I have often said the space program killed Science Fiction. Similarly, geology has killed the Lost World genre. For several days I have been trying to escape mental claustrophobia thru looking at million year time scales by thinking of the migration of land masses, and biodiversity, trying to get to the point where I can think about Guns, germs, and warfare in an alternate world context. These thoughts are inspired by Atlantis, Yrns Afallon, Huy Brasil, and, more modern, by Utopia, Lilliput and Laputa, Caprona, Islandia, and other such fictional land masses. As one can see from the maps of the world a half and a fifth of a billion years ago, been a whole lot of shuffling going down. But an excellent example of an extreme to which such modeling can be pushed is the sf novel Two Hawks From Earth by PJ Farmer, about a world where the Indian continent went south, instead of colliding with Asia, and the Americas subsided so that Peru was an island called Kahike, colonized by Polynesians, as was Havati, the North American chain of islands about the size of New Zealand. This meant no camels or horses, aside for mesohippo living fossils. It also meant that the ancestral Amerinds went west, to make a world where Ohio and Kentucky meant the Danube and the valley it flowed thru! Starting with the Triassic map, I have tried to picture where another land mass could have been on the fringes of Gwandona, mostly, to form another land mass in the Pacific. Lost several days worth of gleanings on WHEN various existent land masses split from the motherland. :( The next set of questions is, what life forms would have been present when a hypothetical fringe mass split, and how would they have evolved in their splendid isolation? After that, when would hominids have reached them, and when Europe have raped them? Anyway, that is mostly what I have been thinking about, and the types of info I have been trying to glean. Any thoughts, examples, requests?
Posted on: Mon, 19 Jan 2015 21:48:22 +0000
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