What is "The Great Mistake"?

[Seek]

... building the Pyramids in a coastal city in CivBE Earth so that they would end up in the water.

Haha, maybe the shot in the BE trailer is a nod to Civ 5's watery wonders?

 

[Bfoxius]

I believe that they are keeping the "Great Mistake" kind of obscure. Sure, we will probably know generally what it is (my vote's on ecological degradation/global warming, as that's the fashionable apocalypse nowadays).

 

[AriochIV]

Will Miller specifically says in the PAX East panel that "No one really knows what the Great Mistake was," though he goes on in the same breath to theorize that it was triggered by a nuclear exchange in the Asian subcontinent.

 

[Browd]

Which may indicate that the in-game hints about the Great Mistake will be sufficiently vague that each player can decide what he or she wants the Great Mistake to be/have been -- may not affect actual game play, but might inject an entertaining role-playing element.

 

[BackseatTyrant]

I was about to say climate change (judging from rising sea levels and population displacement), until I saw the "we didn't work together" option, which is a pretty big reason why we're not doing anything about climate change today.

But yeah, it is best if only the developers themselves know exactly what happened. The fact that they wrote the whole backstory in preparation, is actually something worth applauding.

 

[kolpo]

Maybe is there even on earth no consensus on what was really the biggest mistake. But has each faction his own theory.

The American reclamation corporation believes that government interference in the economy caused it, the pan Asian cooperative instead believes that weak governments caused it, the euro faction that global warming did it...

All factions believe that what they are doing is the only think that can prevent a second Great Mistake on the new planet. This is also the most realistic scenario, America, Russia and Iran for example don't agree on what caused the current economic stagnation, even western economists don't agree, why would a decline in the future be different?

 

[otaman1]

I'm surprised no one has mentioned a natural disaster. The Yellowstone Super Volcano, large asteroids such as the one last year in Russia, tsunamis like in Japan, earthquakes like the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, or even an ice age like the one from The Day After Tomorrow but less more dramatic.

 

[iRule]

I think there's certainly an environmental aspect at play here (Rio de Janeiro isn't foggy like that; Cairo was flooded) but it will be left vague on purpose. And I like the idea of that.

 

[Catalytic]

Apocalyptic climate change seems to be the theme of the trailer video.

Current theory suggests potential sea level rises up to 200 feet or more by the end of the century on the "really bad" end of the scale. The great pyramid of Giza is about 60m above sea level, so the flooding of that particular wonder seems to coincide with the theory of completely melted Arctic and Antarctic ice. Further, the theory suggests 1/3 of the world's population lives in the potential flood zone, so they'd have to move, leading to the visions of overcrowded and trashed cities we see in the trailer.

Of course, the actual mechanisms are unknown, but the imagery seems to lean heavily toward this type of scenario.

If it were nukes, they'd probably show images of barren nuclear wasteland (at bomb sites), abandoned cities (like images we see of Chernobyl), and maybe some Terminator 2-type post-apocalypic battle imagery.

If it were some biological disaster, they probably would have shown images of afflicted patients (like medieval depictions of plague), mass graves, plastic-covered structures (quarantines), etc.

As another poster pointed out, society wasn't wiped out. There's overcrowding. Infrastructure wasn't destroyed. They can still manufacture and launch rockets into space. I'm leaning towards shrinking areas of habitable land and overpopulation as side effects of some sort of climate disaster.

 

[Algeroth]

I'm surprised no one has mentioned a natural disaster. The Yellowstone Super Volcano, large asteroids such as the one last year in Russia, tsunamis like in Japan, earthquakes like the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, or even an ice age like the one from The Day After Tomorrow but less more dramatic.

You can hardly call a natural disaster a "Mistake".

 

[SamBC]

I'm surprised no one has mentioned a natural disaster. The Yellowstone Super Volcano, large asteroids such as the one last year in Russia, tsunamis like in Japan, earthquakes like the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, or even an ice age like the one from The Day After Tomorrow but less more dramatic.

Those would be great disasters, but would hardly qualify as "mistakes"

 

[otaman1]

Mistakes by drilling into volcanoes/fault lines.

 

[reddishrecue]

I think one of the greatest mistakes I've seen is transporting oil overseas via cruisers and allowing the oil to spill over the sea. Humans don't live on the sea so spilling the oil in the middle of the sea isn't that harmful to humans but it is to other species. How does that affect humans then? Through the loss of important natural resources. Oil really powers many ships and vessels.

 

[Lord Tirian]

I'm surprised that we didn't get MAD SCIENCE responses yet, like black holes dropped into Earth's core, causing cataclysmic earthquakes and climate shifts!

 

[bite]

Will Miller specifically says in the PAX East panel that "No one really knows what the Great Mistake was," though he goes on in the same breath to theorize that it was triggered by a nuclear exchange in the Asian subcontinent.

That actually makes a lot of sense, studies have been done and a small exchange of nuclear weapons between India and Pakistan would (besides release a lot of radiation and create carnage) deposit enough dust and particulate matter into the atmosphere that it would have disastrous effects on the global climate.

 

[otaman1]

What about all of those nuclear bombs during the Cold War? IIRC, there were well over 2000 nukes that went off between 1945 and 2013. All but 2 were tests.

 

[bite]

Most of those test were conducted underground or on atolls reducing their impact (of the approx 2474 detonations only about 600 were atmospheric) , and they were released at the same time as would happen during a nuclear exchange between two countries. Even then they have changed the planet's ecosystems.

 

[s0nny80y]

GM and the auto revolution's contribution to pollution?

How about cloud 'seeding' gone wrong?

Moderator Action: Political statement removed. We have an OT thread for that stuff, please use it,.
Please read the forum rules: http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=422889

 

[dapperbandit]

They said at PAX that nobody knows what the Great Mistake was and then went on to describe it in detail lol.

I thought what was mentioned at PAX was interesting though; rather than a global nuclear war, a confined nuclear war in Asia which forces billions of people (think the human populations of curren day India and China combined +) to leave and live elsewhere, suddenly there's a whole chunk of the world where food can't be grown, and there's all these people and no space to adequately house them, leading to starvation and suffering, immense strain on the places that take in the refugees.

That displacement of an enormous amount of people sounds like a very realistic side effect of a nuclear exchange.

 

[hbar]

What about all of those nuclear bombs during the Cold War? IIRC, there were well over 2000 nukes that went off between 1945 and 2013. All but 2 were tests.

Nuclear winter isn't triggered directly by the nuclear bombs, but rather by the cities burning in the aftermath. A large number of firestorms would propel tonnes of soot into the stratosphere, which would block enough sunlight to create a massive, year-round winter. Then, once there's snow everywhere, Earth's albedo would be high enough to prevent future warming, basically locking Earth into an ice age until natural variance pulled us out again (typically estimated on a timescale of 10,000 years).

Considering the trailer didn't show any of those effects, I think we can rule out nuclear winter.