User blog comment:The Milkman/ME3 Ending: What Went Wrong/@comment-3062992-20120322073616/@comment-4947725-20120322165724

No, what I wanted was not for everyone to die off. No Mass Relays means: The destruction of the mass relays to propagate the energy wave to every Reaper held system makes galactic travel near-impossible until the network can be rebuilt or a new form of interstellar travel can be found. This leaves colonies and any other outposts that rely on an import/export economy to starve, as ordinary FTL travel across the galaxy takes hundreds of years and an unfeasible quantity of fuel. Further, a ship needs to periodically discharge its drive core through contact with a planet's atmosphere or ground, leaving large swaths of empty and unexplored space dangerous to travel without a new relay network or new technology. Armed fleets from every spaceflight-capable race in the galaxy have been left stranded in the Sol Cluster. And while our collection of stars and systems may have enough available resources and suitable planets to house the various displaced alien races, a lack of either or even the various races' previous bad blood with each other could easily cause another war. Unless other colonies or survivors from the fleet are somewhere nearby, It's highly unlikely the crew of the Normandy can found a colony with a sustainable population, as there appears to only be about 30 crew members. Furthermore, depending on the planet, aliens like Garrus and Tali or even the entire crew could starve due to the planet having food inedible to their particular species.