Jared Diamond's book "Guns, Germs and Steel" is much on my mind these days. Its thesis is that civilization developed in Eurasia fastest for ecological not cultural or racial reasons. Eurasia's size and eco-diversity gave it more species of domesticable plants and animals than other continents, certain favorable climates and landforms (a Mediterranean dry season eases grain-storage, for example), a long human presence (late discovery of the New World meant mass extinction of large mammals that might have been domesticable), and east-west trade routes (pigs and wheat do well in both France and China, but Mexican corn took centuries to adapt to Ohio). His theory's complex, and rather than discuss it, I prefer to sculpt it--I'm an artist, after all!

So here's a tilted Earth that should foster a quick, relatively even growth of civilization--if he's right. I've created the widest possible east-west zone by turning the Americas sideways. Africa froze, but in exchange, Australia and Antarctica turned green and the Americas linked to Asia over the now-exposed Bering landbridge. Half the world's in one Jaredian belt.

Why Africa? Well, if I'm sticking to Earth's geography, only allowing myself to tilt the planet, the Pacific Rim is the most sustained possible east-west strip. And to level it, I had to put my poles in the central Pacific and Africa. At first I was upset over the sheer size of the resulting icecap--they generally spoil the climate--but to follow Jared's hypothesis, I needed a land-bridge over the Bering Strait anyway, and that requires a good-sized polar cap to lower the sea levels. So I went with it despite Africa. You win some, you lose some...

It's not all distortion. My African icecap is big--over 50% more ice than Antarctica. That locks up enough water to cause a 40-meter drop in sea levels. The Bering Straits are gone--there's a permanent, tropical land-bridge. You can walk from Bali to Cape Horn, two-thirds of the way around the world, and never leave the tropics! The whole southern hemisphere is relatively warm, for the south pole has only sea-ice, and is sealed in a ring of currents and winds unblocked by land.

The equatorial current travels west around the Pacific Rim, heating up for 30,000 km before much of it squeezes through the straits between Bali and Australia, to warm and strengthen the currents circling in the Indian and East Atlantic Oceans. This hot-water pump helps keep the northern ice in check. So even the African Cap isn't as cold as Antarctica; I modeled it on the temperate caps during the last Ice Age. Tundra grows nearly to the foot of the ice, and low forests begin not so far away. Why? For orbital reasons I won't detail here, the northern hemisphere has inherently milder winters than the south. Also, our Antarctica's isolated--no warm currents hit it, while this African icecap has four separate warm currents fencing it in.

Is the situation stable? I doubt it--ours isn't.

I've shown the icecap in a mild interglacial phase; in cold eras, the Mediterranean freezes over, and half Italy and all of Spain would go--maybe even central Europe. And the mountain glaciers of Turkey, Iran and the Red Sea spread till they meet, swallowing everything to the shores of the Caspian. Though even in such cold eras, I suspect the hot currents of the Indian Ocean will keep its coasts generally ice-free, ceding only Arabia to the advancing ice.

In warm eras, Arabia, Turkey and Spain largely thaw, to become tundra, and the ecological island of southern Africa grows to near-continental size--forests spread to the Zambezi or beyond, and new animals pour in along the ice-free coastal corridor from Asia.

This current interglacial's sea level is 40 meters below ours--130' down. Sounds like a big change, but it's trivial really; our sea level has varied a good 250 meters in our last million years alone! Jaredia's lower seas bare several million square kilometers of islands, reefs and coasts. Japan, Britain, and Java-Sumatra are now capes; they'll be settled by early (even pre-) humans. But the change that matters, if Jared is right, is that the land-bridge to America is permanent and tropical--and that means easy! The Old World here consists of Eurasia and the Americas; it will develop as one. Australia will still require boats to reach, but the straits are much smaller now. I'd expect it to be settled quite a bit earlier, though long after the Americas.

