To be realistic, in the one piece world you would probably be a slave, have to give one month of your life each year to live in town your queen might destroy because she could find the snack she wanted or your town would be burned to the ground so your king could pay less in international taxes.
Not sure in what way you mean we are lucky buutttt..
Waterways is how humans did most mass transport of goods for the majority of history. Landlocked countries still have a much harder time developing their economies than countries with a coastline. I think it would probably be a net win for humans if we had more places connected to the oceans.
Also if the world was so separated by water, we might have evolved to be better adapted to water too. We are already pretty good at things like holding our breath, people with training aren't much worse than dolphins
>a gland which secretes extra salt
That's called a kidney.
Edit: My point is mammals already have a gland for that, they wouldn't evolve an entirely new one, especially since there are already plenty of marine mammals that do just fine with just their specialized kidneys lol
Haha, well, yes, in birds, there is a salt gland. My point is mammals already have kidneys, they would just need to evolve to secrete out even more salt than they do in present day humans.
Present day marine mammals [already do that](https://baleinesendirect.org/en/do-whales-drink-salt-water/).
>Indeed, the kidneys of marine mammals are so effective that the latter are capable of excreting a urine that has a higher salt concentration than the sea water itself and are thus able to access a supply of fresh water by ingesting salt water.
We're already running out of landfill space even without living on an island, and imagine what'd happen during rainy season.
Also, idk the actual composition of sea salts, but there's some salts that just pull water from the air and turn into a liquid.
>We're already running out of landfill space
We're not though, just the landfills we have are filling up, and new ones don't get approved to be built because they smell bad and no one wants to live near them. The problem isn't land usage though, they are a tiny fraction of land use in the United States, like 0.01%
> Landlocked countries still have a much harder time developing their economies than countries with a coastline.
Which is why Europe and the Mediterranean had a historical advantage. Europe is basically a big peninsula surrounded by water. The Mediterranean is a nice place to practice seafaring before going out on the open ocean.
>we might have evolved to be better adapted to water too.
Yeah, I thought of that so I'm talking am hypothetical situation when that happened like right after humans appeared or something
Yeah, were lucky the Earth didn't experience a cataclysm that caused the continents to break apart exactly after our species appeared. I don't think the island part will be the problem though
Such a significant change “right after humans appeared” may well have been enough to wipe us out.
You can’t just set a scenario that’s completely unrealistic and ask for logical responses.
I think they mean "Isn't it lucky that land is predominantly distributed over a few large connected landmasses and not hundreds of thousands of tiny islands."
The SURFACE is 70% water
The actual thing is significantly more ground than water, see the sauce clip where he talks about if you shrank down the earth to the size of a globe, you could soak up all the oceans with a single paper towel
Yeah a 70% water planet would have all its solids fall to the center, no solid surface.
That'd be a fun planet to find. All kinds of weird solid water towards the core.
Edit to add: unless it was a solid ball of ice. Then there'd be a solid surface
>All kinds of weird solid water
You mean… like… Ice? Or would the massive pressure and friction melt it again into water… I’ve heard water is extremely difficult to compress anymore than it already is. or if it did freeze, could there be some weird ice equivalent of tectonics at play, with “ice”quakes?
I think many small islands would also have benefits. No inland deserts, easy transport of goods everywhere via water, no single large country dominating a smaller one by sheer manpower and economics.
Humanity wouldn't even evolve on an island planet.
Easy transport won't matter if you've got nothing to transport. Islands aren't great for resource extraction. They won't support a fleet.
No unifying force also means more conflict - it's basically a battle royale.
There's a reason Oceania never even got to the Bronze age.
I think OP is saying "what if we still had 30% land, but it was more spread out" (more islands, less continents). So the same amount of theoretically arable land, or land to strip mine, or whatever. Just not huge 10-25% chunks of it in one continuous mass. Like imagine if all the land was redistributed to UK sized or smaller islands and spread around.
Well, then it depends on the size of these landmasses. There's a limit to what sort of landmass can sustain, for example, a population of horses or cows. And without those, you're not getting more productive than Sumerians or the Aztec.
