(SPOILER TOPIC?) What the hell happened to Earth???

[chefcook90]

Alright, I get the whole, "life going extinct because the atmosphere flew off into space" thing.

What I DON'T get is why the planet is not only completely deserted, but bizarrely flat.

First weird thing - the NASA base is quite literally the ONLY building left standing on the ENTIRE planet. What happened to all of the other ruins? No way they all degraded while that one place was miraculously spared. I guess you COULD try to say it was protected by the artifact, but that seems like a pretty big stretch.

Second weird thing - there are no mountain biomes on Earth.
Erosion of mountains on earth is a process that normally takes hundreds of millions of years, and that's with the help of water and plant life - two things that no longer exist on Earth. So how the hell did all the mountains on Earth vanish in only 200 years?

Third weird thing - the fact that the planet was 100% abandoned when there are underground cities on even LESS hospitable planets like Mars and Titan.
Fore SOME reason, Earth is the one planet in the game that does NOT spawn random colony buildings or military installations.
Think about it - Earth is 70% covered by water, which means the vast majority of the planet's mineral resources and fossil fuels are being obscured by the oceans. In Starfield, those oceans no longer exist, so Earth SHOULD be experiencing a mining bonanza. All the dead animals from the mass extinction would also make the planet a rich source of cheap hydrocarbons. But NOPE, there are zero mining facilities on earth. Not even abandoned ones.

Fourth weird thing - what the hell is up with this cave I found?! (brb with screenshot)
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3053390330
click below if you want to open it in your browser
https://steamuserimages-a.akamaihd.net/ugc/2♥♥♥♥38842991948779/DDD9BC5619262B27F8C761BDEF7310E61EC74652/?imw=5000&imh=5000&ima=fit&impolicy=Letterbox&imcolor=%23000000&letterbox=false

[chefcook90]

Btw if YOU have managed to find random colony buildings on Earth, PLEASE post screenshots here - I would LOVE to be proven wrong.

But after landing at 20+ different locations to try and find SOMETHING I've all but given up.

[indigo]

Earth's atmosphere does far more than simply provide humans and plants something to breathe. It also protects the Earth from space.

Space, as you don't realize, is not some cold, empty void. It's absolutely filthy. Space suits are made of layers of materials, including layers of bullet-resistant Kevlar. Why?

Because every single time someone goes "outside", they are pelted by space-filth, grains of sand traveling at thousands of feet per second, bits of rock and debris hurtling at ballistic velocity. Without this, astronauts, and even moreso their suits, would simply not survive. Suits would be shredded, air would leak out and people would perish.

So where did Earth's mountains go? Solar winds and space debris that no longer burn up in the atmosphere ground them down, as if the entire planet were placed into a sand-blaster.
Mons Huygens is the Moon's tallest mountain. Its height is 18,046, about half of Mt. Everest, and it too is shrinking, being whittled away by space filth.

Earth simply took the brunt of this, because the Powers that Be decided it deserved it.

[chefcook90]

Originally posted by indigo:

Earth's atmosphere does far more than simply provide humans and plants something to breathe. It also protects the Earth from space.

Space, as you don't realize, is not some cold, empty void. It's absolutely filthy. Space suits are made of layers of materials, including layers of bullet-resistant Kevlar. Why?

Because every single time someone goes "outside", they are pelted by space-filth, grains of sand traveling at thousands of feet per second, bits of rock and debris hurtling at ballistic velocity. Without this, astronauts, and even moreso their suits, would simply not survive. Suits would be shredded, air would leak out and people would perish.

So where did Earth's mountains go? Solar winds and space debris that no longer burn up in the atmosphere ground them down, as if the entire planet were placed into a sand-blaster.
Mons Huygens is the Moon's tallest mountain. Its height is 18,046, about half of Mt. Everest, and it too is shrinking, being whittled away by space filth.

Earth simply took the brunt of this, because the Powers that Be decided it deserved it.

By that logic, shouldn't Olympus Mons be really tiny since Mars lost its magnetosphere 4 BILLION years ago?