Is there a New World, an untouched land that only true deepwater sailors can discover? Yes, and it's a land none of us have ever seen. Jaredia's equivalent of Polynesians have a spectacular find waiting for them--Antarctica free of its ice.

A TOUR OF JAREDIA

I've processed these orbital photos very little. Names and boundaries and meridians are not marked; only the text will guide you. I have made a few concessions: stripped away clouds so the landforms are clear, roughly indicated water depth by color, shown both polar icepacks near summer minimum (not very likely to happen simultaneously!) and marked live volcanoes in red.

AFRICA

Life survives on other fringes of Africa. The Atlas Mountains in Morocco hold the ice back. While the Moroccan coast is mostly cold windy tundra, it too is more Greenlandic than Antarctic: in valleys along the shore the warm Azorean Current allows grasses and even a few stunted trees.

All along the Atlantic coast, though the icecap looms over the sea, floating ice isn't extensive, even in winter; the offshore currents are just too warm. The seas here explode with life; the cold windy Canaries and Cape Blancas and even the ice-locked Cameroon Isles are havens for seal and walrus, penguin and polar bear.

THE SNOWY NORTH: EUROPE AND INDIA

The Mediterranean's a chill gray sea at the best of times. Spain, Italy, Greece and Lebanon are lichen and tundra and bog, when they thaw at all. Turkey and central Spain, being plateaus, have iced over like little Greenlands. Indeed all the mountains are ice-crowned--except Etna, eerily bare, a lone fire above the ice.

South of the Alps and Pyrenees, life takes firm hold. Scattered spruce and fir woods deepen into dark Canadian forests. Well, not Canadian: tigers roam, hunting giant elk, though the mammoths are gone, hunted out eons ago. Britain's a somber wooded cape linked to chilly, Nordic France. Britain's warmer than the mainland, though, and far larger than in our world--much of the North Sea is forest and bog. South of Britain, the coast grows milder, the trees taller. A cool-temperate forest covers most of Europe--hardwoods in the south near the Urals, conifers near the Alps, stretching all the way to the ecological island of the Caucasus Peninsula. Scandinavia, especially Lapland, is mild, nearly French, though its peaks inland are snowy year-round. The Baltic Sea is now a freshwater lake draining through the Skagerrak River to the shrunken North Sea.

Northwest, over the Zagros mountains, is the marshy plain of Jazeera, dotted with great lakes where our world's Persian Gulf lies. Beyond the woods and lakes lies only tundra, rising slowly to the glacial ranges bordering the Red Sea. Yemen's under a mile of ice, though the shore is bare, and Oman to the south resembles Iran, with great lakes and piny woods.

TEMPERATE WEST ASIA

Tibet? Tibet is still Tibet. Sometimes altitude is destiny. Wait, I lied--Lhasa's river valley in the southwest, and the plateau of Tsaidam in the far southeast (both a mere 3000 meters high instead of 4-5000) are closer to the equator on Jaredia, warming them enough to become cool but fertile highlands. Even warmer are the inaccessible but spectacular gorges of southern Tibet, where all the great rivers of South Asia flow parallel, only a few miles apart--but those few miles are mountain ridges rising 4-5000 meters. Looming above it all at 7500 meters is the isolated peak of Minya Gonga, which, for a thousand kilometers around, will be the home of the gods.

SOUTH ASIA

Now we enter another continent, south of the snows, where ice is a mirage--mountains floating on the horizon.

Central Asia is still relatively dry, but the only true desert is between Tibet and the Tien Shan--this Tarim Basin is dry in every single alternate world I've devised, for with peaks 5-7000 meters high around it, rain can't get in. Aside from streams around the rim, draining to the swampy Lop Nor in the south, this is dead land. But the many ranges to the east, from the Tien Shan to the Altai, are warmer and rainier than in our world, with sheltered valleys where pastures and wild apples flourish. The wider valleys and plains, from Dzungaria in the north to the Gobi in the south, add up to the biggest grasslands in the world. The Gobi Desert is gone and winters are mild, influenced by the predominantly southern winds. This region of Asia is rather like our East Africa: scattered wooded ranges with warm savanna plains between. Apes from the jungles of China who explore these grasslands may take the first steps toward becoming human.

