Ritchie's death always bothered me.

Their future pans out like this:

Dutch cures Lisa, who then mourns for Ritchie and Robert; he cures himself, then makes more serum from his and Lisa's blood, which then cures all the children.

They take off to somewhere around Big Sur; Dutch and Lisa have children, and as the other, older children of the original group mature, they, too, have kids - all immune.

The Family die within a few years after Matthias kills Neville, as Dutch & Lisa's group aren't about to risk anything for them, especially after they murdered Ritchie.

Dutch & Lisa's group repopulate the earth over the course of centuries and millennia, creating a civilization which at first will be tribal, then small city-states (some using advanced weaponry from the knowledge of the ancients), until the world, after a few thousand years, has come full circle.

New space probes are launched, confirming that ancient astronauts (from NASA) did, indeed, land on the Moon; soon the first manned Moon landings in over 3,000 years commence.

Eventually man builds small colonies on Mars, large space habitats in the LaGrange points near the Earth and the Moon; asteroids are mined; they surpass 20th century man's accomplishments.

At some point, there is another plague released upon the Earth; it kills the majority of humanity; there are some survivors on Earth who notice that the dead are starting to rise and eat the living; the colonies in the solar system, having quarantined themselves, are safe, but are taking no refugees.

The survivors on the Earth at first live a nomadic, tribal-like existence, then a feudal one of small, fortified city-states, safe from the dead.

The colonies in the solar system attempt in vain to find a cure; eventually the dead, who rot far more slowly than normal corpses, fall apart, leaving only the freshly dead to pose a threat; the survivors live in a state of constant war, constant observation of their own sick and injured, ready to put a knife in the skull of any who appear on death's door.

Deemed a threat should they ever once again industrialize and attempt to leave the planet, the colonies come to a consensus that the fortified city-states of Earth are to be eliminated with nuclear weapons; in the genocide, the death toll is estimated at over twenty-five million; a pittance compared with the populations of humanity Earth once had, but one that would still weigh heavy on the hearts and minds of the inhabitants of the colonies throughout the solar system, whose population barely approached four million.

Unmanned robotic visits are made to the Earth many times in the future - but they relay only transmitted date - nothing is allowed to be brought bsck; the contamination remains, with plants and animals unaffected as the plague was genetically engineered to only affect humans - whose home would now and forever be space itself.

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