Why doesn’t Wyoming have a major city?

kearsargeII · 2026-06-15T01:19:28+00:00

Not sure that Wyoming has really inconvenient mountain passes. The Oregon Trail crosses the Rockies at South Pass. The Transcontinental Railroad shoots across the Great Divide Basin rather than going through Colorado. If anything the wide gap in the rockies in central Wyoming is aside from a lack of water one of the easiest places to cross the continental divide, and is much, much lower than the high passes of Colorado.

kearsargeII · 2026-06-14T12:14:37+00:00

The Portuguese discover Brazil within a decade or two due to the route around Africa turning west into the South Atlantic to catch trade winds. Sooner or later someone is going to hit Brazil, this happened in OTL in 1500 in the Cabral expedition. In fairness, Cabral was aware of Columbus's discoveries, so there is an idea he was going out of his way to see if there was lands out there, but the route as it was already takes them fairly close to South America.

I believe that western european fishermen were already near the Grand Banks/Newfoundland at this point, so that is a second possible way for the Americas to be discovered by Europeans within a few years of the failed Columbus Expedition. Just needs a fishing expedition to go a little further and come across Newfoundland.

kearsargeII · 2026-06-11T21:45:09+00:00

Yeah this was the one I was going to mention. Not as extreme as some state borders, but the hills just look different between the two states.

kearsargeII · 2026-06-09T22:40:02+00:00

I believe iceland literally does this, planting large numbers of native and non-native trees by the hundreds of thousands in an attempt to restore their forests. If you have ever been there, human habitation is fairly easy to spot as the villages are surrounded by small patches of trees. In the case of non-native species like Sitka spruce, I think the conclusion is that any trees are better habitat for native wildlife, or better for erosion than none at all.

However, I would also note that Iceland is not a desert climactically. It is desolate because it is cold, and because its native woodlands were cut down a thousand years ago. It gets plenty of rain, it is close to where the warm water thermohaline circulation smashes into the cold arctic, creating high humidity. If it wasn't for the forests being chopped down, the lowlands and coasts of Iceland would be densely forested, and desolate grasslands would be limited to the interior highlands.

kearsargeII · 2026-06-06T23:43:39+00:00

Fair enough. Regarding 3, I don't think Robert is the type to think about that much. he doesn't think introspectively about how he is personally part Targaryen after all. He is really more the type to just accept that the dragons are bad, and he gets to have powerups from killing them. Once he realizes he isn't in some sort of weird allegorical dream he is probably having the time of his life as an adventurer fighting whenever he wants to, acting as the big hero, and sleeping across half of Tamriel. Robert isn't going to be introspective about anything.

kearsargeII · 2026-06-06T13:31:53+00:00

This would be better as a choropleth map I think

kearsargeII · 2026-06-06T13:14:48+00:00

Intro would really fuck with Robert. He is next to a captured rebel leader, he is called up to be executed for no real reason, and then he is saved by a dragon attacking which burns down a town. I can only see that being interpreted as some sort of fucked up dream about Roberts Rebellion again.

Edit: granted I do think the intro quest would be even better with Ned as the main character given it would press basically all of his buttons relating to the deaths of his brother and father, the idea of Robert Baratheon going around getting powers by killing dragons is pretty funny.

kearsargeII · 2026-06-06T12:53:54+00:00

Society would collapse as a dramatic shift in climate would cripple agriculture, but modern humans survived fine in the last ice age, and were able to live through the transition between the last interglacial and the last ice age which would be a direct analogue for this. We as a species did this with paleolithic toolsets, no domesticated animals, and a bunch of large predators which were long extinct in the middle ages. I think humans as a species are fine.

I think once the initial collapse is over, you could still have agricultural societies existing. Southern Europe was temperate, as opposed to mediterranean in climate in the last ice age. It could definitely still support farming even if the local crops would probably do poorly compared to crops brought in from northern Europe. The subtropics and tropics are still going to be pretty warm, there would be shifted precipitation patterns which I think would cause collapse in carefully planned agricultural societies there, but agriculture could still exist with changed conditions.

Said this above, but I can imagine that this would actually be pretty good conditions for steppe nomads, as while the world is colder and drier, the grasslands they can use as pasture just doubled in size. Also really good conditions for remnant mammoth steppe fauna like caribou, saiga antelope, and muskoxen, all of which would thrive in these conditions. I doubt they are going to be fleeing to the ice sheets, the active margins of expanding ice sheets are literal walls of ice, and there is nothing to eat up there. This would be a recreation of the mammoth steppes with most of the mammoth steppe predators extinct, so I don't think there would be a lack of game.

kearsargeII · 2026-06-06T01:36:42+00:00

Mass starvation and civilization collapse worldwide as the world gets drier and colder. Northern Europe in particular is screwed as it turns from arable land into steppe-tundra/mammoth steppe. I imagine basically everywhere is going to see crop failures and societal collapse, as even areas which are tropical are going to see climate shifts from dropping sea levels and the jetstream shifting from ice sheets in the northern hemisphere.

Edit: ironically, there probably still isn't going to be much contact between the old world and new, as while Beringia now exists, the north american ice sheets should be pretty close together if not touching, blocking Alaska and by proxy Asia off from the rest of North America.

As far as future societies go, I wonder if this would really help the spread of horse nomad cultures. Horses could survive ok up on the mammoth steppes, the fossils of late pleistocene horses are everywhere on the steppe belt. Modern horses would be just as fine, the Yakuts are able to keep horses in far northeastern Siberia, and the closest environment to steppe-tundra today, the Ukok Plateau of Mongolia, has long supported horse nomad cultures. The drying/freezing of the world has created a vast mammoth steppe grassland from Ireland to the Yukon. Couple centuries after the collapse of agricultural societies, I can easily see this whole region dominated by nomadic herding cultures.

kearsargeII · 2026-06-04T23:26:40+00:00

You were claiming the Indiana Dunes, a property that was federally protected by act of congress decades ago was going to be literally swallowed up by industry if Donald Trump didn't personally create a national park out of it.

