Re: New Reality Seeds
It order to support cities, you need trade. When you have 200 million people and 5 billion square miles of area, you cannot really have sufficient trade volume to support a city. If nothing else, the distances between locations make it uneconomical to really trade anything, especially since villages would end up with an average of a 100 mile separation (and since even 'densely' populated areas would have 25 miles between villages). This effects the exchange of ideas as well as products, meaning that technology progresses slower, more languages evolve, and stranger customs can survive.
One thing to remember as well is that the travel distances are enormous on this world. If the planet was an exact replica of the Earth at 5x scale, the Mediterranean Sea would cover 62.5 million square kilometers, making it larger than the North Atlantic, and Europe would also be larger than Asia in our world, meaning that it would possess substantial deserts. The massive size of the oceans also allow for tremendous storm systems, such as having hurricanes the size of Europe in our world, with maximum wind speeds in excess of 300+ km/hr.
In order to avoid making it uninhabitable, it would need hundreds of continents and oceans. With that, you could have humans continent hopping, though there may be entire continents missed because of random chance. These lost continents could have exotic flora and fauna, as well as their own sapient inhabitants, who may not like humans bothering their paradises.
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