Editing Amazing Deliveries (section)

==2185==

The outdoors is no longer survivable for humans. Without protection, it is possible to endure for only a few hours at most before heatstroke or the carbon dioxide content of the atmosphere brings a person down. Everyone lives in a sealed shelter, the smallest being simple farmsteads and the largest the mighty Dome Cities – pitiful remnants of the metropolises of old.

Standard of living varies but is for most people way below what it was generations past. In struggling communities, food, water, and sometimes even air is strictly rationed. Most people, though, can live according to what they can afford. That tends to vary by individual, and just like it always has been, a tiny minority live in luxury while most people do back breaking work for their daily subsistence.
Despite difficulties science has continued to develop, and even in the poorest settlements, what would once have been advanced technology is commonplace, such as 3D printers and cybernetic modifications.

Most of the colonies that formed during the exodus from Earth are still up there, but life is no easier in the colonies, and is often harder. Where stepping out uprotected is hazardous on Earth, in the colonies it is deadly. Where once people fled to space, now many colonists dream of a ticket to Earth. But those tickets are atrociously expensive, and many end up trying to stow away on a transport or use other shady means to return. Those who do find themselves as aliens. Generations of living in the lower gravity of the colonies has changed people physically. 

Mighty nations and global conglomerates are things of the past. This is the era of city-states. The Dome Cities, being the largest, most powerful and most advanced settlements, serve as centers of political, economic, and cultural life over the territory around them.