sapiens in the wake of apocalyptic events on Earth after the unexplained disintegration of the Moon and the remaking of human society as a space-based civilization after a severe genetic bottleneck. Seveneves is a hard science fiction novel by Neal Stephenson published in 2015.

Seveneves by neal stephenson