Monday, November 17, 2008

In The Future....

Fallout 3 has been an amazing experience so far. It's pretty awesome the amount of detail they put into the game. The entire Washington DC area is done very well in a post-apocalyptic state. I happened upon the White House in my explorations and it was pretty amusing. This got me to thinking though, if sometime in the future, humanity is indeed wiped out to only be rediscovered eons later by some other curious sentient race, how much of it would be left? Would they see ruins of great cities or more likely, find little to no traces of our legacy? This site has a few insights and links into such a possibility and I found it a pretty interesting read.

One of the most interesting things it mentions is how can mankind protect these future discoverers from our mistakes such as radioactive materials? If you were an archaeologist in the future and you learn of this great (hopefully) previous civilization who had all this technology and you find out the burial site of extremely deadly radioactive waste, what kind of warning signs could possibly dissuade you from going inside to your doom? This D&D metaphor the link provides is particularly illuminating on this subject:

"GM: Having climbed for days, your party reaches a summit in the Sierra Nevadas. There is a clearing here, with a raised dais adorned with engravings depicting horrible, ritualistic deaths. Many of them feature people touching barrels and being smote with disease and suffering. A heavy metal door hangs ajar, but it is surrounded by the contorted corpses of other mountaineers.
D&D Player: There must be phat loot in here! "

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I say send the rouge to check it out, and if that doesn't work, send the rogue.

And if you get irradiated, L2resist.

moonfleck said...

lol.. its so true, you know if you see a cave door adorned by massive images of death, there is some treasure inside..