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- Conversely, The Postman would've the future of Pokémon Ruby, had Team Magma has succeeded in their plan to use Grodoun to drought the the world.
The main Headscratcher about the film is that there simply isn't enough water on the planet, solution? Just add water. A large enough ice asteroid would explain why the sea level is so high, it also caused the mass extinction of most of the other types of creatures on the planet which is why we don't see many. Also maybe the asteroid contains lots of sodium to explain the salt levels in the water.
- Ice asteroids are way too small to seriously increase the amount of water to such levels, and would be far more destructive. If the world's water levels increased by 300 meters, and we know it was more than that, then the asteroid would have to be 330 kilometers in diameter. 36600 times more destructive than the one that wiped out the dinosaurs. It would break the crust, it would cause a nuclear winter, it would produce earthquakes greater than have ever been seen in the last four billennia. It would wipe everything and everyone. Nobody could survive it.
- Not to mention, an asteroid would probably throw up enough debris into the atmosphere to cause a new ice age, which would cause the ice caps to expand, and make the water level around the world go down.
- According to My Calculations, in order to actually get the sea to rise 25,000 feet (which would cover all the continents except for a few mountains in the Himalayas which, logically, becomes Dryland) it would take a single comet over 2,000 kilometers in diameter. Impacts with stuff like that gets into Earth-Shattering Kaboom levels.
- Well there goes that theory. How about a series of smaller asteroids over a longer time-span. Highly unlikely granted but this is WMG.
- There was a comet(?) which hit Jupiter several years ago which broke up into a number of smaller pieces before impact, leading to a row of smaller visible impact marks instead of one large one. Perhaps something similar happened here, with a giant ice comet breaking up into clouds of debris and making a series of smaller impacts, with most of each piece melting in the atmosphere and coming down as rain instead of making a solid impact?
- What if it only went through the atmosphere never hitting any solid or liquid?
- What about a massive and continual barrage of ice asteroids instead of just one really huge one?
- Perhaps an ice planet was struck by a world destroying asteroid and we ended up bombarded with many large, but manageable ice asteroids that over time changed the world into what it is in the film.
- Maybe intentionally, maybe unintentionally by an AI terraforming craft, but instead of the extra water being deposited by comets (which are destructive), the terraforming ship picked up a few comets, melted them, added the needed salinity and pumped the water down to the surface via a temporary Space Elevator. Aliens will get here when they get here, point is Earth is stuck with more water than we can shake a stick at. (Hey, if the Battle: Los Angeles aliens can reduce the sea level in a day, then these guys can pump it up.)
- Thorny is why we didn't fight it off. I'm guessing that the water was pumped down in such quantities and so fast coastal communities didn't have a chance, and think of how many National Capitals are near sea level, too.
- This might explain the "whalefin" monster with its bizarre vertical mouth; no Earth fish, aquatic mammal or even invertebrate has a mouth that runs up and down. Either the aliens may be trying to rid Earth's seas of its native predators to make room for their own species, or it might have been accidentally released, the way zebra mussels were in the Great Lakes.
- That's a neat idea - so many stories have "water looters", like in V (1983), but this idea inverts that.
There's whole continents still around, just nowhere near where these folks are.
- THAT... explains quite a bit.
My theory is that the ice caps did melt, but acted as they would in real life, flooding islands and costal areas. The flooding of several nations ended up sparking a nuclear war, causing many to flee by boat. The EMPs generated by the nukes wiped out navigation equipment and led to many people being stranded. These people would find shelter on oil rigs and large ships. The radiation would accumulate on the coastlines, because one: many large cities are costal, and two: radiation caught in rivers would eventually make its way to the coast. Anyone who acually found dry land would die of radiation poisoning. After generations passed, everyone assumed that dry land was now underwater. In reality, most of the worlds landmass still exists in various forms, from post-apocalyptic wasteland, to small villages and surviving wilderness, to rebuilt civilizations. Everybody in Waterworld are just wandering around the middle of the pacific convinced that dry land isn't real. Oh, and this explains where the pirates get their gas, ammo, and factory rolled cigarettes. They trade (or more likely steal) from land-based societies. Hell, they may even have originated on land, starting out as raiders who stumbled across an oil tanker, and discovered that there's a bunch of defenseless morons out in the middle of the ocean who don't know that land exists.
- This might also explain the whalefin monster; a mutation resulting from nuclear radiation. Hell, even the Mariner himself has been stated in-universe to be a mutant, so we know mutants are a thing in this world.
- Disregarding the deleted scene indicating that Dry Land at the end of the movie is the peak of Mt. Everest but also taking the sunken city visited being Denver into account, a flood map program will show you exactly how much of the world would still be above water for this to work—setting it to 4400 meters indicates that most of the Tibetan Plateau is still above water, the Andes have become an archipelago, and—interestingly enough—Mr. Ararat, the supposed resting place of Noah's Ark, is also still above water.
- Think about it we never actually see the oceans in fallout and the Pirates in the movie were vary Raider like. mayhep the world was not flooded completely perhaps this is happening in some god forsaken stretch of oacen between the east and west.
- By the far, far future, maybe 5 or 10 thousand years after the film, society begins to revert back to more primitive civilizations, and had forgotten the society that came before. The magic in Earthsea is just sufficiently advanced technology.
When the sea levels rose, much of humanity died, but those who did became either the Atollers or Smokers. Meanwhile, the many nuclear power plants worldwide began leaking radiation unabated, causing mutations. These mutations were the next evolution of sea-life. Creatures such as squids, octopi, anemones, crabs, lobsters, sea urchins, and jellyfish evolved and mutated to the point where they were able to instantly change their physical form to a humanoid, or simply became anthropomorphic. A human crossbred with one of them, giving rise to the gilled humans (which explains where the Mariner came from).
Humanity is too busy surviving and fighting each other to realize that the evolved sea life has managed to create their own landmasses to restart civilization.
It's been long enough since the ice caps melted that people aren't quite sure why or how it happened. But, it stands to reason that it must have happened because of someone/thing, right? So the people, looking for someone/thing to blame end up inventing a quasi-religious belief that the mutants (the only people who would seemingly benefit from all the water) created the situation. As such, mutants are hated, despite the fact that they'd be really handy to have around, because it's "totally their fault" anyway.
- Oooo! Maybe this is the X-Men universe! Some water-mutant DID create this!