For the moment, let's turn west and leave China and Siberia for later.

Indochina is generally drier. Burma's floodplain has a monsoon in good years, but in bad ones there's only the great river, descending from the Tibetan snows, like the Ganges and Brahmaputra. The upper Mekong and Irrawaddy rivers have cut spectacular desert canyons into the Himalaya's southern spurs. Thailand's not as lush as in our world, but it's wetter than Burma, and the equatorial peninsulas of Vietnam (enlarged and with a strange hook at the southern tip) and Great Java (Malaya-Sumatra-Java-Bali) still form one of the earth's great rain forests, extending offshore onto Borneo, the Philippines, the Moluccas and Sundas.

AUSTRALIA

The Jaredian rainforest doesn't end in Indonesia. Papua (New Guinea) is now the east coast of Australia. Lush forest covers the lowlands, though in the south it's temperate not tropical. The mountains are snowcapped, spectacular in places, rising 4-5000 meters. Highland valleys are grassy and alpine--herding not farming country. Jaredian populations will crowd the lowlands, not the highlands as in our world.

The hardwood forests of Papua stretch across the York Isthmus to cover a million square km of Australia proper, too. The southern coast is cooler yet, occasionally seeing snow--pine and redwood dominate the dark, dense woods here. Offshore, Tasmania's nearly anchored to the mainland by island chains; it will never become culturally isolated as it did in our world. North, over the snowy coast range, lies the Darling Prairie, a million square kilometers of grassland, watered by snowmelt. Beyond the central Flinders Range is Adelaide at the mouth of the wide Eyre River. To the east, the Great Lakes: Eyre, Torrens and half a dozen others make a sapphire necklace from the west coast two-thirds of the way across the continent. North of the lakes is the last gasp of the Australian desert: just a Sahelian patch along the appropriately named Nullarbor Plain, in the rainshadow of the central Macdonnell Ranges, with their forested ridges and rust-red canyons. North of this, along the Indian Ocean from Perth to Darwin, is a wide savanna, deepening to jungle--and this is no timid coastal strip, for the northeast coast has widened by some two hundred miles--it stretches halfway to Timor. New islands and reefs make crossings from Timor even easier.

New isles have surfaced in the gaps between Great Java/Borneo and Papua, too. The Timor routes, the Borneo route and the Taiwan-Luzon route mentioned above are now short, relatively easy island-hops, making it likely Jaredians would settle Australia long before we managed it (around 40,000 BP). A wave of mass extinctions probably still resulted, but the invaders might be so early and primitive that (as in our Africa and Eurasia, and unlike Australia and Americas) many large animals would have time to adapt, learn to fear humans, and survive (to be domesticated later on?). Whether or not that happens, Australia is likely richer in megafauna as well as biomass--full of giant lizards, marsupials, and flightless birds. And people--even before agriculture, it's so much larger and richer, it could support millions.

SIBERIA AND PACIFIC ASIA

Other tilted Earths I've built have had fertile Siberias, but this one's unusual in that this sea-level creates one unified land from the Urals to the Bering Strait and inland to Lake Baikal, centered on the great Lena River Valley. I think this land would develop as one huge nation, either colonizing the Asian peninsulas like Kamchatka, Korea and Japan, or merely exporting its culture and inventions to the "barbarians". But this China-like Siberia couldn't isolate itself easily; it's at the world's crossroads. If it turns inward and stagnates, the Alaskans, Kamchatkans, Japanese, Mongolians, or Chinese, living on trade from Australia, India and America, will inevitably move ahead, forcing the Siberian monolith to modernize or die.

North America is now south of South America. To avoid confusion, let's call it Tortolia, after the native name, Turtle Island.