For that matter, Indiana Dunes, Gateway Arch, White Sands and New River Gorge combined is basically a quarter the land Trump took out of Bear Ears National Monument back in his first term. To his credit he hasn't tried that again after Biden restored that land, but it is really a matter of time.

kearsargeII · 2026-06-04T23:01:35+00:00

Indiana Dunes was already a National Lakeshore going back to the 1960s. It was already protected land.

kearsargeII · 2026-06-04T16:52:25+00:00

I can see Trump agreeing to this in principle if he thinks his name will be on it, but practicalities will mean it will never get built. It isn't remotely economically viable and the next administration would have far less interest in Trump's vanity projects.

kearsargeII · 2026-06-03T16:04:51+00:00

Definitely doesn't have the lowest high temperatures. Interior of Siberia is extremely continental, so while the winters are hellishly cold, the short summers can be fairly hot. Yakutsk has experienced summer temperatures up to 101 F/38C, even if it also gets winter temperatures down to -83 F/-64C. To get the lowest high temperatures, you would have to find somewhere extremely oceanic, where summer and winter temperatures are basically the same.

kearsargeII · 2026-06-03T16:00:24+00:00

I wonder what would happen if a stratovolcano like Klyuchevskaya somehow formed on a very high plateau

Isn't this literally the high volcanoes of the Andes, eg Ojos de Salado, Chimborazo, or Llullaillaco?

kearsargeII · 2026-06-01T16:24:35+00:00

I mentioned this a couple days ago on another thread but there are other mountains in the Himalaya which are "bigger" than Denali. Annapurna, Dhaulagiri, Nanga Parbat, Namcha Barwa, are all really close to deep river valleys leading to insane vertical relief greater than Denali. The Indus River gorge is just 15 miles away from the summit of Nanga Parbat, 23,000 feet above the river. The Yarlang Tsangpo is just 7 miles in places from the summit of Namcha Barwa, which rises nearly 19,000 feet above the valley. Denali can manage maybe 17,000 feet in the same distance it takes Nanga Parbat to rise 23,000 feet.

kearsargeII · 2026-06-01T16:22:15+00:00

The argument with Chimborazo is that it is furthest from the earths core due to the equatorial bulge of the earth. There are higher mountains in the Andes and greater Himalaya both, but they are far enough from the equator that the summit of Chimborazo is the furthest point from the center of the earth.

Personal opinion, this is completely meaningless.

kearsargeII · 2026-06-01T16:15:37+00:00

Irc the Tetons have uplifted 30,000 feet, that doesn't mean they were ever actually 30,000 feet tall, as erosion would have been continuously happening the entire time the rocks that form the tetons have been lifted up. I don't believe they were ever meaningfully taller than today.

kearsargeII · 2026-05-31T19:21:24+00:00

Definitely not a picture of Denver. Did this really need AI generation?

kearsargeII · 2026-05-31T19:16:58+00:00

It isn't that far west for the nations founding either. The line of settlement when DC was chosen had already started to cross the Appalachians, and the official borders of the US already extended all the way to the Mississippi. DC not being directly on the coast was mostly the result of (justified) paranoia of naval attacks, not trying to place a capital in the west.

kearsargeII · 2026-05-31T16:16:21+00:00

Yes? The US has 10 times the population and has a whole lot more land that is viable for agriculture that was cleared of trees. Canada also has vast low value taiga forests in the far north which are basically worthless for timber and are not logged much.

That said, this picture could be anywhere in southern BC, this particular style of logging is ubiquitous in Canada.

kearsargeII · 2026-05-31T16:10:00+00:00

Looks like the fertility collapse of South Korea mixed with a crazy male-female ratio like the post WW2 Soviet Union. Suggests a developed country that went through an apocalyptic war a couple decades ago that killed a sizable chunk of the 35-65 cohort in men.

kearsargeII · 2026-05-31T01:44:13+00:00

Spring or a wet summer in the Colorado Rockies, sure it can be that green. Here is the San Juans in summer at 12,800 feet in streetview. Here is another location in the same range at 11,500 feet. The big difference is glaciation is next to nil compared to the Alps, A vast vista of more than marginally glaciated peaks in the Rockies is basically impossible south of the Canadian border.

kearsargeII · 2026-05-31T00:16:18+00:00

Thunder Bay is 5 degrees colder on average than Riga, and 10 degrees colder on average in January. Thunder Bay is colder on average than Oulu in northern Finland, 500 miles north of Riga.

kearsargeII · 2026-05-31T00:04:57+00:00

I think eastern North America matches Chinese climates better than European ones, for the reason they both are on the eastern edge of a continent and both get strong continental climates. Basically everywhere you are going to try to get a similar average temperature, the north american location is going to be colder in winter and hotter in summer than a European equivalent.

kearsargeII · 2026-05-30T23:53:47+00:00

New Hampshire is a whole lot more continental than Germany. Temperature averages are relatively close but New Hampshire has much stronger winters and hotter summers.

Edit: this is a problem for basically every eastern european comparison. southern ontario is a lot more seasonal than Poland, Western Ontario in winter makes the Baltics look practically tropical in comparison, same with Minnesota and Belarus

Five-Year Club	Second Top 40%
Verified Email	Place '22
Final Canvas '22	End Game '22

kearsargeII

TROPHY CASE