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Message: <blockquote data-quote="s/LaSH" data-source="post: 539799" data-attributes="member: 6929">I'd suggest taking into consideration overall geographical changes to the world. Sure, you wouldn't be able to tell from orbit...... or would you? Go find a map of the world. Look at New Zealand, the North Island in particular. See that lake in the middle? It's quite obvious. Right, that's a volcano crater - not the mountain, that was much bigger and got blown up in the last eruption, just the top. Taupo (for so it is named) is thought to erupt every ten thousand years or so... the last time it happened, the Romans and Chinese wrote about unusually vivid sunsets for years. If that thing goes off again, you are looking at climate change, and if our science is right, your game stands a good chance of intersecting with the next big boom. Krakatoa and Thera were weaklings.And of course there's a chance that parts of California would slide into the sea (or form an island); the Himalayas would be even taller (although not on the scale of kilometers, and the tops could well fall off - it happened to New Zealand's Mount Cook a couple of years ago, you might want to use that idea); Iceland would have many new islands growing up out of the sea; coral reefs might well form new islands in the Pacific and Indian oceans; Hawaii would probably have erupted and changed drastically; and Antarctica is always spitting out new icebergs that could end up in unusual places. That's just off the top of my head.There was an interesting part in Stephen Baxter's Space (published a year or two ago) where an astronaut returns from far distant star systems only to find, much as he expected, that humanity's gone down the gurgler in various ways. He lands in Africa somewhere, and finds a local tyrant running quite a nice nation, with hot running water and stuff. It's powered by an underground nuclear waste dump, where slaves go to work. You don't need to understand it to use it.And does anyone think China will still be around then? Maybe not cosmetically the China we know today, but looking into the Chambers Dictionary of World History I see 14 dynasties since 1766BC, not counting 'interregnums', 'periods', the pre-record-keeping Xia, the current regime, and eras described as plural dynasties. I think you'd still have some kind of China in ten thousand years, although it could be ruled by Tibetans, Mongols, Vietnamese or some bizarre foreign dynasty (as I always like to point out, Genghis Khan, that asian warlord, had green eyes and red hair).</blockquote>

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