WLBOTT is all about The Long Game. The Long Game is a quiet rebellion against urgency, or possibly just another reason not to get off the couch.
We’ve tasked a team of unpaid researchers to examine our position 250 million years in the future, where the continents have re-merged into Pangaea Proxima.
To increase shareholder value, we plan to purchase large acreages of future seaside locations.
Pangaea Proxima – The Nuts and Bolts
Pangaea Proxima (also called Pangaea Ultima, Neopangaea, and Pangaea II) is a possible future supercontinent configuration. Consistent with the supercontinent cycle, Pangaea Proxima could form within the next 250 million years. This potential configuration, hypothesized by Christopher Scotese in November 1982, earned its name from its similarity to the previous Pangaea supercontinent.
“It’s all pretty much fantasy to start with,” Scotese has said. “But it’s a fun exercise to think about what might happen.
As with most supercontinents, the interior areas of Pangaea Proxima are presumed to become semi-arid or desert regions that will be prone to extreme temperatures up to 55°C [131°F]. Most land mammals, including humans’ descendants, may be driven to extinction (comparable to the Permian–Triassic extinction event) because of these environments.
Wikipedia has an interesting article on the clash of tectonic plates. As these plates gallop towards each other (sometimes as fast as 11 cm/year), weird things happen when they make contact. The article uses terms like “buoyancy“, “ductile“, “light crust“, and “recycling” to describe these massive plates.
Subduction is a geological process in which the oceanic lithosphere and some continental lithosphere is recycled into the Earth’s mantle at the convergent boundaries between tectonic plates. Where one tectonic plate converges with a second plate, the heavier plate dives beneath the other and sinks into the mantle.
By KDS4444 – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=49035989
I’d always thought that when the plates collide, one plate would slide under the other, like shuffling cards, but it turns out that the looser plate can sink at an angle of 75° or more.
A few other interesting factoids:
So far, Earth is the only planet where subduction is known to occur, and subduction zones are its most important tectonic feature. – Wikipedia
Subduction is sort of like stirring chicken fried steak gravy over a hot burner. Radioactive decay from the Earth’s core gets released during the subduction activity. – Ladle & Lube
The overridden plate (the slab) sinks at an angle most commonly between 25 and 75 degrees to the Earth’s surface. – Wikipedia
More Shareholder Opportunities
Because of the intense public interest in tectonic plate movements, we are introducing a series of romance novels to catch the subduction fever.
And for our readers that want a spicier selection….
Future Evolution
If Dune shows how strange we become in 20,000 years… what happens when you add another 249,980,000 years to the equation?
First we story-boarded covers for our upcoming editions of WLBOTT Geographic.
The Littoral Archivists
This is a semi-aquatic human descendant living along the vast, humid coastlines of Pangaea Proxima. Over time they have developed adaptations to survive, then thrive in the space between sea and land.
For example, they have molars that can crush shellfish, but can also grind fibrous sea plants. Their diet consists of crustaceans (crabs, shrimp, barnacle clusters), mollusks: mussels, clams, limpets, and small fish trapped in the tidal pools, along with seaweeds, algae. They have webbed hands and feet for efficient paddling and rock-hopping, and strong, flexible ankles and toes for gripping slick surfaces. Their eyes are optimized for both air and water: a flexible lens system and a protective membrane for underwater focus.
They are primarily dependent on their lungs to absorb oxygen, but they have also developed accessory gill structures along the neck help during short dives and tidal foraging. They can stay submerged for long periods of time, and their blood chemistry is high-efficiency, with enhanced oxygen-binding proteins for low-oxygen pockets in tide pools.
Their intellect far outstrips anything we can imagine – though they live a semi-nomadic life, their days are filled with song, stories, rituals, and tales of the ancient times. Their arts are sublime, but also impermanent – their joy is in the creating, like the sand mandalas of the Tibetan monks. They live in harmony with the natural cycles of tides and seasons.
Creation… shared… and released
Our Airborne Future Generations
Our friends from the former Soviet Union took a different evolutionary path.
Our People of the Deserts
The majority of Pangaea Proxima will be covered in intense, blistering deserts. We will survive. We will thrive.
Other Possibilities
We sent our unpaid marketing intern George (he’s single, ladies!) to investigate possible scenarios of human evolution.
There were some lingering effects of the future experimentation with gene splicing.
The Tortillazoic Era
Unethical eugenicists will try to optimize for the NBA.
But we trust in evolution to provide for WLBOTT’s future.
