'Isn't the world lovely and green, granddad?' The small child asked, her eyes wide and her smile pure and naive.
'Yes it is, my dear, but it wasn't always like this,' the old man replied.
'Wasn't it?' She pursed her lips and frowned.
'No, a long time ago, when I was a young lad, the Earth was very different. There was hardly any space for anyone to move around.'
'Was this when there was dinosaurs?' She asked, thoughtfully.
'Only old dinosaurs like me,' he said, smiling while he ruffled her hair.
'You're not a dinosaur, granddad, you're a man.'
'True, true, but the real dinosaurs were long gone and there were billions and billions of people on the Earth. Everywhere was covered with roads and buildings and there were queues everywhere you went. Not that people went very far because there was so much traffic the roads were clogged up to standstill.'
'What happened to all the billions of people – where have they gone?' She was a bright little thing.
'Oh, they haven't gone, they're still there. We can't see them because we moved.'
'We haven't moved anywhere. I don't understand.' She frowned again and put her hands on her hips.
'Let me tell you a story,' he said, smiling. 'Come and sit next to me.'
In 2015 lots of people were really fed up with the sheer numbers of other people on the planet. Rich people were especially fed up because poorer people were always getting in the way and slowing them down when they were trying to go about their important, money-making business. By 2030, there were so many people on the Earth that wherever anyone went, there was always somebody there already. Queues lasted for days, nobody used cars because the roads were full of abandoned vehicles, left there when people got fed up of sitting going nowhere. Trying to get a seat on a bus was pointless, because they were all full, but the bus never went anywhere anyway – they became resting places for people walking from one place to another, especially if it was raining, which it did more and more. There was a great trade in bikes, however.
One very rich man, let's call him Mr X, called up a few of his very rich friends and they got together for a meeting. They had an idea that would reduce the number of people on the Earth and also create a very lovely place for them to live. They all agreed that they needed the help of some very, very bright scientists to help them put their plan into action.
Being very, very rich people, they were able to employ the very, very brightest scientists to help them. These very, very bright scientists listened to the ideas of the very, very rich people, looked at each other, looked upwards, nodded and shook their heads in the appropriate places and went away to formulate a solution.
A little while later the scientists came back with a plan. It was audacious and would cost a mindbogglingly large amount of money, but the very, very rich people liked the idea and told them to go ahead with it.
The scientists designed twenty very large spacecrafts and had them built. They also designed a really, really big net that would attach to the back of the spacecrafts and trawl through space. The idea was, much the same as a large fishing trawler will catch a huge shoal of fish and drag them on board, the spaceships would find a desirable planet circulating some nearby star, catch it and bring it back to our sun. But, and this was the really cunning bit, whereas a fishing net leaves the fish all squashed up at the end of the net, this net would keep the planet revolving within very technical force fields, force fields that are far too technical for me to describe, so that the planet didn't go all squashed and useless.
Other scientists had been looking for a suitable planet that matched, as far as possible, our own. They found one revolving happily round a star not too far away. When they looked more closely they found that there were far less people on this planet because it hadn't reached the state of technological wizardry that we enjoy. These people were running around wearing the skins of animals that they'd killed and were killing each other with big clubs and bits of sharp flint, rather than wearing designer clothes and killing each other with lasers and high-tech weaponry. So, they would pose no problem.
Once the coordinates were plugged into the twenty huge spaceships, off they went.
A few years later the spaceships returned dragging the planet behind them. It was a nice planet, very similar to our own: lots of blue oceans, green lands, high mountains, large deserts and a few very angry people.
After a bit of jiggling about they set the planet in orbit around our sun on the opposite side from the Earth. This way one planet never saw the other. And then the rich people went about the business of moving onto it.
Of course, the people that were already on this new planet were a little fed up to have been dragged away from their own sun, but seemed happy enough once the new sun started rising in the morning and setting in the evening as it had done before. However, they were in for a bit of a shock: the very rich people who'd paid for this new planet to be brought to them didn't want lots of savages running about trying to hit them with their big clubs, so they had them all rounded up and put on a special little island, miles from anywhere where they could carry on their lives bashing each other over the head.
The very rich people then had lots of nice places built for them to live in and moved onto the planet. They all invited some of their other very rich friends to share this new planet with them and were all very happy without the poor people and the crowds.
However, after a little while there was a small problem that started to bother a lot of the very rich people. There was no moon looking down on them from the night sky, which was a little lonely in itself, but also meant there were no tides, which felt very strange, especially as these very rich people spend a lot of their time on holiday by the seaside.
There was lots of debate between the very rich people about whether they could steal the moon from the Earth, but they decided that this would make them deeply unpopular.
After more consultation with the very bright scientists, they decided to steal a moon from Jupiter, which has got far too many moons anyway. Initially, they were going to take Io, it being the one closest in size to the moon, but it was felt that it was too yellow so they went for Europa, which had a more pleasing colour. Even this was a bit dull, though, so they employed some artists to make it look more interesting.
'And that, my lovely child, is why you live on a beautiful, green world.' The small child smiled, kissed her granddad and skipped away.