Sorry, but your math doesn't add up.

Also doesn't answer the question of how the NASA building is still standing if every mountain on earth got sand-blasted into oblivion.

[Jack]

How do you kill a planet without involving RL enviromental politics.

You create a unrealistic event.

You asked for this.

[chefcook90]

Originally posted by indigo:

So where did Earth's mountains go? Solar winds and space debris that no longer burn up in the atmosphere ground them down, as if the entire planet were placed into a sand-blaster.
Mons Huygens is the Moon's tallest mountain. Its height is 18,046, about half of Mt. Everest, and it too is shrinking, being whittled away by space filth.

I just realized something.

Earth's moon has only ever experienced a tiny fraction of the amount of the seismic activity that the Earth has, so there's little reason for large mountain ranges to form in the first place.

And yet it has a mountain half the size of Mt. Everest, which is still pretty dang massive, despite the fact that the moon has NEVER had an atmosphere to protect it.

So yeah, no, I'm not buying the whole "sand blasted in only 200 years" hypothesis.

[aandaie]

They made the Earth so bad because of current climate change concerns.

It isn't really realistic for the time when the game takes place, since if anything people are doing more now to lessen such things than they ever have. It just seems more like the rest of today's culture that they put in the game, which will kind of severely date it. In 50 years, people will laugh at those aspects of Starfield(if they even remember it.)

I watched a video where Neil Degrasse Tyson comments on how Stephen Hawking was saying something about the need to "Terraform Mars" as a place to live, but Tyson and other people were saying now that it makes far more sense and would be far easier to keep Earth livable.

The same would be true then. There is no way Earth would actually be in that kind of shape and it would make more sense to live underground on Mars as they do in Starfield. If anything, it would be far easier to build underground places on Earth.

I'm kind of hoping that DLC content touches on this, where we do find an underground civilization on Earth that is kind of "out of the loop."

[Wade]

What happened to Earth, and to the whole game? Emil's terrible writing. That's what happened.

[kdodds]

It's not hard science, but even scientists agree that if our magnetosphere collapsed we'd be pretty quickly doomed:
https://science.nasa.gov/science-research/planetary-science/earths-magnetosphere/

Also. It's a freaking game. Did you really expect them to model the entire population of earth? I've already explained, even pre-release, why detailed modelling of an entire planet-sized planet is currently not possible. Simple answer to why the earth is barren? There would be no game if it wasn't. Period.

[chefcook90]

Originally posted by Liquid Inc:

Originally posted by chefcook90:

the NASA base is quite literally the ONLY building left standing on the ENTIRE planet.

Not true, there are other buildings. This being one;

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3053968555

Originally posted by chefcook90:

Third weird thing - the fact that the planet was 100% abandoned when there are underground cities on even LESS hospitable planets like Mars and Titan.
Fore SOME reason, Earth is the one planet in the game that does NOT spawn random colony buildings or military installations.
Think about it - Earth is 70% covered by water, which means the vast majority of the planet's mineral resources and fossil fuels are being obscured by the oceans. In Starfield, those oceans no longer exist, so Earth SHOULD be experiencing a mining bonanza. All the dead animals from the mass extinction would also make the planet a rich source of cheap hydrocarbons. But NOPE, there are zero mining facilities on earth. Not even abandoned ones.

The place was abandoned and left as a monument to humanity, so no one touched it. It's a better reason than "we couldn't make a part of every city, town and village on earth, since it would take us too long to create, so we went the barren dustball idea"?
Atleast they tried to justify it, however odd it seems....

Hey, it's that the building from the loading screen? Glad it's actually in the game :D

As for the planet being left untouched as a monument... wouldn't that just make it a haven for criminals, since the UC doesn't even bother patrolling it?

I doubt Spacers or the Crimson Fleet have any respect for monuments - seems like a place with zero traffic and zero security would make a great place to build a hidden pirate base or smugglers den.

