Wait, no, I won’t. I’ll be long gone. I expect the human species will be extinct by then. This is entirely predictable, that thanks to ongoing plate tectonics, eventually the continents will collide into a super-continent, Amasia.
It won’t actually be named that, of course, since the hyper-intelligent spiders that evolve to replace us won’t be using English.
Biology will get interesting, though.
Surrounded by a new superocean, the newly formed supercontinent will also have decreased biodiversity.
“Earth as we know it will be drastically different when Amasia forms. The sea level is expected to be lower, and the vast interior of the supercontinent will be very arid with high daily temperature ranges,” Li said. “Currently, Earth consists of seven continents with widely different ecosystems and human cultures, so it would be fascinating to think what the world might look like in 200 million to 300 million years’ time.”
It’ll be a harsher world in many ways, but at least it won’t have Homo sapiens screwing it up further. Also, you might want to start getting on the good side of the hyper-intelligent spiders.
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blockquote>It won’t actually be named that, of course, since the hyper-intelligent spiders that evolve to replace us won’t be using English.
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What about the beetle-race the minds of the Great Race of Yith will inhabit after the Great Old Ones exterminate us?
But PZ. We already know that intelligent land-squid will develop on this continent.
https://speculativeevolution.fandom.com/wiki/Squibbon
At the rate we’re filling up the oceans with garbage, we don’t need to wait for plate tectonics to make one solid land mass.
If we can keep at developing AI while simultanously learning how the brain works, the division between AI and biological intelligence will eventually become irrelevant.
These our descendants will hopefully transcend the obstacles that are challenging our iteration of the human species.
Goodness gracious, did I sleep through Pangea Ultima?
University of Texas geologist Christopher Scotese predicted this future supercontinent some decades ago. The best I can find is a map just before things close up:
http://www.scotese.com/future2.htm
In further projections, which I must have seen in a seminar but cannot find online, these merge to a single continent with a huge inland sea.
Some of the scenes in Michael Swanwick’s 2002 novel “Bones of the Earth” take place in this future. Humans are long extinct but there is an intelligent species, descended from birds. They are fascinated by our time-travellers, as they knew of us only through paleontology.
William Hyde
@6 williamhyde: Look closely, that Scotese map (and almost all other ‘Pangaea Ultima’ maps) predict that the Atlantic Basin will close again.
However, this new study predicts that it is the Pacific Basin that will close, while the Atlantic Basin will continue to open.
I have to admit, initially I was highly skeptical of this new model, but I read the paper (I’ll admit it is outside my geological and palaeontological expertise), and it makes some compelling arguments. Basically that over the past 2 billion years that oceanic crust has changed in thickness due to cooling of the earth, and the way that supercontinent cycles behaved previously may no longer be applicable.
I wonder… will we be the distant ancestors of the chthonians and the Deep Ones?
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By then, a lot of stars will -by random movement- have passed by the sun at considerably less less than a light-years’ distance. At least some of them will have terrestrial planets and be a star belonging to the F, G or K classes.
So the real-life version of ‘First And Last Men’ will not have quite as bleak an ending as Stapledon’s novel.
And if you find people willing to settle a world orbiting a star with fast relative motion (Barnard’s star is one such) their offspring will travel past a lot of promising star systems much faster than those who stay at our sun.
Sol is travelling at ca 15 km/s relative the Milky way background. Those stars I mentioned (usually population II stars) travel at 40 km/s or more.
And a robot civilisation may not spurn brown dwarf planets or red dwarf planets, jumping from står to star much faster than biologicals.
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(As the “Rare Earth” hypothesis has a lot of arguments going for it, it is not if we will be destroying local biospheres when repairing worlds that became inhospitable for any number of freak accidents)
Isn’t that ocean called Panthalassa? Or is that name only used for past superoceans?
Isn’t that ocean called Panthalassa? Or is that name only used for past superoceans?
Pleased to see from the graphic that Australia is indestructible. (All other nations must bow down before us.)
Pretty sure Paul Rudd will still be around.
@ 9. birgerjohansson : Seems the Panthalassa was the past ocean of the Mesozoic when we had the previous Pangean supercontinent – and apparently a precursor to the the Pacific too. See :
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panthalassa
I’m sure we can work out a good tongue-twister from that..
PS. When it comes to Panthalassa there’s a good, if long (40 min), youtube doco on it here – from the 19 minutes 53 seconds mark onwards – here .
D’oh! Make that here instead actually
– wrong link above sorry.
See also this nearly nine minute long youtube clipon it too
Okay just one more supercontinents / oceans clip on youtube – a 9 & a half minute one via SciShow Space which runs through some possible future continental arrangements and why they might happen which is pretty good I reckon despite being a year old and Amasia does get a mention at the end too.
Hope these are interesting and informative for y’all.