Futuristic Setting
Having witnessed the coming apocalypse with crystal clarity a century in advance, a world that was already slowly becoming nothing more than a stage for corporate whims had found a solution.
Scion Corp. implemented new contracts that tested the boundaries of human rights in their regulations and offered those contracts to their employees - Those who agreed to work on a new project with the purpose of ensuring man's survival would in essence be signing over their lives and the lives of their descendants but would, with their families, receive immense benefits and a generous payroll due to the importance of the work; their descendants, too would be ensured a life of comfort and influence within the new world this project would establish.
The project went as such: Various nations would form their own secret political faction separate from any alliance and the legislature of the UN. Those nations would then undertake a sort of mutual defense pact under the same level of secrecy and put what funding they could into Scion Corp. to make a space station capable of sustaining itself throughout multiple generations of inhabitance. Certain portions of each nations population, the influential, the skilled, would then be allowed to live on this station as it left the planet to serve as a makeshift home for the human race while Earth was left to its utter destruction.
All went according to plan and a "megastation" estimated to be four times the size of New York City was build just far enough from our atmosphere that it didn't have any ill side effects stemming from its massive size and the nature of physics in space. Advancements in technology in the 50 years it took them to complete construction were enough to send massive numbers of people up at once, all around the same time so as to make a clean final step in the whole process.
Then came centuries of travel while man searched for its new long term home. Society continued aboard the station, reproduction turned into a process to be governed by beaurocrats so as to avoid overpopulation. New resources were periodically acquired from celestial bodies during this age of constant travel, new research and advances in technology were born.
Then, this surviving pocket of mankind found justification for a suspicion that was held for so long on their homeworld - They found galactic society. After finding a planet similar enough to the familiar conditions of Earth (and overthrowing the race of lizardmen that once called this world 'Lon') and setting up for inhabitance of it, they found nearby areas of space with numerous sentient species, some of which were capable of space travel. In time, they became a respected planetary nation under what was essentially a galactic version of the UN.
