The World War Era is a roughly 134-year period of Earth‘s history beginning in 1914 AD with the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand of Austria-Hungary in Europe and ending with the AI War.
There were three actual world wars, two “Pauses,” several minor wars, two Cold Wars, and a “Terror Phase” that comprise the era. The World War Era is used to refer to the twentieth and first half of the twenty-first centuries AD. The period was not completely war-torn, and World War III marked the first time humans attempted to use drones and mechanized soldiers to do the fighting. A brief nuclear exchange, culminating in the devastation of Beijing, ended the war, but a brief AI War erupted only a month later.
The period also represented a leap forward in human rights, the foundation of the United Nations (the governing authority on Earth since the end of the war), and huge technological leaps in computing, medicine, and space travel. Because of the devastation of the three actual world wars, humans developed a reluctance to use weapons of mass destruction such as thermonuclear devices, imposed restrictions on the abilities of artificial intelligence, and more rigidly enforced cooperation and reorganization of nation-states on Earth.
Erich Ludendorf is generally blamed for sparking the World Wars when Germany entered the conflict between Serbia and Austria-Hungary, though some, most notably Bonaparte‘s Windsor family and those of their Dukedom, blame Germany’s emperor, Wilhelm II. Steven Turing, an artificial intelligence thought to have originally been a terminated engineer for software giant Google, took responsibility for the era’s final conflict, seeking to devastate Earth in a nuclear conflict to allow machines he controlled to carefully guide a remnant of humanity in Antarctica in rebuilding. Turing was thought to be destroyed after slaughtering the population of Ulan Ulde in Siberia. Chinese forces, at the request of the Russian Federation, destroyed the city, and presumably Turing, with a tactical nuclear strike. Turing’s unwitting remnant soon became the Republic of Antarctica and forced their way onto a reorganized UN Security Council.
The World War Era was followed by nearly seven decades of unprecedented peace on Earth before the dawn of the epoch known as the Interstellar Era.