Let me tell you about the world

 This is my world, where almost all my stories are set. I finally managed to draw it somewhat decently. The secret is what you leave out.

I call it The "Value Added" World as a joke. (It's funnier in Swedish.) The characters who live in it just call it the world, as in their stories it's all the world there is.

It's infinitely large, you see. It's one of them worlds that contain every imaginable world as a physical reality that every other writer comes up with. It stretches infinitely in an infinity of directions. Rifts and folds in time and space within the borders (Fallingbridge is a sea that some people claim is a country) and stranger things without. The boundaries to the North and South are just inhospitable to human life and no one who goes there very far comes back, while those who go East or West tend to come back changed. No recording equipment seems able to capture what's out there, no signals transmit; spaceships who look down on it close enough to see any degree of detail find it distorted by an equivalent degree of interference. So the outer edges of the map remain as loose and foldable as those within.

What's funny is this all grew out of a joke in One Piece's letter column. A reader asked how come everyone speaks the same language and Oda said "because comics are a picture of people's dreams".

Simple and elegant. But when I started writing my magnum opus in about 2004, about a character who travels unthinkably far and rights wrongs all over the world, I thought it would be cooler to come up with a reasonable explanation why a world would share a common language. Definitely cooler than having her just be unbelievably good at learning languages.

So how about if the world was infinitely large? People would have all the room they ever wanted to spread to. Colonial empires wouldn't get very far because they'll spread themselves too thin to hold their territory and there would still be infinitely more they needed to grab to quell any resistance. Humanity would largely outgrow fighting for territory and resources maybe 40-50,000 years BC, I reasoned, and we'd have a slightly gentler, more trusting, more curious society. More people would travel more frequently and further. Nation-states would be more informal arrangements and less prone to political instability. (Io has existed in its current shape for at least 40,000 years.) Cultures would be more open, less united, less a substitute for personal identity, and people would be less jealous of their distinctiveness. Before the end of the last ice age there would be good reasons and easy conditions for a common language to spread and few reasons for it not to. 

Possibly.

But possibly is good enough for me.