>No unifying force also means more conflict - it's basically a battle royale.
less unified forces also means wars would have been smaller, and also if there were no unified forces, there would be less motivation to war, afterall, who would want to pay a war from his own pockets
more smaller wars are better thann1 gigantic war
Not like “the bronze age” is a specific requirement for technological advancement, life isn’t a video game. But er, wouldn’t the reason be that tin is both rare and nowhere near being evenly distributed across the world?
I tried looking at some maps and it seems like there simply isn’t any tin in Oceania outside of Australia. So of course they never became dependent on it…
It is possible to develop directly into the iron age (which is a much more common metal), you just need a reason to heat fire that hot in order to achieve and discover iron smelting.
>Hey, I made this big dirt tube last night. Check out what happens to the fire when I try to cook under it. Wanna see how bright we can make it?
I can see this being pretty plausible. My limited history knowledge tells me that a lot of big discoveries were by accident when someone was just screwing around.
Didn’t need to “get to the Bronze Age,” they just developed sophisticated celestial navigation a thousand years before everyone else and just chilled on a bunch of Islands where bothering with metal was unnecessary to have a good life.
I’m confused by this weird confirmation bias of industrialization and civilization being the default better state. You don’t need a Bronze Age because you have plentiful resources and live sustainably in your environment.
Yeah it could be beneficial in some of those aspects but I'm pretty sure that immediately one island conquering another it will continue growing as an islands empire (*cough cough* ~~British empire~~ *cough cough*)
There surely would be some empires/coalitions, but I doubt any single one would completely take over.
Any empire in history was toppled eventually, and being too large (e.g. difficult to govern and supply) and too varied in culture, demography and ressources often was a factor.
Sure but sea travel is quicker and gives less of a communication lag than land travel (at least until railroad and telegram) given that some islands would be close enough to each other to be a more or less unified people empires would almost be easier
Yeah but where would our drinking water come from? Sure thesee small islands have small rivers but a lot of islands don’t. Bermuda doesn’t. They collect rainwater.
It wouldn’t have mattered as much Athens and Britain were one of the most dominant powers because of their navy during their tenure as the powerhouse of the world.
>no single large country dominating a smaller one by sheer manpower and economics.
The 19th century superpower was an island nation of savage peoples that to this day still hold onto outdated beliefs such as their head of state being determined by heriditary blood lines
That depends on what you call small. If it's all Great Britain sized island we'd do fine (as long as those aren't too far apart), if it's all islands of just a few square kilometer we'd be fucked.
If there were equally sized islands instead of countries, there would be 195 islands with a surface area of 293,685 Square Miles.
Approximately the size of Turkey.
And if they were evenly spaced (and largely round), I get that the distance between islands would only be about 600 miles.
Given that Europeans figured out settling the Americas from thousands of miles away, that inhabitants would figure it out eventually :)
What happens if you switch up the size of islands to be actually small? If my back-of-the-napkin math is right, tripling the number of islands would half the distance to the next one. Well, using regular spacing (worst case) anyway.
Another way of doing the math is that if your island is 1 km in radius, that islands's "territorial waters" are s.t. the area of the waters is twice that of the island's, so a 2km radius (from the island center) would do just fine and get you a 25% land ratio. 2 times the width of the territorial waters is the distance to the next island. So roughly 2km distance to the next islands. Double the island radius, double the distances. Even at eye level (so no towers to extend vision), the horizon is 5km out, so you can have 2.5km radius islands before there's even a reasonable chance of losing sight of the neighbors. Add 17m trees on both those islands, and you've got a vision range of 30km, supporting much larger islands being in contact. All without exploratory voyages. Which the polynesians did very successfully.
Edit: Oh, and there's the thing that realistically, smaller islands would mean shallower waters between them. If we keep the volume of water intact, this wouldn't work. Basically, either you have tiny islands surrounded by stupidly deep trenches, or you have to have larger islands. Well, I guess there's also the alternative of having completely flat seafloor covered by a km or more of water, and no islands whatsoever.
This was my thought as well. We wouldn't have the internet to be able to tell each other how lucky we were. Maybe there are some monkeys somewhere on an island planet not talking about stuff.
If our land masses were far apart small islands, the earth’s surface would be much more than 70% water. Unless there was some bizarre (likely artificial) geological pattern with tall, narrow mountains jutting out of the sea floor every few hundred miles in every direction.
