roseembolism (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
roseembolism) wrote2008-10-24 10:24 am
roseembolism) wrote2008-10-24 10:24 am
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[UTGM] Foolish Mega-engineerng Projects
As part of my worldbuilding project, I'm wondering what sort of megaengineering projects might be undertaken by people with far more power than common sense.
I'm not talking about "small scale" projects, like flooding the Dead Sea, or a sea-level canal through Panama. I'm thinking of insane projects at the scale of Atlantropa, or even larger. Like deciding to lower the sea level by 100 meters to get more land area (and facilitate paleolithic archeology), or focusing statites on Antarctica to melt the ice pack. Or both at the same time, leading to a lot of engineers shouting at each other. these are the sort of things done by people who have the ability and attitude to shrug and say "Oh we'll just clone or build robot duplicates of any species that go extinct, and we'll adjust the climate manually if we have to".
Any ideas?
Under the Green Moon Info:
A big part of this exercise is thinking about some of the weird things that the Precursor civilizations may have done in the 30,000 years that separate Now from the time of UTGM. The world in the game is currently in a low-energy, low-impact mode, but that hasn't always been the case. The presence of humanity (in the broad sense) is everywhere in UTGM: aside from tons of artifacts (you can't go anywhere without stumbling over some old ruin), large areas of the world have been shaped.
Possibilities:
The World Tree: one entire subcontinent has been overrun by a gigantic plant that is it's own ecosystem. Aside from having a huge diversity of forms that mimic ecological layers, at periodic intervals immense trees that would make Miyazaki blush have sprung up, growing up to a kilometer high. The peoples that live in this artificial biome can get all of their needs met by this single uber-plant, and have a surprisingly sophisticated civilization.
The Hex River: on a vast plain, someone took a river and it's tributaries, and altered it into a series of canals that form a hex grid over hundreds of square miles. the project was one of brute-force engineering, as the canals sheer through hills, escarpments and other river systems to form the grid. Why? Nobody knows.
The Desert of Pits: So exactly why did some Precurser create a grid of 512 holes, each a half kilometer wide, and two kilometers deep, reinforced by super-strong concrete? It's an immense feat, and there's no sign of why it was done.
The Moon: There's a reason it's green, and has a blue rim around it. On clear nights one can even see lights on the unlighted portion.
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And of course Astrology and related sarts are completely different, because few people even know about the "fixed" stars. To most people "stars" are the countless wandering lights that traverse a near-infinite number of orbits.
The planets are still known of course, since they are brighter. And the blue of Mars and Venus are highly noticable....
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-Magnetic monopoles buried all over a plain, forming glyphs or artwork with magnetic field lines in the fashion of the Nazca lines. But bigger. and done with magnetism.
-Bioengineering: Giant creatures that seem to violate the square-cube law by cheating (bones reinforced with ultrastrong materials, abnormally dense and strong muscles, multi-pump circulatory systems, distributed ganglia for processing instead of a central brain)
-The Refractorium: An impervious cube of matter at some amusing gigascale that radiates a field that drops off as the cube of the distance. The speed of light in vacuum slows according to the strength of the field, causing various sorts of wacky physics effects within (possibly messing with causality). Any damage done to the cube regenerates slowly but continuously.
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Also, how about rivers, really big rivers (or more likely river). Perhaps you have something like the Columbia River or the Nile, except that it's 20-50 km wide and several thousand miles long. For extra fun, what if it (or perhaps another slightly less huge river) suddenly vanishes, going over a vast waterfall, into a huge hole deep into the earth. The hole is big enough to lower ropes into and not get washed away definitely appears to have been bored into the Earth (although, it would now be very worn). No one has made it more than half a mile down into the hole, and throwing lights down there reveals that the hole goes for a long way down. What might be down there?
For other riverine fun, you could have a braided river. Instead of tributaries flowing into a single large river that then fans out into a delta at the coast, how about tributaries that come together into several rivers that then intersect, branch apart and create dozens or hundreds of islands several miles across in the midst of a huge network of rivers.
You could also have some sort of weird Underdark created using effectively eternal lights, strangely engineered life-forms, and an underground sea, possibly complete with retro-engineered dinosaurs.
Also, how about some huge floating balloon cities, even better, what if some or all of these cities are alive. The buildings are of wood (engineered to include carbon nanotubes and suchlike to strength) and the upper surface is green and is effectively one huge leaf (the lower half would be transparent. In some, the difference between floating city and floating jungle would definitely blur.
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