Though it survived the war, Krypton was scarred deeply by it. The formerly lush garden world was burned and blasted to a desert, and a sterile society—emotionally unlike its predecessor—emerged. The population lived isolated from one another in widely separated technological citadels, shunning all physical and personal contact, to the point that even family members would only interact with each other via communication devices. Procreation became a matter of selecting compatible genetic material to be placed within an artificial womb called a "birthing matrix," the parents almost never met in person and never touched one another. The planetary government was deeply isolationist and forbade space exploration and communication with other worlds.