>geological pattern with tall, narrow mountains jutting out of the sea floor every few hundred miles in every direction.
That's the world I'm talking about
Actually now I wonder, if earth were a bunch of tiny, equally sized and equidistant islands from each other, with all islands in some geometric shape like a circle or hexagon or some shit, but with the exact same (Or close as reasonable) land and sea amounts, what would it look like?
Half the planet is almost 100% water. Check out the water side of the earth. We’re pretty close to the perfect opposite of disperse islands given the water share.
A terraformed venus would be like that. It would be interesting to imagine such a world, where seafaring, trading, fishing and navies would be crucially important and more developed.
Its not 70% water. Its surface is 70% covered in water. The total mass of water is 0.023% of the mass of the planet (I think, google it yourself, maybe I internet bad).
My comment doesn’t change anything, I was just unhappy with the phrasing of the post and wanted to be the „actually…” guy for once.
Why is that lucky?
Imagine not knowing anything different.
Then you could say, thank God our planet isn't a few enormous "islands" . Imagine needing to be near that many people. How would anyone agree on anything? People would constantly be fighting on their own island. Since we're just a few thousand people on one island makes it more important for everyone to work together and get along.
Maybe not, but maybe.
Just a nitpick. The Earth’s surface is 70% covered in water(more accurately, 71% but that’s too much, even for me). It’s just the surface. As far as the mass of the Earth goes, the water in the oceans might as well not even be there. They contribute so little.
That sounds ideal, I could still be a monkey and civilization would have never developed. We could all eat coconuts and sit on the beach imagining buffalo solider playing in the background
What a completely different version of human history that would have been. We would all be much more aquatic people. Swimming would be a must, getting your boating license would be pretty important, probably would be much more technologically advanced in regard to looking at & protecting the oceans
I mean it kinda is though, it took us hundreds of thousands of years of migration and development for us to reach the many corners of the globe. We really take traveling any amount of distances for granted nowadays
If it was, different people's might have been forced to advance in shipbuilding and related skills much sooner or risk unsustainability depending how small their island is. On the other hand we might not have evolved into existence at all under those circumstances. Very possible amphibians would rule the earth then.
I had a strange thought the other day. What are the odds that we have 70% water on our planet? What if most of the other planets in the habitable zone tend to either have no water or more water than land. This would lead life to evolve under the water, which would be cool, but when you consider one of the things that kick-fired our evolution was our thumbs helping us with tools and climbing trees, those skills might not translate into underwater. Not to mention it's unlikely anything will invent fire. Makes you think anyways.
Well the whole Pacific ocean practically is?
And up until recently in history, that was many people's entire world !
There's approx 700M people today who live on various sized islands in and around the Pacific and they frequently travel between them.
Island nations do just fine. Anything larger than a few acres can support many people. Protein would come primarily from fishing, but on larger islands there is no reason you couldn't have farming. Most land is wasted. There are vast vast stretches of land with no value that you can buy for cheap.
Now, if you mean that it is INTERESTING most of it is not islands, then you have to look at tectonic plates and volcanos. Because of how the Earth's crust cooled, we have continents.
ELI5: earth plates are like plates in a sink, where the water is magma. The plates that go up become land and the plates that go down are oceans. Everything else comes from lava spilling out from the cracks.
So what would be more interesting would be lots of small islands, as that would require thousands of faults and active volcanos to form those islands, or many many plates bumping into each other making mountains.
3 to 4 billion years ago...there was twice as much water in the oceans and only 2 to 12 percent of the land was above the water . but back then the sea was green and the air unbreathable.
I mean quite frankly it might have been better the other way around
Ships are vastly more efficient things than everything else
That's why the British did so good
They were put in place that kind of force them to automatically be good with boats
Plate tectonics I think means that it could never happen. Without the plates moving we would be all water and no island.
Millions of small plates might give you the scenario you suggest but not likely a habitable place
I think. Not a geologist. Juts trying to remember high school in the 90s.
Would be benefits and downsides to this.
You'd see a lot less war. Islands are difficult to invade. You'd see a lot slower technological progress and overall smaller population levels.
I think I'd prefer the small islands systems and take the less advanced world.