[Paganini]

You can't seriously expect them to somehow recreate the entire Earth. I would probably have done it so that the Earth was completely blown up in some war, and use that as a starting point to introduce serious adversaries to the game.
Two birds with one stone.

[chefcook90]

Originally posted by kdodds:

It's not hard science, but even scientists agree that if our magnetosphere collapsed we'd be pretty quickly doomed:
https://science.nasa.gov/science-research/planetary-science/earths-magnetosphere/

Also. It's a freaking game. Did you really expect them to model the entire population of earth? I've already explained, even pre-release, why detailed modelling of an entire planet-sized planet is currently not possible. Simple answer to why the earth is barren? There would be no game if it wasn't. Period.

Read the whole post man, or at least the headers on the bullets.

We've got underground cities on Mars and Titan, and random procedural generated man-made structures on literally every rock in the settled systems EXCEPT for Earth.

In the latter case, the dev team needed to DISABLE something they had already implemented in the game in order to make Earth completely building-free.

Originally posted by Paganini:

You can't seriously expect them to somehow recreate the entire Earth. I would probably have done it so that the Earth was completely blown up in some war, and use that as a starting point to introduce serious adversaries to the game.
Two birds with one stone.

Never did I say in my OP that I expected them to fully recreate the Earth.
I said I expected there to be at least ONE underground city like Cidonia or New Homestead and the same procedurally generated facilities that every other planet has.

[Liquid Inc]

Originally posted by chefcook90:

As for the planet being left untouched as a monument... wouldn't that just make it a haven for criminals, since the UC doesn't even bother patrolling it?

I doubt Spacers or the Crimson Fleet have any respect for monuments - seems like a place with zero traffic and zero security would make a great place to build a hidden pirate base or smugglers den.

UC patrols the whole of the Sol system, so they'd eventually see a number of CF or Spacer ships sitting in orbit there.
Earth also has no raw resources, like water or food, so they'd have to raid passing UC ships which would soon put them on the radar, and being so close to Mars and Titan would make it a priority target.

a hidden cache location maybe, but you couldn't house something that would be frequently visited there, given the UC patrols and the scanning of the system.

[chefcook90]

Originally posted by Liquid Inc:

Originally posted by chefcook90:

As for the planet being left untouched as a monument... wouldn't that just make it a haven for criminals, since the UC doesn't even bother patrolling it?

I doubt Spacers or the Crimson Fleet have any respect for monuments - seems like a place with zero traffic and zero security would make a great place to build a hidden pirate base or smugglers den.

UC patrols the whole of the Sol system, so they'd eventually see a number of CF or Spacer ships sitting in orbit there.
Earth also has no raw resources, like water or food, so they'd have to raid passing UC ships which would soon put them on the radar, and being so close to Mars and Titan would make it a priority target.

a hidden cache location maybe, but you couldn't house something that would be frequently visited there, given the UC patrols and the scanning of the system.

Nah they don't actually patrol the WHOLE system. Trust me, in my last playthrough I went on a massive murder spree and racked up a 3 million credit bounty with the UC. There were never any patrols around when I jumped to Earth.

Even in that one main story mission with that one Vanguard guy who stopped at the old Nova Galactic shipyard, he was complaining how he keeps telling the UC to send the fleet out to deal with the Spacers on the station, but his requests were being ignored.

So yeah, there are already criminals hanging around in orbit around the planet - they're just avoiding the surface for some strange reason.

[Paganini]

Originally posted by chefcook90:

I said I expected there to be at least ONE underground city like Cidonia or New Homestead and the same procedurally generated facilities that every other planet has.

Okay, fair enough.
But of course, it was simply easier that way.

[ch33353]

The doyalist explanation is that since an accurate depiction of earth would've been time and cost prohibitive to create rather than half assing it they instead destroyed everything.
Watsonian explanation is that the earth was secretly intentionally destroyed to force humanity out into the stars. Most people in universe have no clue what really happened and there could have been a lot more going on that we haven't seen yet. Bethesda likes to give players contradictory and obviously false world building lore. Don't trust the official story.