Real life must’ve seemed like this for a really long while, until it all of a sudden didn’t anymore.
People have known the Earth is spherical for way longer than they have been able to assemble expeditions.
But the “non-expedition” version of this, sure, for a long time people must have just assumed the world just keeps going on.
“wait… this is where we started”
“what”
“we… uh… i think we pacmanned back on the other side”
When they look up, it looks like this:
I like to think they also see that text
We journey, to the click, to be restored to our proper size!
they will find the far lands eventually, but its actually infinite too
This would make an excellent tv series (animated or otherwise). Any time things start to get stale, introduce a new group of people. Some aggressive, some peaceful, some pirates aiming to get rich. Maybe throw in a big “all go the same way” cultural movement just to be silly. It would do amazingly for the episodic format or a continuing story format, or even a blend of the two. Maybe a different group of travelers every season, maybe different groups that are shown in turns and eventually meet up or something.
But I don’t think I’d likely want to read it as a book series… it feels like the sort of concept that would very quickly escape most authors and just sort of meander on forever… maybe someone like pratchet who does complicated intertwined world building anyway, but it would require a very specific sort of author to do well, where a show series of that sort would necessitate a team of people working on it to sort of keep it in check.
HxH dark continent be like
Reminds me of The Unwritten: Stairway to Heaven - https://the-unwritten.fandom.com/wiki/The_Unwritten_(Volume_1)_Issue_24
A bunch of creatures go into an endless staircase that leads between worlds in an effort to find the top
Ringworld vibes
Yes! Finite world, infinite for all practical purposes.
Presumably at some point they would figure out that their skybox is fixed in a way that either doesn’t actually follow any rules of basic trignonometry, and thus is a simulation/projection, or, they’d find that it does follow the rules of trig, and that would prove that their world has 0 curvature.
If Eratosthenes had done what he’d done, in that world, he would have pretty definitively concluded that the world is indeed provably flat, and is potentially an infinite plane, around ~ 220 BCE.
Also: How do ‘days’ work, on an infinite flat plane?
This is actual flat earther levels of nonsense if you think about it for like, 15 seconds.
Here’s a better world building idea:
Build your alt history or fantasy or post apoc world (why not all three?) on a world that is totally covered in a very thick atmosphere, or has some property by which there is essentially always 100% cloud cover, basically everywhere.
It can be flat, or not.
Astronomy and thus our whole tech tree path for like half of science is now essentially impossible.
It would follow a totally different pattern of development of thought and ideas, in many ways.
Also: How do ‘days’ work, on an infinite flat plane?
Embracing the fantasy aspect an infinite plane requires: Light comes from an infinite number of stationary celestial bodies above the firmament that, within the period of a day, are created, increase in luminance, start dying, explode, then slowly form again at night. That means sunsets end spetacularly, nights are completely dark, and there are no time zones.
Biomes match the type and distance of the cloud of celestial bodies, so astronomy can be used to predict future expeditions.
Infinite tiled flat firmament. Where the moon and sun cover the sky in an infinite checker pattern that slowly moves east to west. As the sun slowly passes over and farther and farther away it appears to meet the horizon, until the light is so dim you can’t see it.
Adjust suns and moon brightness as needed
Well, there wouldn’t really be sunsets, they’d be more like… bright to blinding, explosions…
Sunsets, as we know them, only look the way they do because the angle of the main source of light changes, eventually hits and then goes under the cloud layers…
An infinite flat plane disallows that from being physically possible, you can’t go under the plane.
You… also can’t really have a ‘hemisphere’ to affix stars to, and then define a pattern of timed explosions… because the hemisphere would need to be… infinity + 1 sized or whatever, this does not work in basic 3 dimensional space.
But that is at least a neat idea!
Oh, other… issue.
Presuming these stars are not infinitely far away… uh… that many syncronized supernovae is gonna mean you’re gonna have waves of EM radiation … bare minimum, the nights are not pitch black, they are aurorae, everywhere, in serious intensity…
Worst case scenario, you’re basically evaporating the entire atmosphere and all life, maybe only blowing out the magnetosphere, maybe literally melting the
planetplane’s surface.
Which… leads to another problem:
Our planet has a substantial magnetosphere protrcting us from high energy ionizing radiation… because the inner core is a dynamo of rotating molten metal.
Your flat plane is either gonna need something like that, or just a magic forcefield with no physical explanatiion for what generates it, or, your stars aren’t really stars, they’re… some kind of magic.
Well, there wouldn’t really be sunsets, they’d be more like… bright to blinding, explosions…
Oh, I meant sunset as in “the period of waning light at the end of a day”, they would need to be called something else in-universe, heh
the nights are not pitch black, they are aurorae, everywhere, in serious intensity…
That’s even better!
Your flat plane is either gonna need something like that, or just a magic forcefield with no physical explanatiion for what generates it, or, your stars aren’t really stars, they’re… some kind of magic.
I chose to write “celestial body” instead of “star” to get away with any borderline magical or actual magical explanation as to how they work. Some may call this lazy world building. They are correct.
Oh, I meant sunset as in “the period of waning light at the end of a day”, they would need to be called something else in-universe, heh
Ok, so… you said exploding, so I am imagining … basically God is just spawning in stars that are 24 hrs from going supernova, on a 24 hr cycle.
If they’re not actually exploding, well, there are stars that go through natural brightening and dimming cycles, for a long period of time…
Or, you… could basically have them be occluded by like, they all have one massive planet that at such an orbit that from flatworld’s pov, its the same angular size…
Or, because we are basically being silly here, I dunno, God has screendoors for each of these very far away not-stars, that he just opens and shuts.
So, they’re basically then just … stars as extremely grandiose pixels.
Some may call this lazy world building. They are correct.
Maybe we can call this the ‘its not that deep, bro’ dimension, lol.
Local physics actually just does collapse if you try and think about it too hard, so don’t do that, hahaha!
A bit like the short story “Tower of Babylon”, by Ted Chiang.
this reminds me, tolkien spent quite a lot of time thinking about successive waves of migration into europe all going vaguely west for generations only to eventually stand on the western shores and behold the endless sea. and what that would’ve done to their minds and myths.
Ultraviolet Grasslands would be good for this
In a pc game context I would try to make something like a no man’s sky planet, but as you walk chunks of land in a radius around you get replaced with procedural new ones. something like a minecraft chunk loader that is relative to the player but wrapped around a sphere, and god forbid you actually want to have multiple players… Going into space can be more cursed but my favourite is: as you orbit the planet the active chunks scroll relative to your orbit with a speed relative to your distance; good fucking luck landing in the same place without insane math.
Why west specifically 🪿