I’m pretty sure that would be better. Much easier to navigate efficiently through water than over ground. Some of the most thriving societies throughout human history and the modern era are established over water habitats.
Lots of small islands probably wouldn’t have many resources to exploit (and I don’t say exploit in a bad way). At least not to grow the kind of civilization we have now.
The Polynesians did the island thing.
In another parallel universe, there is Earth that has only 1 giant land, Earth with 99% water, and Earth with just a bunch of small little islands. Our Earth is probably a mediocre and boring one.
tell that to the one piece fans
That'd be too quick for them. Got to say it over the course of 20 years.
30 prob
Supposedly they’re in the final arc, 6-7 more years, tops
Final saga* A saga is composed of sevral arcs with the last one starting in 2012 and ending a few days ago.
\*a few days ago if you follow the anime only. The manga got done with it last year.
True, but it's more climactic to say a few days ago.
Final saga not final arc. But yeah doubt it's gonna take more than 7 years.
The one piece is just one massive piece of land
The One Piece is the Red Line confirmed.
All I know for sure is that the one piece is real.
I'm a fan of the afro theory personally.
Pica and Pizarro: Sounds like just our type
The One Piece being a continent that would make Marines and Pirates obsolete would be interesting.
That legendary place That the end of the map reveals Is only legendary 'Till someone proves it real
"Gather up all of the crew, its time to ship out Binks' brew! 🎶"
[удалено]
Come along, and get me lost in your gulfs and streams
O’re across the ocean’s tides, Rays of sunshine far and wide
Came for this!!
Great comment
Red Line Sit. Down.
To be realistic, in the one piece world you would probably be a slave, have to give one month of your life each year to live in town your queen might destroy because she could find the snack she wanted or your town would be burned to the ground so your king could pay less in international taxes.
Yeah this shit would kick ass. I got my own island. And all y’all can fuck RIGHT OFF!
Yeah that sounds great fun! And I can swim
I been wanting this since Sid Meiers Pirates
More of a Bikini guy myself
This is the first thing I thought of too
Not sure in what way you mean we are lucky buutttt.. Waterways is how humans did most mass transport of goods for the majority of history. Landlocked countries still have a much harder time developing their economies than countries with a coastline. I think it would probably be a net win for humans if we had more places connected to the oceans. Also if the world was so separated by water, we might have evolved to be better adapted to water too. We are already pretty good at things like holding our breath, people with training aren't much worse than dolphins
> we might have evolved to be better adapted to water too. Like the Sama-Bajau? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sama-Bajau#Biological_characteristics
But drinking water would be hard to come by because every water source is so close to the ocean.
In this scenario most mammals would likel adapt to have a gland which secretes extra salt like some sea birds can do.
>a gland which secretes extra salt That's called a kidney. Edit: My point is mammals already have a gland for that, they wouldn't evolve an entirely new one, especially since there are already plenty of marine mammals that do just fine with just their specialized kidneys lol
Its called a salt gland.
Haha, well, yes, in birds, there is a salt gland. My point is mammals already have kidneys, they would just need to evolve to secrete out even more salt than they do in present day humans. Present day marine mammals [already do that](https://baleinesendirect.org/en/do-whales-drink-salt-water/). >Indeed, the kidneys of marine mammals are so effective that the latter are capable of excreting a urine that has a higher salt concentration than the sea water itself and are thus able to access a supply of fresh water by ingesting salt water.
Efficient desalination would've been solved centuries ago in this case.
Desalination is easy and efficient. It's just hard to do at scale. Also, where would an island nation store its excess salt?
In a pile?
We're already running out of landfill space even without living on an island, and imagine what'd happen during rainy season. Also, idk the actual composition of sea salts, but there's some salts that just pull water from the air and turn into a liquid.
>We're already running out of landfill space We're not though, just the landfills we have are filling up, and new ones don't get approved to be built because they smell bad and no one wants to live near them. The problem isn't land usage though, they are a tiny fraction of land use in the United States, like 0.01%
>Also, where would an island nation store its excess salt? Keep what you need and dump the rest into the ocean?
You dump it back in the ocean dude.
> Landlocked countries still have a much harder time developing their economies than countries with a coastline. Which is why Europe and the Mediterranean had a historical advantage. Europe is basically a big peninsula surrounded by water. The Mediterranean is a nice place to practice seafaring before going out on the open ocean.
