So according to this video, in March of 1981, a building from Columbia is found in the Alps. Which would imply that Columbia was over Europe at some point (maybe not recently though). That got me thinking, if Columbia hadn't crashed or was destroyed by that time or even the late 40's onwards, we should have been able to find the damn thing any time it passed over a major land mass that is watched by a radar system, military or weather related. That thing would have showed up on weather radar like a sore thumb. I remember working a forecasting shift at McConnell AFB, when the Columbia (shuttle) broke up over Texas, and let me tell you that left a very large swath on the radar.

Any thoughts?

you're thinking too hard.

Or: they have technology capable of shielding them from radar.

Or tech developed in a different manner and there was no radar yet.

@the_laughing_man: Especially if all the brainiest scientists went off and helped ideologues build flying/undersea cities instead of radar.

Elizabeth has be shown to be able to split reality. In one of the gameplay demos she breaks through into the 80s (with Revenge of the Jedi showing at the cinema). Rather than laying undiscovered for 40 years or floating unmanned for that time, my guess is this; some crazy stuff goes down during the events of the game, that building is transported to somewhere above the alps where it crashes and is subsequently discovered.

By the end of Infinite I don't expect Colmbia to be in much of a habitable state for it to continue flying for 40 years and then begin dropping out of the sky.

Unless it flips and you are both flung to when it first launches.

Rapture was in a technically "habitable" state for quite some time. I don't know if the timeline approaches four decades, but "habitable" can be a term that covers a pretty broad state of repair.

So I just had a horrid thought. What if you play this entire game. Get to know and care for Liz...and the get her down to the earth...and it turns out the reason she was up there...was to keep people safe...the song bird was to keep her locked away....and her being on the Surface would cause utter destruction? And you have to kill her?

I thought that up after watching the Lamb of Columbia trailer.

Remember that clip where Elizabeth opens up a rift and we see the 80s? There's a Tears for Fears song playing they almost get hit by a car? Something like that. Once you start including time travel, all bets are off. Maybe it didn't crash. Maybe a part of it fell and the rest of it is in 2050.

I knew that wasn't just my imagination:

@ravenlight: It all kicked off in Rapture about a year before your arrival. With no one assigned to repair it, it sprung a few leaks but held together pretty well.

With Columbia, if people stop stoking the fires that keep the balloons inflated, it's going to start dropping pretty sharpish.

Time travel would have to be the answer, as dumb as that statement sounds. I bet some Swiss villagers would have seen a giant floating building fall from the sky during the events of Infinite and gone to investigate it, and so the only reason I can think of is that it somehow "warped" there in 1981.

One thing I'd like to know is the world's reaction to Rapture, assuming Infinite is part of the same universe. By 1970, the world has to have known about Rapture after some of the escaped individuals had returned to the surface. The Something in the Sea site talks about a massive kidnapping epidemic of young girls before the events of Bioshock 2, and if some of those little sisters returned to the surface with Tenenbaum the world is going to want answers. I'm sure that by 1981, after learning about the crazy voodoo madness that happened down in Rapture, they are going to assume anything about the fate of Columbia.

Don't forget the world is 70% covered in water, a lot of ground to cover and a lot of it too deep for even modern submersibles to find. Good odds that if it was destroyed it fell into the oceanic zone with much of the debris sinking to the bottom. However, that does leave the question about the many blimps and balloons that kept Columbia airborne, of which quite a few would have a good chance of keeping afloat and be carried by the currents to someplace inhabitable.