The Midnight Sky (2020)

Augustine Lofthouse, a reclusive academic, has devoted his life to finding habitable planets where humanity can expand. In the present day, he meets Jean Sullivan after giving a presentation at a gala and the two form a romantic relationship. After a pregnancy scare, Sullivan leaves him because of his obsession with work and his inability to bond with other human beings. Several years later, when Lofthouse encounters her again, she tells him they have a daughter, whom he chooses not to meet.

Thirty years later, in 2049, an unspecified disaster has wiped out most of the Earth’s population and left the surface contaminated with ionizing radiation. Lofthouse, now much older, is the only person inhabiting a large Arctic base. A recent flashback shows him refusing to join the evacuation crew with Mason Mosley, knowing he does not have long to live due to an unidentified serious illness requiring hemodialysis and medical equipment at the base. He searches the base’s computer systems for active crewed space missions to warn about the situation on Earth, and finds only one: the interplanetary craft Aether, returning from an exploration of Jupiter’s habitable moon K-23, which Lofthouse discovered. The crew of the Aether, meanwhile, believe their systems to be faulty, as to why they have lost contact with Earth. Lofthouse finds his antenna is too weak to contact them, even after calculating them to be in range.