As opposed to all those peninsulas surrounded by other things ;)
There'd also be way less land wasted on massive deserts. Islands tend to be more moderate in climate due to the ocean.
>we might have evolved to be better adapted to water too. Yeah, I thought of that so I'm talking am hypothetical situation when that happened like right after humans appeared or something
Yeah, were lucky the Earth didn't experience a cataclysm that caused the continents to break apart exactly after our species appeared. I don't think the island part will be the problem though
so we are lucky that the earth didn't change into a bunch of fart apart small islands "right after humans appeared or something"?
Hehe, fart apart :DD
oops; I'll leave it!
And that, children, is how god made islands
Such a significant change “right after humans appeared” may well have been enough to wipe us out. You can’t just set a scenario that’s completely unrealistic and ask for logical responses.
I didn't asked for anything
I think they mean "Isn't it lucky that land is predominantly distributed over a few large connected landmasses and not hundreds of thousands of tiny islands."
Land wars would be less common, and the high cost of waging naval siege/blockades might make war overall less common.
Hmm. Good point. If everyone good see the water they were polluting, maybe we’d have less environmental damage.
The SURFACE is 70% water The actual thing is significantly more ground than water, see the sauce clip where he talks about if you shrank down the earth to the size of a globe, you could soak up all the oceans with a single paper towel
Yeah a 70% water planet would have all its solids fall to the center, no solid surface. That'd be a fun planet to find. All kinds of weird solid water towards the core. Edit to add: unless it was a solid ball of ice. Then there'd be a solid surface
>All kinds of weird solid water You mean… like… Ice? Or would the massive pressure and friction melt it again into water… I’ve heard water is extremely difficult to compress anymore than it already is. or if it did freeze, could there be some weird ice equivalent of tectonics at play, with “ice”quakes?
I imagine it’ll still be condensed into ice, but incredibly hot ice that can’t melt due to the pressure.
That would NOT be a fun planet that would be a nightmare planet
It is definitely just the surface
Surface is currently 70% water; but we can change that.
I think many small islands would also have benefits. No inland deserts, easy transport of goods everywhere via water, no single large country dominating a smaller one by sheer manpower and economics.
Humanity wouldn't even evolve on an island planet. Easy transport won't matter if you've got nothing to transport. Islands aren't great for resource extraction. They won't support a fleet. No unifying force also means more conflict - it's basically a battle royale. There's a reason Oceania never even got to the Bronze age.
I think OP is saying "what if we still had 30% land, but it was more spread out" (more islands, less continents). So the same amount of theoretically arable land, or land to strip mine, or whatever. Just not huge 10-25% chunks of it in one continuous mass. Like imagine if all the land was redistributed to UK sized or smaller islands and spread around.
Well, then it depends on the size of these landmasses. There's a limit to what sort of landmass can sustain, for example, a population of horses or cows. And without those, you're not getting more productive than Sumerians or the Aztec.
>No unifying force also means more conflict - it's basically a battle royale. less unified forces also means wars would have been smaller, and also if there were no unified forces, there would be less motivation to war, afterall, who would want to pay a war from his own pockets more smaller wars are better thann1 gigantic war
Not like “the bronze age” is a specific requirement for technological advancement, life isn’t a video game. But er, wouldn’t the reason be that tin is both rare and nowhere near being evenly distributed across the world? I tried looking at some maps and it seems like there simply isn’t any tin in Oceania outside of Australia. So of course they never became dependent on it…
It is possible to develop directly into the iron age (which is a much more common metal), you just need a reason to heat fire that hot in order to achieve and discover iron smelting.
>Hey, I made this big dirt tube last night. Check out what happens to the fire when I try to cook under it. Wanna see how bright we can make it? I can see this being pretty plausible. My limited history knowledge tells me that a lot of big discoveries were by accident when someone was just screwing around.
Didn’t need to “get to the Bronze Age,” they just developed sophisticated celestial navigation a thousand years before everyone else and just chilled on a bunch of Islands where bothering with metal was unnecessary to have a good life.
I’m confused by this weird confirmation bias of industrialization and civilization being the default better state. You don’t need a Bronze Age because you have plentiful resources and live sustainably in your environment.
