

650 Million Years in 1.2 Minutes (tectonic drift timelapse) - timf
http://kk.org/ct2/2009/07/650-million-years-in-12-minute.php

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biohacker42
How accurate are the future predictions?

The snowball theory of earth claims that volcanoes and land close to the
equator (but not close to the poles) leads to oscillation between a tropical
earth and an earth covered in ice.

Our present state of lots of land close to the poles leads to a more stable
long term climate.

So if in the future the continents again bunch up around the equator we could
see the earth covered in ice once more and another mass extinction.

Is this yet another reason why we have not made contact with aliens?

Yet another reason in addition to, just off the top of my head:

A stable star

Being a good distance from that star.

Asteroid sweeper like Jupiter and Saturn.

A magnetosphere.

A large close moon which will keep the core hot so you can have a
magnetosphere.

No X-ray exploding super novas near by.

Life

Intelligent life

Intelligent life that doesn't destroy itself.

Space faring life

And all of this has to happen at the same time, at least until space flight
takes them far from the home planet.

Also space is BIG.

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wlievens
Space isn't really big at all when you think in geological rather than
individual scales. It probably only takes a couple of thousand years post-
Apollo to colonize dozens of stars.

The real reason we don't see aliens is probably contemporaneity.

Although in that context I have another remark. The Drake formula, often
brought up in these discussions has a major omission: it doesn't account for
multiple intelligent species over the total lifespan of a planet. I don't see
why, a couple of million years after humanity's extinction, another
intelligent species could arise and go through the whole space-flight thing
again.

A planet like Earth could have a typical cycle:

0.0 GA: formation

3.0 GA: bacteria

5.0 GA: intelligent species 1

5.1 GA: intelligent species 2

5.2 GA: intelligent species 2

5.3 GA: intelligent species 3

...

8.0 GA: oceans boil away, parent star going manic

9.0 GA: destruction due to parent star going kabloom

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ars
This is not accurate because it does not take sea level into account.

First, when plates drift they also move up and down.

But also, wouldn't the center of gravity of the earth change if all the land
was in one place? Wouldn't that shift water to cover a lot of the land?

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tokenadult
It sure looks to me like the animation shows sea level changes.

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rokhayakebe
And in the end we all come together. How beautiful.

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aduric
And we only have to wait 250 million years!

