The Global North, and South, which includes developing nations primarily in Africa, Latin America, and parts of Asia and Oceania.

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.

Wouldn't it make sense for areas which were once geographically proximate to each other (Gondwana areas / Laurasia areas) to continue being geographically proximate to each other (continue being ≈ north of equator / south of equator)?

I was talking about India's case, which is quite peculiar.

India is unique case of a bit from the south that moved at high speed, smashed into the north, creating Himalayas.

My son went trekking there came back with a stony fossil of some deep sea creature thousands of miles from ocean today!

I find geology's power fascinating.

A person was once able to surmise from geological features that India was once part of Africa.

(He was resoundingly mocked of course.)

Also, from the distribution of lemurs. Before plate tectonics this lead to the idea of the sunken continent of Lemuria, which has since migrated into weird science fantasy stories.

It is fascinating once we consider how little, both of technology and mobility scientists had in the past. To verify some little fact they had to wait months, years.

I am an enthusiastic amateur rock botherer, what got me hooked was wondering why mountains on why one side of our island are far more rugged, and the river gorges far harder to traverse, than the other.

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.

I attended a talk by a geology professor about features in my area.

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.

Polygondwanaland. It’s full of dinosaurs.

And there's men whose heads do grow beneath their shoulders.

Makes one wonder how human history would have played out on a different geography from the past. Say we evolved on a super continent with no oceans in between, just one big one around the connected landmass.

It would have been completely different: geography has been an enormous factor in human history and culture. Jared Diamond's "Guns, Germs and Steel" book makes the case that the main reason for Europe's historical success as a seat of civilization over other places is mainly due to geography: stable, warm-enough (but not too warm) climate with a very large amount of arable land for farming.

Completely different, but probably still full of the same basic wars, bigotry, tribalism, brutality and all the other shining facets of our basic human nature.

Maybe, maybe not. Human history has been drastically shaped by geography, causing humans to leave wherever they first evolved and travel across the world, becoming by far the dominant species.

Perhaps with different geography, humans would have gone extinct long before figuring out how to make fire or the wheel.

I was wondering how difficult it might be to modify Earth's geography to ensure humans went extinct, while still having them evolve in the first place.

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...

Guns, Germs, and Steel is not well-received by actual historians.

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.

What claim are you refuting? I've read the book, as well as several critical reviews and I don't understand what your point is.

I'll also echo your advice not to take that book (or any other) as gospel, nor to slide into racism.

Some of the lakes will look like seas. Water is relatively easy to cross, provided you avoid storms or can cope with them. A storm on land isn't too much fun for a traveller either.

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.

That was Pangaea. Not very hospitable. Most of it were deserts, receiving little humidity because it was too far from the ocean.

Ozs don't need to feel so isolated. Their continent is moving north towards China & will one day ram into it.

Would humans be able to live on earth 400m years ago if we time travelled back to Gondwanaland, considering the 7x CO2 and hot tropical climate?

Yes, sure. Just imagine being somewhere 5-10C warmer and a few hundred metres higher in elevation than where you are now.

I do see significant change from our current dependence on fossil fuels, but for argument’s sake, what’s the best case scenario for global warming and climate change? Could we create a super verdant earth epoch? What probability do our most advanced climate models have for such an outcome? And what’s the economic cost of moving coastal populations and those in high risk zones to new cities designed from ground up using the latest thinking in urban planning? What’s the cost benefit from high one off relocation costs to long term gains from smarter cities?

I don’t know what the best case scenario is. Perhaps it is simply to avoid the likely case scenarios. As I see it, the great risk of temperature increases such as this would be the collapse of food chains that we ultimately rely upon.

Is there an equation for human food chain adaptability speed vs climate influenced food chain change rate. I’m thinking if we could adapt and harness new food chains faster than climate disrupts the old chains, we come on top. We need to assume food generation capacity independent of human intervention remain constant in current and future states. I think it’s fair as long as terrestrial food chain benefit from higher CO2 and expansion of temperate zones further north, while conceding some southern temperate zones to equatorial conditions. This is all speculation. But I feel we are discounting speed of adaptation of current human civilization.

How can there be such an equation? The world is so interconnected that you'd have to factor in every single living species. Just don't collapse the food chain pls

Well, we've been running up a helluva tab at the bar, and it's coming due.

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.

Pfft, don’t be so pessimistic - we’d have lots of people making each other miserable in our Kowloon walled city/Judge Dredd like authoritarian dystopias.

A lower pressure of our current gas ratio is not the same as current pressure with a different gas ratio

7x CO2 would mean the air feels stale all the time, like a stuffy room, and you'd get headaches and struggle to concentrate. But it's not immediately dangerous as such.

> “These rainforests were historically neglected by tourists and walkers in favour of supposedly more ‘Australian’ eucalypt forests,”

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...

Thought this might be about Fastmail's Bron Gondwana

Me too!

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.

Same first name presumably, JANET style?

Sadly, they weren't quite prescient enough to realise the importance of different initials, so we have to use TWO letters for card game scoresheets; but nah. Pity.

Wait, your name is literally Bron Gondwana? That must be a hell of a conversation starter.

I'd definitely bore you with tree talk though.

Legitimately is, it's been a challenge at time but pretty happy with it. Pity LeBron came along and stole my googlability

Welp, if you're ever in NZ and want to discuss the saltiness of the scientist who named southern beech "fake beech" (Nothofagus), I'm always keen :D

Made it to NZ for the first time in my life just over a year ago. Love it, definitely gotta get back

(and visit Les Mills in Auckland again of course... always nice to get to the place where my OTHER job came from)

Fun facts, we can still see the animals in their original preserved form from Gondwana era millions years ago inside amber [1],[2].

[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:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lebanese_amber

"Gondwana": land of the Gonds

"Gondwanaland": land of the Gonds land

Do they have an ATM machine there?

No, but they were prolific producents of compact CD disks.

this is a cool app [1] i found to visualize the contents drifting (among other things) over millenia; its pretty cool

[1] https://www.biointeractive.org/classroom-resources/earthview...