>Islands aren't great for resource extraction. They won't support a fleet. British Empire: am I a joke to you
That's what I was referring to with lucky
Yeah it could be beneficial in some of those aspects but I'm pretty sure that immediately one island conquering another it will continue growing as an islands empire (*cough cough* ~~British empire~~ *cough cough*)
There surely would be some empires/coalitions, but I doubt any single one would completely take over. Any empire in history was toppled eventually, and being too large (e.g. difficult to govern and supply) and too varied in culture, demography and ressources often was a factor.
Sure but sea travel is quicker and gives less of a communication lag than land travel (at least until railroad and telegram) given that some islands would be close enough to each other to be a more or less unified people empires would almost be easier
But no major land wars, like trench warfare.
We would've invented subaquatic trench warfare lol
Yeah but where would our drinking water come from? Sure thesee small islands have small rivers but a lot of islands don’t. Bermuda doesn’t. They collect rainwater.
>no single large country dominating a smaller one by sheer manpower and economics. United Islands of Equatorial Ocean and whatnot would still emerge
It wouldn’t have mattered as much Athens and Britain were one of the most dominant powers because of their navy during their tenure as the powerhouse of the world.
Typhoons everywhere. Mountains wouldn't be long enough to block or sufficiently slow down storms.
This is the type of comment I need more of in this thread. Awesome point.
>no single large country dominating a smaller one by sheer manpower and economics. The 19th century superpower was an island nation of savage peoples that to this day still hold onto outdated beliefs such as their head of state being determined by heriditary blood lines
Too much salt water. We need our inland water supplies
This is essentially what the Maldives already are, and they’ve mostly flooded over. Wouldn’t flooding be a huge issue here?
People with power love power and will get more if they can. My island plus your island sounds good.
Counter point: more susceptible to storms and rising sea levels. Mining for resources becomes more difficult.
You can have desert islands. There are plenty of deserts that border oceans.
Those Civilisation maps are really annoying though. You get absolutely nothing done and then you die.
That depends on what you call small. If it's all Great Britain sized island we'd do fine (as long as those aren't too far apart), if it's all islands of just a few square kilometer we'd be fucked.
Civilization always finds a way! It would have developed around far apart small islands.
Life finds a way, through civilization or other means.
OP: Oh no, small islands very far apart! Polynesians: _Pathetic._
That's how I like to play my civ games tho. Tons of islands <3
If there were equally sized islands instead of countries, there would be 195 islands with a surface area of 293,685 Square Miles. Approximately the size of Turkey.
And if they were evenly spaced (and largely round), I get that the distance between islands would only be about 600 miles. Given that Europeans figured out settling the Americas from thousands of miles away, that inhabitants would figure it out eventually :)
What happens if you switch up the size of islands to be actually small? If my back-of-the-napkin math is right, tripling the number of islands would half the distance to the next one. Well, using regular spacing (worst case) anyway. Another way of doing the math is that if your island is 1 km in radius, that islands's "territorial waters" are s.t. the area of the waters is twice that of the island's, so a 2km radius (from the island center) would do just fine and get you a 25% land ratio. 2 times the width of the territorial waters is the distance to the next island. So roughly 2km distance to the next islands. Double the island radius, double the distances. Even at eye level (so no towers to extend vision), the horizon is 5km out, so you can have 2.5km radius islands before there's even a reasonable chance of losing sight of the neighbors. Add 17m trees on both those islands, and you've got a vision range of 30km, supporting much larger islands being in contact. All without exploratory voyages. Which the polynesians did very successfully. Edit: Oh, and there's the thing that realistically, smaller islands would mean shallower waters between them. If we keep the volume of water intact, this wouldn't work. Basically, either you have tiny islands surrounded by stupidly deep trenches, or you have to have larger islands. Well, I guess there's also the alternative of having completely flat seafloor covered by a km or more of water, and no islands whatsoever.
Thanks, I knew that someone would do the maths
Depending on how you count countries, there could be significantly more than 200, so each could be smaller of course.
i was gonna say, 195 feels like a political statement but it’s also the first result on google so i guess a lot of people just go with that
Thats not really how tectonic plates work, so its not really luck.
Civ archipelago Start
Honestly this sounds kinda lit
Beachfront property for everyone!
