After hearing some of the theories surrounding the new character, Mae in the upcoming Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes, I thought about what one of the priorities of a group of surviving humans would be. There would be no way of them wanting to put all of their chances on Earth, not when they could easily be found and killed, or succumb to a new form of virus outbreak.
Survivors of Humanity.
The outbreak of the Simian Flu pandemic shattered the human population; bypassing routine precautions and quickly spread to other countries and continents worldwide after the first confirmed signs of it appearing in San Francisco, the Simian Flu killed millions. Only a few people proved to be immune, while the apes benefited from the outbreak in so many ways. They became smarter, gaining higher cognitive functions.
A decade following the Simian Flu outbreak, humanity was broken; communications overseas were nonexistent, the internet had gone down long ago, and after a decade, there was rampant debate Europe, Africa, and Australia were now dead.
A decade following the original outbreak brought about the end of human civilisation, as evolved groups of apes, led by Ape-Kings who possessed differing views of apes and humans, usually launched devastating attacks on the surviving humans; but the human race was doomed. The Simian Flu later evolved, and in the new mutation of the virus, which had been originally been created to help humans recover from Alzheimer's and dementia, now robbed humanity of both their intelligence and of their ability to speak.
The soldiers fighting off the apes slowly succumbed to it, quickly and easily overcoming the crude precautions put in place to stop the newly mutated and deadlier strain of the Simian Flu from robbing them of their strongest gifts.
The apes won the war, although truthfully the human race would have lost one way or another.
But that was not the end of humanity. Small groups of people, who had been lucky enough to see the writing in the sky following the initial outbreaks, fled from the outbreaks, and they set up communities in remote areas, far from the outbreaks. Taking whatever they could find, tools, weapons, and other pieces of equipment, and whatever they thought they could make use of, these communities decided to make the best they could in this new dystopian world.
Many of these communities took with them what they had of their culture; music, TV, DVDs, books, art, and artefacts for posterity. It was better than seeing them destroyed, either by the apes or by people who lost their minds and saw them more valuable as firewood.
Isolated from the other survivors, these communities only caught bits of news; they found out the Simian Flu had mutated, ripping intelligence and speech from the others. This news was terrifying for many of these remote survivors, and they went out of their way to protect themselves.
Centuries passed, and many of these survivors went on their way; many of them dedicated themselves to just surviving and avoiding the apes, whose empires began growing and growing. Others looked into advancing human science and technology, and when they did, they began pooling their resources and spending their time devising ways of crossing the continents and seeking out other humans like themselves, and seeing for themselves if other evolved groups of apes had taken power.
But others, salvaging the remnants of the space travel technology and plans that had been left behind before the pandemic, they began planning and advancing new methods of getting spacecraft into orbit, using the old laboratories and workshops that was left to make the experiments possible.
The human race had very nearly been wiped out by the Simian Flu, proving that many scientists were right all along; as long as they had lived and existed solely on Earth, they were vulnerable.
Looking out into space, the survivors of the pandemic who'd miraculously managed to survive in this dark new world, saw not just a wonder to explore, but a replacement home.
After a few decades of working, they finally constructed a giant railgun cannon. Capable of shooting small spaceships into space before they moved under their own power, either through ion propulsion or through solar sails, they succeeded in constructing space capsules which were capable of this independent flight, which allowed them to cross the distance to the moon. Many more were just unmanned probes, which were fired out into space to help their controllers look for new worlds to colonise, but a new generation of satellites was shot into orbit above the planet, for communication and to look for any signs of surviving groups of their people who hadn't lost their intelligence.
But most of their resources were spent building a lunar colony slowly after a few more decades, which spread and grew over the lunar surface, this group of humans relocated a large number of their people to the moon before they discovered the other settlements in America, and in other parts of the world.
Making contact with their own people, although priority was given to the construction of the lunar settlements, the colonists on the moon saw a large influx of colonists. A few years after the small colony began taking root and saw more people settling down after the more important questions about the possibilities of living there were answered properly after years of speculation and debate, more spaceships arrived.
They had come from survivors in a remote region of China, and the American survivors had learnt about them some time ago, but all of their resources had been going into growing the colony on the moon. To say they were surprised to meet others from another part of the world and weren't rendered animals by the mutated Simian Flu was an understatement. Pooling their resources, they began building the colonies up together, sharing and exchanging knowledge.
With their help, skyhooks were placed in orbit above the planet to allow for faster and more convenient landings and take-offs. With such a large population living on the moon, which rose more and more as the years passed, it was decided to make contact with any survivors on Earth and move them, by force if need be, to the moon.
The moon colony was growing rapidly over the years, while astronomers looked further out. The moon was good, but just one replacement home was not enough. What if something like the Simian Flu happened again? Humanity's survival needed to be guaranteed, and so railgun cannons and skyhooks prepared for launches to Mars, to the asteroid fields, and to worlds like Ceres, Europa, and especially Titan, and even beyond.
Humanity had survived the Simian Flu pandemic before. While millions of people had died and many of the survivors had lost their intelligence and were robbed of their power of speech by the mutated variant, the human race had survived.