zompist bboard

Have you ever planed out anything about Almea's future... you know what the inhabitants will look like after evolution... tectonics after a few million or billion years.. anything along those lines?

Nah... I don't even know the next few centuries, except in broad strokes. It's hard enough to come up with Almea's present-day biology, much less its future...

As far as the next few centuries are concerned, this might be an opportunity to pick up something that was briefly mentioned on the Count of Years thread. Dr Jay had pointed out that if there really was an earlier high-tech civilisation on Almea, it probably would have consumed all the planet's natural resources. Mark then explained that this would just apply to non-renewable energy sources like coal and oil.

That allows some interesting future histories of Almean technology. If there's really no coal left, they won't be able to get much of a steam-engine based industry even if they invent the steam engine. (Perhaps they could use wood or charcoal instead, but not for long before they would have burned all forests).

But since they're already doing a lot of scientific reasearch and experimentation, it's quiet likely that they'll sooner or later play around with electricity and discover the principle of the dynamo (if the laws of electrodynamics are the same on Almea). The windmill and the watermill were already known in mediavel times, so it shouldn't be to difficult for them to get electricity from wind and water. (The main reason why we aren't that much into these is that we always had coal and oil available so far):

This, however, wouldn't give them a modern industrial economy, because that also requires some things wich need amounts of heat that can only be reached by high-level combustion, such as industrial blast furnaces. It might be interesting to imagine how the technology of a society that has electricity but doesn't have access to coal and oil, and thus can't produce large amounts of steel and metal tools, might look like.

After that, they'll probably develop atomic energy at some point (though I don't know wich technologies were required for the R&D work that led to it). Now, strictly spoken atomic energy is a non-renewable energy source, too, but you can get so much of it from so little base material that I doubt that an ancient advanced civilisation on Almea had enough time to eat up all the planet's uranium resources (given that it has some).

If the Verdurians already have a well-working infrastructure of wind and water power plants at that stage, they might think twice about wether they should start using such a risky technology at all.

At the same time, a country's power might depend on how many rivers it has and how windy it is, and there might be wars for the regions with the most water and wind energy.

A different possible future timeline entirely might happen if the earlier civilisation consumed most of the coal and oil, but left just enough for 50 or 100 years of industry. In this case, Almeans might invent the steam- and the combustion engine just to see their most modern societies collapse after a few generations, so that after this, people see that time as a misguided development.

In either case Erelaean nations might start to send their fleets to all parts of the planet in order to get wood and charcoal from the forests there, either for winning electricity or for firing steel mills. That, of course, wouldn't be nice.