Great Catastrophe
- "The earth shook for days, the fires burned for weeks, and when the ash had settled, less than ten thousand of your kind still lived, and far fewer of ours. But we carried on, together.…"
- ―Jupiter to Desmond in the Synch Nexus[src]
The Toba catastrophe was an event during pre-history which nearly eradicated both Humanity and the First Civilization.
Minerva and Subject 16 both described it as a planet-wide scorching that originated from the Sun.[1][2] Lucy Stillman believed that the Earth's magnetic field was disrupted by an ejection of matter from the Sun, which made the planet geologically unstable.[1]
A warning delivered by Jupiter to Desmond Miles seemed to corroborate this hypothesis. A massive solar flare struck the Earth, followed by planet-wide lightning strikes, firestorms and earthquakes, with large fissures opening on the Earth's surface. The earthquakes continued for days, while worldwide blazes raged for several weeks.[3]
Less than ten thousand humans and "far fewer" members of the First Civilization survived the catastrophe, while the surface of the earth was rendered barren.[3] This incident, rather than the eruption of a supervolcano, was the true nature of the Toba catastrophe and subsequent mass extinction.[2] In order to recover from the event, the remaining members of the First Civilization worked with humanity to restore life to the planet,[3] as both Subject 16 and Juno implied that this effort also involved interbreeding between the two species.[4][5]
Fortunately, some members of the First Civilization were aware of the impending disaster and attempted to prevent it,[3] by constructing a series of temples. Built by "those who knew to turn away from war,"[1] the temples were said to have been placed underground, both to protect them from the ongoing Human-First Civilization War and as a "precaution" in case of failure.[3]
For those within the temples, each attempted to find a solution to prevent the catastrophe, with each temple "dedicated to a different method of salvation." The information collected at each temple was transmitted to a single location from which Jupiter, Juno and Minerva would "sort and sample all that was collected." The three then tested six possible solutions in succession, "each more encouraging than the last," but all six solutions ultimately failed.[3]
It was to be this point that Jupiter would refer Desmond Miles to in 2012, where they had "laboured and lost", in order for him to "take his words" and "pass them from [his] head into [his] hands."[3]
These were most likely instructions for Desmond to carry on the work of Those Who Came Before, and to prevent the second catastrophe.
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