Author notes

319 - Good Girl

El Cid

on May 15, 2020

At my college freshman orientation, they held a trivia competition where the (clearly improvised) prize was a packet of K-Y Jelly®. I won that prize, and oh boy did I put that puppy to use! I lubed the bejeezus out of my bike chain that night, ooh baby! It was runnin' suh-mooth!

So, uh, yeah, this is obviously a bridge page. Full of bridgey goodness, it is. In case you're wondering, there are no less than four more pages of this non plot-advancing stuff up ahead, with this probably being the weakest among them in my opinion. If there were a cutting room floor candidate among the bunch, it would have been this one… but in all honesty, I need to make full use of all the buffer material I have right now. One thing I really want to get into doing, is waiting until I complete a chapter fully before I start posting. Not only does that give me an opportunity to revise things into a more polished “second draft” of the material, but it also means I can afford to scrap pages like this one that didn't work out.





So it's the year 2420, and your spacefaring swashbucklers return to Earth from a harrowing Mars adventure, ready to kick back and soak up some rays on the beach. This raises the question: where is the beach, exactly, hundreds of years in the future? We know that our coastlines are changing, and the sea level is rising. So, in your futuristic sci fi story… should Florida still exist?

There's a lot more to changing coastlines than just sea level change. In many places, the main driving factor in relative sea level is actually land sinkage or uplift and in other cases tectonic events, which is why sea levels appear to be rising on the United States' east coast while they actually appear to be dropping in the northwest. In some cases, this can insulate an area to an extent from rising sea levels, but in other cases it can exacerbate the problem. For instance, the island of Miami Beach, Florida, has made the news for its horrendous “sunny day flooding” problem, which predictably has been blamed on rising sea levels… but it appears that it's largely due to ground sinkage brought about by some questionable land use decisions. Even if sea levels weren't rising, they'd still be sinking.

Also, we need to give humans a little credit. A recent study came out telling us that, by the year 2050, 150 million people worldwide will be living underwater due to rising seas. That's some scary stuff. But, what the the study doesn't account for is that currently today, 110 million people are already living underwater, in places like southern Vietnam, Holland, and downtown London. It's actually not all that difficult to adjust to living below sea level with basic infrastructure like dikes.



If you're an optimistic worldbuilder, not only do major coastal population centers not need to necessarily get washed away Biblical style, but in some places coastlines can actually grow through land reclamation. The Dutch did it six hundred years ago, and the Nigerians and Malaysians among others are doing it today in a big way. I like to think that, for a futuristic civilization with enough snazzy technology to do terraforming, something like sea level rise would just be a minor annoyance.

But, if you're going full dystopian… that's a whole other kettle of fish!