The ascendency of Lord British

Richard Garriott was one of my heroes when I was 15. He wrote the Ultima series of computer games, and the one I owned, Ultima IV, was in a class of its own for making morality a central aspect of gameplay. Your character's moral status was a measurement of your compliance, throughout the game, with eight virtues. I still have the game box, including a super-cool cloth map of "Britannia." And I can still picture the pages of a magazine interview of Richard back then. His words which I dwelled upon amounted to: if you want to develop cool software, the most important thing is to master the dry technicalities of programming. That interview was very inspiring to me.

Now, Richard, the son of a NASA astronaut, is spending his own fortune on a ten-day spaceflight. When he looks out the window back at Earth, might he see something like this?