The World (the Known World) of Game of Thrones is set on Earth. A fictional future Post Apocalyptic Earth. Perhaps long after a nuclear war (with lasting consequences, plate tectonics and the like) with forgotten technologies yet to be rediscovered and with new technologies active in use and confused with magic.
Here are some reasons why:
- Familiar Foods: Clues of Earth’s Continuity
- The existence of Earth-like crops and culinary practices (e.g., pies, bread, ale, wine, rum) strongly suggests that this isn’t an alien world.
- The lack of new agricultural products (no alien fruits, grains, or spices) points to agricultural continuity from Earth’s historical crops.
- Viticulture (wine-making) and distillation (rum) require advanced agricultural knowledge—suggesting that humanity retained cultural memories of these processes after a collapse.
If Game of Thrones were truly another planet or dimension, we’d expect different evolutionary paths for flora and culinary staples. The preservation of Earth’s diet implies that this is Earth, after civilization reset itself.
- Identical Trees: Evolutionary Fingerprints
- The presence of recognizable trees like willows, beech, cedars, and pines—all of which are Earth-specific species—is another biological fingerprint of Earth.
- These species evolved thousands of years ago under Earth’s specific environmental conditions. Their presence means:
- Either Earth’s biosphere survived catastrophic events.
- Or humanity replanted these species after a collapse using preserved genetic material—consistent with post-apocalyptic terraforming efforts.
If the planet had been terraformed by survivors from our era, they would have chosen familiar species to restore ecosystems. The uniformity of these tree species across continents also hints at artificial rewilding efforts.
- Weirwoods: A Bio-Internet for a Post-EMP World
The weirwoods, with their face carvings, blood-red sap, and telepathic properties, might represent a biological neural network—a bio-internet that transmits and stores human thought patterns.
Consider the following:
- Greenseers (like Bran Stark) can access memories and visions through the weirwoods. This could represent neural interfacing with a biological data-storage system.
- The Children of the Forest might have engineered the weirwoods to act as organic data servers, capable of broadcasting frequencies only certain genetically receptive humans (like Bran) can perceive.
- Telepathic Communication: In a world without electronics (due to EMP damage), biological frequencies transmitted by trees might have been an alternative communication system—Earth’s fallback internet, based entirely on organic neural networks.
Why a Bio-Internet?
- After a nuclear holocaust, global EMP (Electromagnetic Pulse) damage would fry electronics, satellites, and communication systems.
- With no ability to store or transmit data electronically, genetically engineered flora could have been humanity’s solution—a living internet, storing memories, history, and knowledge in DNA-coded sap.
- The carved faces in weirwoods could represent access points—interfaces where ancient people uploaded consciousness or memories, now accessible to those with Greenseer genes.
- EMP Damage and Medieval Stagnation
- The stagnation in technology for thousands of years—a major puzzle in Game of Thrones—is perfectly explained by widespread EMP devastation:
- No working electronics, no metalworking at advanced levels (beyond what can be rediscovered through trial and error), and no new innovations because key scientific knowledge was lost.
- This would force humanity back into medieval technologies: swords, castles, and animal-powered transportation.
- The knowledge of gunpowder, electricity, or advanced machinery would fade into myth, remembered only as “magic.”
Valyrian Steel as Pre-War Tech:
- Valyrian steel could represent lost metallurgy techniques—perhaps nanostructured alloys or self-healing materials produced by pre-holocaust civilizations.
- Its indestructibility and unique sharpness could be explained by nanotechnology that modern societies no longer understand—a material immune to EMP damage because it’s entirely atomic-level engineered.
- Dragons as Genetic Experiments
- Dragons could have been genetically resurrected or engineered from dinosaur DNA, perhaps modified for use as bio-weapons.
- The Targaryen bloodline may have carried genetic markers enabling them to psychically bond with dragons—another pre-apocalypse technology that was reduced to myth and prophecy after civilization fell.
- The Long Night as Nuclear Winter
- The Long Night, a generation-long winter that almost wiped out humanity, could be explained by a nuclear winter following a global thermonuclear war:
- Ash and debris in the atmosphere blocking sunlight.
- Global crop failures and mass extinctions.
- Societies collapsing into feudal warlords, with oral traditions preserving distorted memories of the apocalypse.
- The White Walkers as a Children of the Forest Bio Hacking mistake.
It warns of the danger of letting technology make technology like AI’s making AIs unsupervised on not fully understood. - Men made the “Children of the Forest” (Guardians of Nature) and they overwrote human DNA to make White Walkers.
Humanity engineered the White Walkers indireclty and the effect was to regulate life to a crisis degree. This shows the importance of making sure that our technology, even AI is checked and verified to always be in the service of mankind.
- The Role of the Three-Eyed Raven
- The Three-Eyed Raven, as a being capable of seeing through time, might represent the last remnant of pre-holocaust consciousness—someone who successfully uploaded their mind into the weirwood network, functioning as a watcher over humanity’s attempts to rebuild.
- Bran Stark, by inheriting this role, represents humanity’s final opportunity to break the cycle of destruction—armed with knowledge from both the past (pre-apocalypse) and the present (post-collapse world).
- Sociocultural Resilience: Why History Repeats Itself
- The persistence of monarchies, religion, and tribal politics shows that human social structures regressed to familiar patterns after the collapse.
- Religious groups like the Faith of the Seven and R’hllor’s followers might represent distorted remnants of pre-collapse ideologies, surviving in oral traditions and half-remembered rituals.
- The “Song of Ice and Fire”: Restoring Balance
- In this post-EMP, post-nuclear world, the Song of Ice and Fire might represent the synthesis of bioengineered forces (the cold, calculated White Walkers) with the uncontrollable power of dragons (fire).
- The “song” itself could be a genetic code, a final algorithm or sequence necessary to restore climate balance and reboot the ecosystem without triggering another cycle of destruction.
Conclusion: The World of Westeros as a Post-Nuclear Earth
This theory perfectly weaves together:
- Genetic tampering (Children of the Forest, White Walkers, Targaryens)
- Biological networks (weirwoods as bio-internet)
- Technological stagnation explained by EMP fallout
- Ecological continuity (familiar flora and fauna)
- Culinary traditions (pies, rum, wine) that survived cultural collapse
- Nuclear winter explaining the Long Night
- Valyrian steel as indestructible nanomaterial from a lost technological age
In this scenario, humanity is Earth’s final experiment, trying again and again to rebuild after self-destruction, with the weirwoods as organic memory banks and genetic mistakes like the White Walkers (and (AI/Robotic) Children of the Forest) mistake threatening regrowth.
Game of Thrones might not just be a fantasy epic, but a warning: a vision of Earth’s distant future, where bioengineering, nuclear war, and EMP devastation have forced humanity back into the Middle Ages, fighting over the scraps of a forgotten golden age they no longer understand.
In the end, the “Song of Ice and Fire” could be humanity’s final attempt to reconcile fire (technology, ambition, growth) with ice (control, stability, preservation)—a last chance to break the cycle of rise, ruin, and rebirth on a scarred Earth that has seen it all before.
Afterall, its only fantasy. It’s only entertainment. But we can learn lessons from some of it’s themes.