I have no doubt Alaska would be a major cradle of civilizations--it's fertile, ecologically diverse, and a crossroads for both land and sea trade. The gods would, of course, live atop Denali. The land is rainforest on the coasts, but savanna inland in the Yukon basin, between the Brooks and Alaska ranges. The savanna corridor leads all the way to Mexico, though much broken up by wooded mountains, canyons, and local deserts. East of Seattle and the Puget Lakes, the Pacific coast turns dry, at least at low altitudes. But the many uplands (Coast Range, Cascades, Sierra Nevada, Transverse Range, Baja, Sierra Madre) are mild to cool, and catch enough rain to be fertile. Inland, beyond the mountains, the Utah Sea never dried up, nor did Lake Lahontan in Nevada or a dozen others, dotting a patchwork of prairie, forest, mountain and canyon much like East Africa at the dawn of man; and it's likely apes would roam the huge Mississippi rainforest to the north. Would they break out onto the savanna and desert here? This could be humanity's cradle. It's a toss-up between Utah and Mongolia... and, as we'll see, Greenland. Yes, Greenland.

And paralleling it is another east-west corridor. The high plains of Alberta range from savanna to open grassland below the western Rockies. But in general, north of the Rockies, the High Plains are forested; indeed the Mississippi basin is an Amazonian rainforest, while Appalachia and most of Canada are pleasant subtropical woods suitable for farming, like Siberia to the west. The shores are shallow; great coral reefs flourish. This maze of islands, reefs, and gulfs stretches from Florida to the isles of Baffin Bay, and around to the Mackenzie Valley near Alaska. Native cultures will be coastal and riverine! Unbroken continental rainforests aren't centers of innovation in our world; they're actually quite hard to live in (getting protein's a problem) and sustain low populations. Broken, coastal and island rainforests, on the other hand, can sustain high populations and cultures, often maritime: Java, the Maya, Polynesia, Hispaniola (it supported millions before Columbus brought them slavery and smallpox.) Tortolia's coasts are of this second, promising type, and I'd expect to see rich maritime cultures, especially on its cooler, drier north and west shores, where each of the large islands could develop its own culture. And such maritime cultures could spread inland--not only to the Great Lakes and the Canadian Lakes (Bear, Slave, Athabasca, Reindeer, and Winnipeg) but to a third, equally large complex where our Hudson Bay lies.

Paradoxically, we're on firmer ground offshore! Greenland's general pattern is clear, because its mountains are so high and the land will definitely ride much higher without the ice. A shield, a crab-shell, a hubcap! But the green in Greenland's still a bit deceptive--most of the shores are fertile enough, but beyond the coastal mountains lies a huge dry-grass basin where trees huddle only along the seasonal riverbeds. Only the slow winding Rasmussen River never dries up. The veldt supports huge migratory herds preyed on by quasi-lions, cheetahs, and sabertooths. Marsupials?

THE CARIBBEAN

The Caribbean has many new islands, and existing lands have grown; for example, Andros Island in the Bahamas is nearly the size of Florida, itself doubled in size. Cuba and Yucatan have reached out hands and nearly touched. Jamaica has a twin. All these isles and capes are Tortolian coastal rainforest, and probably have similar cultures. If our own Caribbean is any guide, this means high populations; if Jared's right about sheer numbers promoting innovation and east-west corridors spreading it, the region will develop civilizations like the Olmec, Maya and Mound Builders much earlier, and advance much faster. Spreading from Mexico and Peru, corn and potatoes become the world's staple crops, from time out of mind.

AMAZONIA

As South America's now northeast of North America, let's call it Amazonia--though it's no longer really dominated by the Amazon.

From Panama to Cape Horn, Amazonia's south coast is evenly lush, and will inevitably become a great trade route. The Andes are noticeably warmer at the Chilean end. Lake Titicaca has grown, and has four huge sisters: Poopó, Coipasa, Uyuni (larger than Titicaca) and Atacama--together, some 50,000 square kilometers of water. These moderate the climate of the altiplano--it's grassier, if still cold. The Incas will have a much higher population base.

