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In the future, the world will change, there's no doubt about it. For that reason, you have to produce a realistic map of the world n years in the future.
The number n should be the number of years in the future and can be input via STDIN or argv.
It can be one of four types of maps: satellite (real colours), geographical (showing terrain), geological (showing terrain and rock types) or ecological (showing the type of ecosystem in that area - desert, forest, tundra etc).
For a map to be realistic, you cannot add in things such as 'alien invasions' and complete and utter apocalyptic obliterations of the planet. That doesn't mean that you can't factor in meteorite and asteroid impacts (it needs to keep the world round and spinning though).
If n is supplied as a negative value, you must not simulate the Earth in the past. Instead, take the absolute value and find the Earth in the future.
The program with the most upvotes wins, so remember to include all the bells and whistles. Please include example outputs for n=1000, n=10000, n=1000000 and n=100000000.
Note that your map must be on a world big enough to distinguish details easily.
Examples
Satellite, n=100000000
Geological, n=250000000
Ecological, n=0
Note: It is very hard to find suitable maps of the predicted Earth, so please excuse me if the examples are not up to scratch
Beta Decay
Posted 2014-09-21T08:28:06.733
Reputation: 21 478
4I think that restricting this to providing maps of future continents (i.e. tectonics), biome maps (e.g. desert spread) or maps of sea level rise will help make this more objective. The politics is too unpredictable to make a good question – None – 2014-09-21T18:58:16.177
Maybe "Your program has to be 2048 bytes or less", "No hardcoding", "Most accurate match with <insert-tectonics-or-climate-or-desert-predictions-here>" wins, [tag:code-challenge]??? – None – 2014-09-21T19:23:36.067
I've played a lot with vector maps - most recently http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-30/?action=preview&uid=10313 - and just compressing a vector map would be a great challenge. Rendering a globe to PPM given a LNG/LAT for the centre point would be a great code golf. The vector file can be supplied as part of the contest, so everyone is trying to shrink the same data.
– Will – 2014-09-21T19:49:50.9403Getting closer and closer, BetaDecay. Don't lose hope. – AndoDaan – 2014-09-21T21:16:20.693
2To describe plate motions you need at the very least shapefiles containing the coordinates of each plate boundaries as well as the Euler poles of those plates. To map the sea level you need topographical data, i. e. 3-dimensional coordinates of enough points in the world to be able to extrapolate, but you also need to be able to account for erosion and subsidence (on top of accounting for sea level itself of course). As a geoscientist, I found this challenge way too complex and broad, I'm sorry. – plannapus – 2014-09-23T06:35:06.983