Experience a world where the 1950s never ended.

It is the year 2055. A lot of wacky super-science from 50s science fiction works to some extent. Radiation does make everything glow a sickly green, but the only superpower most people get is a horrible death as they turn to glowing mush. It does make insects and such bigger, which resulted in a couple of problems in the 20th century, but now the big bug infestations are limited mostly to the jungles of divided Vietnam, where they are cultivated to discourage border crossings. On the wackier side, aliens did crash-land on Earth twice: in Tunguska and in Roswell, and reverse-engineering of this technology led to a longer and more fruitful Space Race. The Soviets were the first to put a man in space, and maintain their dominance of Earth orbit, but the Americans were the first on the Moon and continue to dominate there. The Inner Solar System is full of bases from the two superpowers, and there are some probes in the Outer Solar System as well. Earth orbit and the Moon are filled to the brim with laser and missile installations, ready to rain unholy destruction on Earth should there ever be a Third World War. Atomic technology was more readily accepted, phasing out fossil fuels completely by the year 2000 with the advent of a new generation of atomic cars. Alien technology led to the development of antigravity technology and flying cars; the choppers in Vietnam resembled flying saucers more than they did the Hueys of OTL. Rockets are still popular for space travel and quick aerial travel, as antigravity is slow and steady. Aliens also led to lots of ray guns and lasers, which have replaced bullets entirely. Robots are an entirely human invention. Computers are still the size of a room, but robots linked to computers via the home computer (typically located in the basement) are common as maids and pets. Artificial intelligence is still rather stupid by the 2050s, but they are in command of the superpowers' nuclear arsenals and they are getting smarter by the year. Oh, and there are vaults everywhere, because everyone is afraid of nuclear war. There are enough fallout shelters around the world to house each of the superpowers' population, but unfortunately the rest of the world does not have that luxury, particularly Red China.

Geopolitically, the world has turned more to internationalism. Supranational unions are the name of the game, although the Cold War has destroyed any plans for a truly United Nations (the organization still exists, but it's mostly powerless). The Soviets did it first by consuming the entire Warsaw Pact after the 1953 uprisings, and the rest of the world followed suit. The United States began its own program to create other United Stateses, first in Europe, then in Asia and South America. As the USA expanded to become the United States of North America, it consolidated some of its states into larger cultural areas; the USNA functions identically to the USA otherwise. The American Leave it to Beaver culture has been maintained through force, the counterculture of the Sixties being identified as a communist plot to destabilize America and cleared out by the FBI. Men go to work, women marry young, and wives stay at home. They don't do as much housework as their great-grandmothers did; most of the actual grunt work, from vacuuming to cooking, is done by robots. However, unsupervised robots are prone to acts of artificial stupidity, such as putting the turkey in the dishwasher or the baby in the oven, so the housewife's role has evolved to that of robot manager. Ironically, their husbands have similar roles on the factory floor. The Civil Rights movement led to the end of segregation, but with blacks being forcibly integrated into white American culture. The same went for other racial minorities as the years went by, particularly with Asian refugees from the Korean and Chinese wars in the 1970s and Hispanics in the 1990s. This culture has been exported throughout the Free World, to the point that a suburb in Chicago, Saigon, Caracas and Frankfurt are practically identical. The politics of the Free World remains that of maintaining the post-war consensus: Democrats and Republicans both agree on opposing the commies, keeping the missile gap wide, ensuring benefits for the lower classes, and crushing any cultural or ideological dissenters from the American Dream. After all, you never know who could be a damn Russian spy, stealing secrets, rigging elections, breaking into zoos or telling students to ignore their homework. Ironically enough, much the same goes on in the Red World. The Soviets have successfully exported their version of industrial Marxism-Leninism to the Chinese, despite Mao's early objections. Thanks to nuclear power, electrification and industrialization of the communist world has largely been a success. Paranoia over capitalist infiltration remains high, and while the excesses of Stalinism have been denounced, they still think he was a great guy who went too far in a few places.

The Non-Aligned world has more or less become a de facto third bloc. They have armed up to defend themselves, although not to the same degree as the Americans or Soviets. They are more diverse in their political and economic systems. India is a somewhat left-wing democracy, and along with the South African-led United States of Africa reckons itself a successor to the British Empire. The Indian Navy is nothing to sneeze at, although they are nothing compared to the United States Space Force or the Soviet Rocket Corps, seeing as they are still entirely aquatic. The UAR is a Nasserist pseudo-democracy; technically, other parties can win, but the Arab Socialist Union Party seems to always win. Islamic extremism never took off; Arab nationalism is the name of the game, which is why the Arabs are having trouble with ethnic minorities like the Kurds, Persians, and South Sudanese.

As for the aliens, the governments of the world are aware that they will return. A secret society, known only as the Men in Black, was formed by the world governments to defend mankind for that eventuality. Originally, the Men in Black limited their activities to studying alien technology and slowly disseminating it to the outside world, and keeping tabs on possible alien infiltration. However, they realized that mankind's survival needed the heavy militarization provided by the Cold War, and began taking a more direct role in purely human affairs. Attempts to politicize the Men in Black were ultimately unsuccessful, and as the Non-Aligned movement rose to prominence, the organization moved headquarters from Langley to New Delhi. As the superpowers began to take funding away from a clandestine organization that they could not control, the Men in Black resorted to less official means of procuring funding. Shell companies were established to sell clandestine alien technology that blew their purely human competitors out of the water and moles planted in the governments and intelligence agencies of the superpowers. As one last move, the Men in Black "officially" closed shop, moving their operations to other entities. Since the 21st century, the Men in Black are actually the primary instigators of the continuing arms race and the Cold War, de-escalating events when they threatened mankind's existence, and escalating them when permanent detente was likely. The entire plan is to turn the Sol System into a fortress, one which any alien empire would think twice about wasting resources attacking, and maintaining mankind's meteoric technological rise, all the while keeping mankind from destroying itself. Whether the Men in Black could maintain this balance through the 21st century and into the 22nd is yet to be seen.