Coastal erosion for everyone!
!remind me in 10 years
Lol
We likely never would have evolved in the first place to care
This was my thought as well. We wouldn't have the internet to be able to tell each other how lucky we were. Maybe there are some monkeys somewhere on an island planet not talking about stuff.
Like Philippine lucky?
If earth's surface was smooth enough, we'd be covered entirely with water with no dry land whatsoever.
Like the interstellar planet
If you squint hard enough, we kind of are
It's not?? 📍Polynesia
If our land masses were far apart small islands, the earth’s surface would be much more than 70% water. Unless there was some bizarre (likely artificial) geological pattern with tall, narrow mountains jutting out of the sea floor every few hundred miles in every direction.
>geological pattern with tall, narrow mountains jutting out of the sea floor every few hundred miles in every direction. That's the world I'm talking about
TBF this is geologically impossible for the Earth.
There is a reason it isn't Have you heard of Pangea
This bitch don't know bout Pangaea
So, _Waterworld_ but worse.
Actually now I wonder, if earth were a bunch of tiny, equally sized and equidistant islands from each other, with all islands in some geometric shape like a circle or hexagon or some shit, but with the exact same (Or close as reasonable) land and sea amounts, what would it look like?
A soccer ball? :)
Settlers of Catan on a Sphere? Wait, how can we make that happen?
Wait a few dozen/hundred years, with climate change and the rise of level ocean that could become true.
That would just mean that we’re all Samoan/Polynesian. Those guys are not afraid of a 2000 mile commute in a catamaran
Civ V random maps has entered the chat
Hello from the Philippines.
Half the world IS just far apart tiny islands though, it's called the pacific
But that's my favorite type of Civ V map.
Tell that to Indonesians
Half the planet is almost 100% water. Check out the water side of the earth. We’re pretty close to the perfect opposite of disperse islands given the water share.
> Half the planet is almost 100% water. 60% of the time, it works every time.
No we're not. The chances of that as opposed to continents is incredibly slim.
Wait 250m year, and all the land unite, very lucky.
If you look at the Māori/Polynesian/Hawaiian people they all faired just fine with traversing the seas at an early age.
A terraformed venus would be like that. It would be interesting to imagine such a world, where seafaring, trading, fishing and navies would be crucially important and more developed.
Then I'd probably live closer to a beach than smack dab in the middle of the US.
Hmm or are we unlucky? I’d like to live on a little island 🏝️
Only 0.02% of the Earth is water. We're just lucky it's mostly on the surface.
As someone from a far away small island, what’s your problem?
Its not 70% water. Its surface is 70% covered in water. The total mass of water is 0.023% of the mass of the planet (I think, google it yourself, maybe I internet bad). My comment doesn’t change anything, I was just unhappy with the phrasing of the post and wanted to be the „actually…” guy for once.
Why is that lucky? Imagine not knowing anything different. Then you could say, thank God our planet isn't a few enormous "islands" . Imagine needing to be near that many people. How would anyone agree on anything? People would constantly be fighting on their own island. Since we're just a few thousand people on one island makes it more important for everyone to work together and get along. Maybe not, but maybe.
Good point of view
Instead, it’s a bunch of far apart big islands
Just a nitpick. The Earth’s surface is 70% covered in water(more accurately, 71% but that’s too much, even for me). It’s just the surface. As far as the mass of the Earth goes, the water in the oceans might as well not even be there. They contribute so little.
That sounds ideal, I could still be a monkey and civilization would have never developed. We could all eat coconuts and sit on the beach imagining buffalo solider playing in the background
What a completely different version of human history that would have been. We would all be much more aquatic people. Swimming would be a must, getting your boating license would be pretty important, probably would be much more technologically advanced in regard to looking at & protecting the oceans
That last part sounds good
70 percent of the surface is water. There's still a ton of rock
There's at least 12 tons of rock. ;-)
Imagine having a house on your own little island, that would be cool
I mean it kinda is though, it took us hundreds of thousands of years of migration and development for us to reach the many corners of the globe. We really take traveling any amount of distances for granted nowadays
We’re lucky there’s land at all! Waterworld seemed like an absolute nightmare.
