Read the following passage and questions, then choose the right answer from options, the answer should be one of A, B, C, D.

<passage>:
DOWN TO THE WORLDS OF MEN BY ALEXEI PANSHIN The ancient rule was sink or swim—swim in the miasma of a planet without spaceflight, or sink to utter destruction! [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Worlds of If Science Fiction, July 1963. small ships squatting over their tubes, but it was the last of the Ship We sat there for five minutes while they bled air out of our tube and then we just ... dropped. My stomach turned flips. We didn't have to leave that way, but George thinks it's fun to be a hot pilot. Thinking it over, I was almost sorry I'd been stinking to Jimmy D. He's the only competition I have my own age. The trouble is, you don't go partners with the competition, do you? Besides, there was still that crack about being a snob. The planet chosen for our Trial was called Tintera. The last contact the Ship had had with it—and we were the ones who dropped them—was almost 150 years ago. No contact since. That had made the Council all right in the end. It didn't make any practical difference to us I felt like crawling in a corner of the ship and crying, but nobody It wasn't the chance of not coming back that bothered me really, because I never believed that I wouldn't. The thought that made me unhappy was that I would have to be on a planet for a whole month. Planets make me feel wretched. a piece of fluff and break your neck. There are vegetables everywhere to crawl on. If you can think of anything creepier than that, you've got a real nasty imagination. Worst of all, planets stink. Every single one smells—I've been on enough to know that. A planet is all right for a Mud-eater, but not for me. a level or down a level and be back in civilization. sea from the morning side and then dropped low over gray-green forested In a minute we were airborne again. I wondered if I would ever see Jimmy—if he would get back alive. It's no game we play. When we turn fourteen, they drop us on the nearest colonized planet and come back one month later. That may sound like fun to you, but a lot of us never come back alive. Don't think I was helpless. I'm hell on wheels. They don't let us grow for fourteen years and then kick us out to die. They prepare us. They do figure, though, that if you can't keep yourself alive by the time you're fourteen, you're too stupid, foolish or unlucky to be any use to the Ship. There's sense behind it. It means that everybody on the Ship is a person who can take care of himself if he has to. Daddy says that something has to be done in a closed society to keep the population have anything to do with Jimmy. I just couldn't stand to put off the and in just a moment it was gone. Its gray-blue color was almost the color of the half-overcast sky, so I was never sure when I saw it last. the dark. When the sun disappears, somehow you wonder in your stomach if it's really going to come back. But I lived through it—one day in thirty gone. I rode in a spiral search pattern during the next two days. I had three things in mind—stay alive, find people and find some of the others. The first was automatic. The second was to find out if there was a slot I could fit into for a month. If not, I would have to find a place to camp out, as nasty as that would be. The third was to join forces, though not with that meatball Jimmy D. Year End Holiday for my taste, but this year it was all right. It was animals. I shot one small one and ate it. It turned out to taste pretty that I couldn't keep on my stomach. So I guess I was lucky. it in the level below. It was narrow and made of sand spread over a identify. One of the smartest moves in history was to include horses when they dropped the colonies. I say "they" because, while we did the actual dropping, the idea originated with the whole evac plan back on Earth. Considering how short a time it was in which the colonies were established, there was not time to set up industry, so they had to have draft animals. as well as the two that were being built then, went up with everything else in the Solar System in 2041. In that sixteen years 112 colonies were planted. I don't know how many of those planets had animals that could have been substituted but, even if they had, they would have had to be domesticated from scratch. That would have been stupid. I'll bet that half the colonies would have failed if they hadn't had horses. We'd come in from the west over the ocean, so I traveled east on the alive. They were green and grotesque. They had squat bodies, long limbs and knobby bulges at their joints. They had square, flat animal masks for was that bad. I wasn't ready to make a fight over the point, though. English spoken any way but one, even on the planet Daddy made me visit all. We mought as well throw him back again." I looked down at the plodding, unhappy creatures they were driving didn't want to be fried. I even convince myself that I'm hell on wheels. great-grandmother brought from Earth. The thing is that inside it, The country leveled into a great rolling valley and the trees gave the green creatures, which surprised me since the ones I'd seen before But it relieved me. I thought they might have been eating them or something. By the time I came out on the other side, I was sick. My hands were stone, wood and brick. Out of date. Out of time, really. There were but I decided I'd not tell anybody different until I found what made the clocks tick on this planet. swarmed. I saw a family come out of a house—a father and children. It was the most foul thing I've ever seen. It struck me then—these people were Free Birthers! I felt a wave of nausea and I closed my eyes until it passed. The first thing you learn in school is that if it weren't for idiot and criminal people like these, Earth would never have been destroyed. The evacuation would never have had to take place, and eight billion people wouldn't have died. There wouldn't have been eight billion people. But, no. They bred and they spread and they devoured everything in their path like a cancer. They gobbled up all the resources that Earth had and crowded and shoved one another until the final war came. I am lucky. My great-great-grandparents were among those who had enough foresight to see what was coming. If it hadn't been for them and some others like them, there wouldn't be any humans left anywhere. And I wouldn't be here. That may not scare you, but it scares me. What happened before, when people didn't use their heads and wound up blowing the Solar System apart, is something nobody should forget. The older people don't let us forget. But these people had, and that the Council should know. For the first time since I landed on Tintera, I felt I'd had two bad shocks on this day, but they weren't the last. In the sky. The dying sun colored it a deep red. Back again? I wondered what had gone wrong. One more enigma. Where was it from? Not here. Even if you know how, and I felt defeated and tired. Not much farther along the road, I came to dear dead mother. But, as it turned out, they were just enough to not." Horst growled a retort. I decided that it was time for me to leave the I should have known that they would have to pen the animals up for the leave. I never got the chance. dragging me and dropped me in a heap. "Make any noise," he said, "and my jacket. said in a voice far colder than mine could ever be, because it was until it cracked and fell apart. face and then nothing.

<question>:
What happened to Earth?

<options>:
A People divided into small, vicious colonies
B Overpopulation caused a war
C People discovered more planets and chose to move
D Everyone chose to live in space

<answer>:

B