[HN Gopher] Ancient Earth globe
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Ancient Earth globe
Author : hendler
Score : 72 points
Date : 2023-08-08 19:53 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (dinosaurpictures.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (dinosaurpictures.org)
| ethanbond wrote:
| This brings to mind one of the more fascinating topics discussed
| in Bill Bryson's (phenomenal, wide-ranging) book _A Short History
| of Nearly Everything_. Until reading that book, I had no clue
| that the discovery of plate tectonics caused huge religious and
| philosophical turmoil similar to the discovery of natural
| selection. It shattered the image of Earth as a static creation
| of God, who of course was beneficent enough to put rivers near
| old cities and provide pretty consistent rain patterns near
| farmland, etc. etc.
| jschroedl wrote:
| This is really cool! Well done!
| [deleted]
| pookah wrote:
| [dead]
| swader999 wrote:
| I can't see my house.
| tail_exchange wrote:
| Doesn't seem to load on Firefox
| kelnos wrote:
| Works fine here (Firefox 115.0.3, Linux).
| SushiHippie wrote:
| +1 Also on Firefox on Android.
| qup wrote:
| -1
|
| Failing with Firefox on Android
|
| I think, anyway. I got a pin then can't figure it out.
| developer93 wrote:
| Try a closer time frame and work backwards
| sublinear wrote:
| The typeahead is awful.
|
| The request to load in the suggested cities should not block the
| UI. There should also be a loading indicator so that the user
| knows it's not a normal text input and it should prevent the user
| from selecting a city when the list goes stale.
| ivanstojic wrote:
| The country lines on the globe are ridiculously out of date, and
| show countries that haven't existed for 30 years.
| thom wrote:
| I keep wanting some sort of dynamic desktop globe, where I can
| set the maps to basically any era and picture the world back
| then. See Alexander's conquests, Rome's rise etc. Feels like this
| hardware must be possible at this point?
| erictd wrote:
| Perfect timing - I just finished John McPhee's wonderful
| "Assembling California". It goes into quite a bit of detail of
| how California came together, and includes some history of
| tectonic plate theory, the gold rush, and quite a lot more.
| jurassicfoxy wrote:
| For some reason this makes me feel depressed. I guess it is the
| lack of functional time machine combined with the on-going
| Holocene extinction.
| germinalphrase wrote:
| Don't worry. Once we're all gone - life will spring right back.
| [deleted]
| danjoredd wrote:
| Sure, the Earth will adapt and be fine long-term. Its gonna
| suck for us humans though. Thats the part Im not looking
| forward to.
| captainbland wrote:
| Yeah personally I could do without living through some kind
| of age of decay with masses of people getting displaced and
| such.
| pookah wrote:
| [dead]
| developer93 wrote:
| Don't give a shoot about life, it's humans I'm interested in.
| acdanger wrote:
| With no other (non-human) life , humans could not exist .
| Alupis wrote:
| > For some reason this makes me feel depressed.
|
| Or you can recognize "climate change" is a constant. That bit
| has been lost with the recent debate over climate science - far
| too many people view _any_ change as a disaster.
|
| We can look at this map and recognize vast dramatic changes
| occurred before humans were ever here.
|
| Humans undeniably have an impact on climate change. That much
| isn't up for debate. What is up for debate is the exact extent
| human actions are actually influencing change vs. expediting a
| predetermined change vs. creating changes that would not have
| existed otherwise.
|
| Poles have changed[1]... oceans come and go, land disappears
| then reappears. The earth is surprisingly constantly changing -
| just not on time scales humans normally contemplate.
|
| [1] - https://ec.europa.eu/research-and-innovation/en/horizon-
| maga....
| developer93 wrote:
| Thing is, humans weren't there for nearly all of it. It's not
| a question of whether things change, it's a question of
| whether we can survive it as a species, or as a civilisation.
| Empires have risen and fallen throughout history, but it
| doesn't mean you'd rather live as part of a society in which
| you could die of a toothache instead of something more
| advanced.
|
| It's going to get extremely unpleasant, it's a no brainer
| that we'd like to limit the fallout.
| forgetfulness wrote:
| It'd be quite callous to hope that nothing will happen from
| the countries above the tropics that
|
| 1. Colonized Africa and Asia to secure raw materials and
| captive markets to develop its industry, pumping all this
| carbon into the atmosphere in the process
|
| 2. Will probably be able to withstand the impact of Climate
| Change either due to geographical reasons or due to having
| more developed infrastructure and economies
|
| In light of that, is the idea of asking Westerners using
| their cars less and switch to clean energy _such a terrible
| thing to ask?_
| louistsi wrote:
| The changes that we're seeing now are occurring at such a
| horrifyingly rapid rate compared to the changes we've seen
| historically though. My reading of your message is that
| you're conflating historical changes in oceans, landmass,
| atmospheric streams and polar orientation with modern climate
| change. The latter is happening at 7 orders of magnitude
| faster than the former.
| developer93 wrote:
| They hit it on the head with their last sentences but
| managed to go steaming past the point with nary a glance.
| Alupis wrote:
| And yet nobody really knows for sure how quickly climates
| changed in the past, or how fast they're supposed to
| change, or if they always change at a similar rate.
|
| On some level, what people advocate doing is creating
| climate change to _benefit humans_ , which is kind of the
| antithesis of what climate science activists claim they
| want.
|
| I'm confident we don't understand the earth and climate
| well enough to "engineer" it to our will.
