Watery world

I'd be willing to introduce a more fantastical reasoning and use a Rock of Limitless Water or something similar to that.

Edited by sifsand on Jul 15th 2019 at 12:46:15 PM

Well...the sci-fi equivalent to A Wizard Did It is usually The Precursors Did It so if pressed we found some weird alien tech on some asteroid, turned it on, and nearly drowned the planet before we managed to turn it off.

How advanced was the technology before the flood? I remember a semi-humorous XKCD strip where he projected what the Earth would look like if all the oceans drained out through some kind of portal (I think it was on to the Moon?). If you dont mind a healthy soft-flavor of sci-fi, then just run the portal the other way (from an ocean planet to the top of a mountain on Earth).

I'm not sure that any tech level could let you do something like that, but it's a hilarious image regardless.

The original column (I'm fairly certain it was in the What If column) didn't specify where the water went exactly but the follow up decided to dump it on Mars and see what would happen there.

Yeah, that's the one.

[World's Scientists]: "We have good news and bad news..."

As funny as this is, we should get back on topic.

Does it make more sense to have submerged cities or floating cities? Floating cities may be cheaper but that also means you've got to deal with cyclones.

Both have serious issues, but the biggest, to my mind, would be how we manage to engineer and construct these cities while the planet's land mass is being swallowed by years-long, torrential rain.

Tectonic shifts. You'd also need to consider tectonic shifts. On Earth, there's not a single continent or continent fragment (think Madagascar) that HASN'T been fully submerged under an ocean or sea at some point in its geologic history.

Hell, there are two of them still existing today! And a number of other areas that are submerged today that weren't in the last glacial maximum. (For example, the Dogger Bank in the North Sea used to be Doggerland.)

I accept that over hundreds of thousands of years tectonic activity might sink some of the landmass of the planet. But all of it, in a few dozen years? A simple guess of the energy that would release tells us that it would be an event larger than anything that's ever happened to the Earth short of a planetary-level collision. Everyone would certainly die.

Not to rain on anyone's parade (ha!), and not to imply that fiction can't bend the rules — it is fiction, after all — but so many writers fall victim to the scale fallacy. They fail to appreciate just how freaking big our planet is.

Edited by Fighteer on Jul 16th 2019 at 9:59:42 AM

I would also add that very few people appreciate the time scales that geological timescales work with. There's a reason geologists (and related disciplines such as palaeontology) coined the term "Deep Time". (And then cosmologists nicked the term and ran off laughing at geologists and their quaint ideas of a long time.)

Tectonic plates move on the order of centimetres and tens of centimetres a year. A single kilometer (just over half a mile for the metrically challenged) takes longer than the entire span of recorded history at the fastest recorded rate at the moment (10.3cm/yr)

Edited by KnightofLsama on Jul 17th 2019 at 10:19:52 PM

^ That'd be why if I were building a watery world, it'd not be Earth but somewhere else that has had such tectonic shifts and climate changes that rose sea levels above most continents.

Because on Earth, the stuff needed to put say Denver Colorado (elevation 5280 feet or 1609 meters) underwater would require the entire landmass of North America be shifted down catastrophically at least a kilometer on top of every last drop of water on this planet being wrung out and cast into the oceans. We're talking the film 2012 kind of shifts.

Edited by MajorTom on Jul 17th 2019 at 6:03:35 AM

Not to start a derail, but one of the things that bugs me about films like 2012 and The Day After Tomorrow is how badly they misrepresent the science (and the scientists), making a laughingstock of real environmental messages.

Edited by Fighteer on Jul 17th 2019 at 11:59:43 AM