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Rocket your D&D 5E and Level Up: Advanced 5E games into space! Alpha Star Magazine Is Launching... Right Now!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Banshee16" data-source="post: 5281012" data-attributes="member: 7883">No, I haven't read those.  Sounds like she's outlining almost a "Waterworld" kind of scenario.I'm not sure that melting all the ice caps would drown everyone.  I mean, there's a lot of ice in the ice caps....but to cover all the land on this planet?  Though, as pointed out by others, a big proportion of the population lives along the coasts, so people *would* be affected.  I live in the middle of the continent, so I'm not too worried about having my home inundated under a sea.  I do live in an earthquake zone....but we average about 3 "major" quakes a century, and we just had one, so I figure by the time it happens again I'll be almost 70....and in any case, this particular one didn't inflict much damage at all, since most of the buildings here have earthquake tolerance anticipated in their construction.I don't think I've seen those novels though.  Maybe I'll have to check the local library.I find the topic fascinating.  I have a brother who's an engineer, and we used to talk a lot about space exploration, what was possible according to science, what was not, etc.In many ways, if you take out the Cylons, I think Battlestar Galactaca's take on space is probably closer to reality than Star Wars or Star Trek, for instance.  Lots of inconceivably vast, empty space, almost insurmountable distances to cover, incredibly hostile environments, and maybe the very occasional oasis *if* you have some kind of FTL type travel.  Even if we find life, it might not be until we get 300 light years out, and might be something with no sense of resemblance to anything we could expect.  According to the limits of our knowledge, don't scientists think that there could be carbon or silicon based life forms.  But maybe you could have something completely incompatible with us, that breaths different atmospheric gases, has a different kind of lifestyle, and can't be communicated with.  Or we could planets with life, but no intelligent life.  Or ones whose touch is poisonous to us.  Or we finally find a world out there with life on it, but they breath a combination of gases that would be toxic to humans, so we couldn't live there anyways.And, as someone else mentioned earlier in the thread, even if we found compatible life, that might not be a good thing.  "They" might have bacteria which can make the leap to be able to either affect humans, or have humans act as carriers, so our astronauts bring the bacteria back to Earth, in turn introducing it to other species, or to something in our food supply, which could have very bad effects.All this is focusing on the negative, of course.  Finding life on other worlds could be one of the things that becomes the most unifying moments we've ever faced as a species.  Instead of humans dividing into groups, and working against each other, we might find a unity in realizing that we're not alone, and that, compared to some of the life out there, skin colour and religion don't matter, and we're all just people.Banshee</blockquote>

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