|
| I cannot imagine what a pole reversal would look like
| today. The truly scary thing is contemplating just how many
| things depend on, or assume polar north is where it is
| today.
|
| Even more scary, there's absolutely nothing anyone can do
| about polar reversal, and absolutely nothing humans do that
| is provoking it. It's just a natural phenomenon, during
| which things will indeed become extremely unpleasant.
| seadan83 wrote:
| "For example, bubbles of air in glacial ice trap tiny
| samples of Earth's atmosphere, giving scientists a
| history of greenhouse gases that stretches back more than
| 800,000 years. The chemical make-up of the ice provides
| clues to the average global temperature." [1]
|
| Is NASA incorrect about this?
|
| This XKCD visualizes the historic rates of change
| temperature change in a pretty compelling way:
| https://xkcd.com/1732/
|
| > I cannot imagine what a pole reversal would look like
| today. The truly scary thing is contemplating just how
| many things depend on, or assume polar north is where it
| is today.
|
| I would ask in response - do magnetic poles impact
| climate change? (I presume you are talking about the
| magnetic polar north & south).
|
| According to NASA the magnetic poles have essentially no
| impact on climate change: "Some people have claimed that
| variations in Earth's magnetic field are contributing to
| current global warming and can cause catastrophic climate
| change. However, the science doesn't support that
| argument. In this blog, we'll examine a number of
| proposed hypotheses regarding the effects of changes in
| Earth's magnetic field on climate. We'll also discuss
| physics-based reasons why changes in the magnetic field
| can't impact climate." [2]
|
| What other impacts do the magnetic poles have?
|
| It is very interesting to me that the magnetic poles move
| by "34 miles (55 kilometers) per year" [2]. That is a
| pretty reasonably steady and fast rate of change. Seems
| like navigation equipment and anything else that relies
| on polar north should already be baking this in. After a
| decade, it's 340 miles of movement.
|
| [1] https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/features/GlobalWarm
| ing/pag...
|
| [2] https://climate.nasa.gov/explore/ask-nasa-
| climate/3104/flip-...
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > how fast they're supposed to change.
|
| The idea that this is even a coherent question is
| Creationist, because it presupposes a purposeful design.
| Alupis wrote:
| Interesting take - it was not my intention to insert a
| philosophy here such as Creationism.
|
| My point was if we're saying something is changing at an
| alarming rate - then the natural question would be what
| is a normal rate?
|
| One of the problems with observational science is we
| cannot ever really know for sure.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > My point was if we're saying something is changing at
| an alarming rate - then the natural question would be
| what is a normal rate
|
| Danger can be alarming even if on a wide enough time
| window its not unusual (that the current warming _is_
| unusual on any timeline as narrow as, say, "the history
| of human civilization on Earth" is clear, though.)
| Alupis wrote:
| > the history of human civilization on Earth
|
| We actually don't even know that much. Written records
| only go back so far, and the ability to measure say
| temperature in any relatively accurate way is a modern
| invention. Majority (or all?) dependable temperature data
| starts around 1900...
|
| If it's alarming because within recent human history
| something is changing quickly - well fine, but that's not
| how this stuff is being offered.
|
| Even so, the question remains - is it an actual problem?
| Has human activity created the change, accelerated
| change, or was the change inevitable (ie. caused by polar
| reversal)? These are difficult questions to answer
| absolutely.
|
| Even if we could answer these questions confidently -
| should we do anything about it? Would our actions to
| "combat" climate change cause unknown side effects?
| Probably... how do we square those potentially negative
| impacts with the "good" changes we've created?
|
| It's pretty complicated. Anyone offering absolutes or
| hysterics should be taken skeptically in my opinion.
| vkou wrote:
| Fuel being combusted during regular operation of an airplane
| is a constant.
|
| Fuel being combusted during an unplanned explosion of an
| airplane is a disaster.
|
| CO2 levels, and, as a trailing indicator, climate are
| currently changing at a rate that looks more like the latter
| than the former.
| developer93 wrote:
| Not depressed but gives me a strange queasy feeling to look at
| my town from a time when there was no life on land.. Kinda
| lonely by proxy..
| teh_klev wrote:
| Sizable discussions from the last time around:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35856820
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31520483
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24459997
| Keyframe wrote:
| that's quite a political map overlay there
| bojan wrote:
| From over 30 years ago.
| jrh3 wrote:
| I used to have ocean front property.
| sigg3 wrote:
| And soon you'll have it again.
| jrh3 wrote:
| Ha, people keep saying that. Ocean has a long way to rise to
| get back to me, not sure I'll be here to enjoy it.
| developer93 wrote:
| If you're right, that's probably a good thing, not sure
| it'll be enjoyable.. However records are being broken much
| faster than the worst predictions, so it might be faster
| than you think.
| vinni2 wrote:
| Really awesome! couple of things to take it to next level.
|
| 1. A timeline or animation to show how a city location or land
| mass changed over time. 2. Predict the future where would my city
| be in 100 million years. May be under water
| checkyoursudo wrote:
| It is interesting to see the landmasses move over time. I am not
| sure if I expected them to move faster or slower. At any rate,
| things can change a lot in just a few tens of millions of years.
| notbeuller wrote:
| Interesting to me - the NYC area (I'm from Connecticut nearby)
| seems like it's been on solid ground for most of the timescale
| represented. And Florida didn't exist 20mm years ago.
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(page generated 2023-08-08 23:01 UTC)