63 points | by bryanrasmussen1 天前
I don't think that's correct. Lamington National Park, one of the mentioned rainforests, was gazetted in 1915 and has long been a mecca for walkers, tourists and bird watchers. The O’Reilly and Binna Burra guest houses have been there for almost 100 years.
https://parks.desi.qld.gov.au/parks/lamington/about/centenar...
[1] Australian amber has revealed ‘living fossils’ traced back to Gondwana 42 million years ago:
https://theconversation.com/australian-amber-has-revealed-li...
[2] Lebanese amber:
A person was once able to surmise from geological features that India was once part of Africa.
(He was resoundingly mocked of course.)
Turns out that's what happens when on either sides of a subducting plate boundary.
What I love though, is that the fault that marks the boundary, was initially discovered by someone mapping natural hot springs and noticed they formed a rough line trending SW - NE.
Mind completely blown. My area was once under the ocean. And the rocks I see in my regular walks bear clear evidence of having been in contact with water long-term.
Another mind blowing thing: if one digs 10 feet in my area, one hits a bed of limestone. And limestone is constructed from the skeletons of past marine life. And marble is compressed limestone. It just goes on and on. Simply mind-blowing field of study.
I speculate that the "best case" scenario is the survival of small populations of human beings grinding out a miserable existence in a post-collapse hell-hole, while probably still arguing about J.K Rowling and "wokeness" no doubt.
"Gondwanaland": land of the Gonds land
My parents thought it was a cool word, so they named me after it. There's 5 of us, and we all have different surnames. Hippy parents, man.
I'd definitely bore you with tree talk though.
(and visit Les Mills in Auckland again of course... always nice to get to the place where my OTHER job came from)
Until fairly recently, water was generally the quickest route from A to B, if it was available. That helps to explain why the UK and Ireland's island disposition was not an obstacle to the same continuous series of colonisation events throughout history as the rest of Europe.
Anyway, your super continent will have quite a lot of fresh water on it and will probably involve some very impressive rivers and inland lakes/seas. That single coastline will mean that all sea faring will be coastal until someone notices that they can nip across through what would look like a worm hole to begin with!
I suspect things would play out in a similar fashion anyway and some nutter will sail or row straight away from land and keeps on going - and the mad idea of a spherical earth eventually takes hold. Perhaps it will be too far and powered flight is developed first and is able to stay aloft and move quickly enough. Perhaps airships are invented before trans ocean shipping.
In another mad world, where sea or air "shipping" is not good enough, mankind straps themselves to giant fireworks, invent an amazing G-suit after some unfortunate efforts involving the pilots being smeared to the back of their clothing and then invent amazing parachutes (after a few hard landings). There are a few other details to sort out, such as how to mount the ash trays and where to put the cabin crew for first class.
There is a very rich set of sci-fi and fantasy novels/stories/novellas/films/stories told around a campfire/streamed stuff that cover what might happen "if things were the same but different", for a given value of same and different.
Mr Pratchett and some of his mates called us humans: "The Story Telling Ape". It's high time you started listening to those stories, or even better, telling some of your own - you do that wondering you mentioned.
It cherry-picks and manipulates facts to make its Euro/Anglo-centric perspective work, and even attempts some Anglo-exceptionalism. It completely disregards the vast majority of human civilisation where Europe was—for lack of a better word—a decayed backwater.
Europe saw several civilisational collapses, including as recently as ~1500 years ago with the fall of the Western Roman Empire. Six hundred years ago Europe was still reeling from the effects of the Black Death, and it took another five hundred for hygiene to be taken seriously by Europeans, which they had forgotten all about since the Romans.
By sheer population numbers, the various river systems South, Southeast, and East of the Himalaya and the Tibetan Plateau have been the most successful and productive human civilisations. Nearly half of humanity lives in and around these river valleys. (And it can be argued from a biological perspective that population quantity is the only factor contributing to 'success'). These civilisations have endured for significantly longer than the European.
It's an alright book to read with a fairly critical lens, but its claims should not be taken as gospel. There's something to be said about a slippery slope leading from the claims in that book to outright Übermensch/Untermensch racism.
I'll also echo your advice not to take that book (or any other) as gospel, nor to slide into racism.
Perhaps with different geography, humans would have gone extinct long before figuring out how to make fire or the wheel.
I think the answer is barely, if at all. Using the power of known population bottlenecks (e g. [0]) and chaotic dynamics we can say that any trivial change might lead to a brief existence for humanity. Specifically I'm thinking of something like Lotka-Volterra leading to Gambler's Ruin.
[0] https://www.npr.org/sections/krulwich/2012/10/22/163397584/h...
What's mildly interesting is that this division mirrors, in a surprising way, the ancient separation of Gondwana and Laurasia. The countries of the Global North largely reside in regions that were once part of Laurasia, while much of the Global South [including India] resides in areas that were part of Gondwana.
My son went trekking there came back with a stony fossil of some deep sea creature thousands of miles from ocean today!