Spyke
sopuli.xyz

I think that's not actually Pangea (the past supercontinent), but a rendition of Pangea Proxima (the future supercontinent). So just gotta wait a while...

86

It's definitely not pangea. For one, South America and Africa are not connected (which is the one thing everyone knows about plate tectonics). However what initially jumped out to me was India and the Himalayas (which are a relatively recent geological event).

26

If every country would just build for the future Mother Nature will eventually finish the connections.

6

As much as Factorio's map gen algorithm is great for ensuring balanced access to resources and (functionally) infinite sprawl, I would love some handcrafted maps that involve feature scale and fractality (fractalness?) approaching real life. The default map gen is too samey after a certain point and size reached.

6

America wouldn't exist in Pangea. There wouldn't be any undiscovered lands to act as The Man in The High Castle

30

Did you know: If all the railway lines in the US were joined end to end

::: spoiler ... it would help :::

4

And not one of each size either. Each having both gauges and several points where you have to switch trains because of a gauge change

1

Imagine how much parking there could be. There would be practically no constraint on parking lot size.

33
megopiereply
lemmy.blahaj.zone

. # Pave Pangea.

A sea of asphalt dotted with box stores and “luxury apartments” that are more parking space than living area.

7
lemmy.world

i think during Pangea, the center of the land was a big ass desert, and a very dry one, the network would probably look like a doughnut

25

That empty land would allow for some nice desert crossings. Empty land is easier to develop and you can go faster.

I'm imagine a donut with at least 2 dessert lines but maybe more. Likely a terminal town would appear in the center of the continent to be used for transfers

5
lemmy.ca

Oh I just saw the answer to this in the new Dinosaurs doc on Netflix, assuming it’s accuracy. At the beginning of Pangea the center was a desert with only the edges having any plant life, then there was a geologic event I think a large number of super volcanoes that caused a climate shift and there was a million years of hurricanes, when the storms finally subsided Pangea was green all over

3

Statistically it's much more likely to get invaded if you are on a different continent from them.

16

All of that would have been Mongolia long before European colonizers ever got a chance to genocide the new world natives.

An alternate history of the world if it was still pangea would be a wild book.

7

As a pro, there would be hardly any invasive species. But, imagine all the Australian venemous things in your backyard!

4

Conservatives: "See??? Why on EARTH should we invest in rail now when it's just going to be broken up by continental drift in 200 million years? It's woke liberal tax and spend waste!"

20

Rail network?! That's commie talk. Real patriots would have an interconnected highway system.

17
Agent641reply
lemmy.world

Think of all the mega parking lots this bad boy could fit!

7

Psst! Don't say their name too loud. That's bad for the algorithm

6
Hikermickreply
lemmy.world

The train tracks would have kept the continent from splitting apart

5

Or civ 3 player. Railroads made movent cost zero and we're op on the pangea map

3

I feel any predictions on a timescale of millions of years is completely pointless. The assumption is always that you can just look at natural processes and assume that things will continue naturally.

Except we're already in the Anthropocene! The Earth no longer evolves naturally; it evolves according to our actions. And our abilities only increase with time. Even the position of the continents is something we can control if we want it badly enough. And eventually, as human capabilities increase, eventually even controlling the position of continents becomes a rather modest infrastructure project. It all depends on the scale and abilities of your civilization.

Hell, I don't even agree with predictions about the lifespan of the Sun. Stellar engineering is in principle possible, and we have many millions of years to figure it out. Really, it's not technically challenging; it's just a problem of scale.

So no. I don't think a supercontinent will form and wipe out humanity, unless we will such a thing to be so. And I'm not even assuming the future is all rosy. We could have a nuclear war, rebuild ourselves from the ashes, and repeat that until we burn through all the uranium, and we would STILL have millions of years to solve these very long term issues.

2

The idea makes me think of The Centerfuge Brain Project where the doctor, talking about a gondola-type… ride, says, “people would fall asleep, miss their stop, and have another 14 hour ride, and you can imagine the problems that caused.”

3

And somehow we would still have US americans tell us, that pangea is too big for a usable railway network.

2
lemmy.world

Dumb question, but would Pangea be flat? Or would it still have the mountains that form by the continents colliding?

2

Sure, but only for like, 115million years. Then you'd have to deal with it breaking apart for the next 200 million years.

2

Companies would still make flying around the waterworld the default. Claiming "sound issues" for the people below....

1
megopiereply
lemmy.blahaj.zone

The image is of a hypothetical future Pangea not the original, so those mountains would form due to re-collision of Europe and North America.

6

Oh great, so in a hundred million years Iceland is going to be crushed? We should be thinking about evacuating the puffins.

2

Commenting to watch the federation test, commenting on Lemmy has felt more like yelling into a void than usual.

2

Yeah, seems like federation broke for a couple days. I made a post about it on [email protected] and got this response from one of the admins:

So it seems the problem was on our end, but also exclusive to instances running 0.19.18

It is fully caught up for blahaj and mander, but still catching up for .world

2