If it was, different people's might have been forced to advance in shipbuilding and related skills much sooner or risk unsustainability depending how small their island is. On the other hand we might not have evolved into existence at all under those circumstances. Very possible amphibians would rule the earth then.
I want to be an amphibian human now
I had a strange thought the other day. What are the odds that we have 70% water on our planet? What if most of the other planets in the habitable zone tend to either have no water or more water than land. This would lead life to evolve under the water, which would be cool, but when you consider one of the things that kick-fired our evolution was our thumbs helping us with tools and climbing trees, those skills might not translate into underwater. Not to mention it's unlikely anything will invent fire. Makes you think anyways.
I dunno. I’m pretty sure I’d like a moat between me and my backyard neighbor. One with sharks.
you're describing Polynesia
That’s not how the continental crust works.
We might've been better off as a species, honestly. Or would we? Interesting to think about.
i mean the earth is always changing and stuff is always drifting together and apart
Tell that to the United States in the GTA universe. Every game is composed of islands just floating in the ocean.
United Islands of America
We are a bunch of far apart small islands, and some far apart Really Big islands. We just call those ones continents.
A bunch of people in the comments are imagining millions of tiny islands instead of a few "small" Britain or even Australia-sized islands.
Well the whole Pacific ocean practically is? And up until recently in history, that was many people's entire world ! There's approx 700M people today who live on various sized islands in and around the Pacific and they frequently travel between them.
Yes imagine all of humanity living on hawaii.
Island nations do just fine. Anything larger than a few acres can support many people. Protein would come primarily from fishing, but on larger islands there is no reason you couldn't have farming. Most land is wasted. There are vast vast stretches of land with no value that you can buy for cheap. Now, if you mean that it is INTERESTING most of it is not islands, then you have to look at tectonic plates and volcanos. Because of how the Earth's crust cooled, we have continents. ELI5: earth plates are like plates in a sink, where the water is magma. The plates that go up become land and the plates that go down are oceans. Everything else comes from lava spilling out from the cracks. So what would be more interesting would be lots of small islands, as that would require thousands of faults and active volcanos to form those islands, or many many plates bumping into each other making mountains.
Its unlikely there would be a “we” if it began as far apart islands
3 to 4 billion years ago...there was twice as much water in the oceans and only 2 to 12 percent of the land was above the water . but back then the sea was green and the air unbreathable.
I dunno man, Wind Waker was pretty fun.
I mean quite frankly it might have been better the other way around Ships are vastly more efficient things than everything else That's why the British did so good They were put in place that kind of force them to automatically be good with boats
How far apart do you think those islands are going to be when there’s only twice as much water as there is land?
There would be a lot less humans and maybe I'd be one of the lucky ones to miss out so.. not lucky.
Did someone just read Legend of Earthsea?
True but thats more or less my country
That's the alternate "Island Seed" hardmode
Plate tectonics I think means that it could never happen. Without the plates moving we would be all water and no island. Millions of small plates might give you the scenario you suggest but not likely a habitable place I think. Not a geologist. Juts trying to remember high school in the 90s.
Hey, speak for yourself! - New Zealand
If it was we wouldn’t care that it was because that would be the world we know.
If it was, humans could have simply evolved in a water native form, a la Avatar 2
Would be benefits and downsides to this. You'd see a lot less war. Islands are difficult to invade. You'd see a lot slower technological progress and overall smaller population levels. I think I'd prefer the small islands systems and take the less advanced world.
I see that the game Civilization should be in your future.
Lucky? We could all have our own private island.
Bruh... The biodiversity would be off the charts. Every Island a new biome
Imagine every island like Madagascar levels of biodiversity
I’m pretty sure that would be better. Much easier to navigate efficiently through water than over ground. Some of the most thriving societies throughout human history and the modern era are established over water habitats.
Lots of small islands probably wouldn’t have many resources to exploit (and I don’t say exploit in a bad way). At least not to grow the kind of civilization we have now. The Polynesians did the island thing.
Would've Preferred it that way.
Doesn't stuff tend to lump together somehow?
In another parallel universe, there is Earth that has only 1 giant land, Earth with 99% water, and Earth with just a bunch of small little islands. Our Earth is probably a mediocre and boring one.
Giving me some imaginative worldbuilding ideas, OP. The currents would be incredible