The Andean foothills and southern Amazon Basin are drier, cupped by mountains east, south and west. In central Amazonia, the rains gradually return--from scrubland to savanna and open woods, then deep forest for a thousand kilometers or more, to the long Argentine coast. The Orinoco to the west and the Parana/Plata to the east, are the twin hearts of the rainforest.

The warm Brazil Current is deflected offshore around 20 degrees north by a new cape and reefs exposed by lower sea levels; east of this, tropical storms make the Uruguay coast warm and green again.

Patagonia is a great rainforest. The shore here is very shallow and sea levels have dropped, so the land is much wider. You can't walk to the Falkland/Malvinas, still 200 km offshore, but the new coral islets and reefs make it easy to sail or paddle.

TROPICA

Tropica is a reasonable name for this equatorial continent analogous to our Antarctica. In the west, the green, jagged Palmer Peninsula is Tropica's gateway: the great question is when the Patagonians will sail beyond the Malvinas and discover what lies beyond.

At the base of the Peninsula, past the great islands in the Weddell Sea, is the steamy Ronne Plain. Over it looms the jagged Sentinel Range, topping out at 5000 meters in Vinson Massif and Mt. Tyree, icy even near the equator. To the east is an immense savanna, drained by the great Valkyrie River. High mountains ring the plain, forcing most of the dense equatorial rains to fall on the coasts, the world's wettest. This lush strip, 1-500 km wide, is one of the world's ecological treasure houses. On the east coast, the strip widens; as the mountains curve inland, they spread to form a great tropical highland, the Argus Plateau, the size and height of Ethiopia. Coffee or tea, anyone?

The Transtropic Range is a rugged dragon-spine dividing the continent, 4-5 km high--high enough for winter snow, even at this subtropical latitude. It stretches 3000 km from the Sentinel Range to the southeast coast. Standing apart is fuming Mt Erebus, the tall volcano standing alone, 3500 meters above the Ross Coast.

South of the Transtropics is the low, flat, red Ross Desert, the largest on Jaredia, broken by the many branches of the McMurdo River, fed by the Transtropic snows. To the west the desert slides quietly into the Byrd Gulf, over 1000 km long. The shallows of this warm sheltered sea are a coral paradise, but it's surprisingly deep in the center and west end near the Bentley Strait.

The great Amundsen Peninsula, (or is it an island? Or a cape linked to the mainland at the WEST end, not the east as I've shown it?) is dry along the coasts, but greener inland, where scattered ranges rise to 3-4000 meters. The land resembles the canyon country in the southwest US and northern Mexico, with redrock gorges and pine-clad plateaus. The lone peak on the south shore is snowcapped Mt Siple, three kilometers above the sea.

Offshore, to the east, are the Balleny Islands, stepping-stones to Macquarie and Campbell, and then south to Zealand or east to Tasmania, bringing us full-circle round the Jaredian belt.

Still, regardless of its exact coastline, the utter isolation of Tropica would create a unique ecology--with unique primates. If they develop intelligence, and they might well, since the land resembles Africa, the resulting people might be hominids, or, as on Madagascar, they could well be descended from lemurs or tarsiers. Tailed or not? Furred or not? Diurnal like us, or big-eyed nocturnals? Omnivores or gorilloid herbivore? It's hard to say.

Fascinating though the possibility is, in a way I hope no such second species of people develops--for trapped in a smaller world, they'd probably advance more slowly than the mainland Jaredians, who I've set up, after all, to advance quickly. Once Jaredians discover the Tropicans, they'd be in for it--plague, slavery, war, oppression at best and extinction at worst.

Or is this narrow thinking? The Jaredians didn't evolve on our familiar African path either. Maybe the civilized Jaredians will be hairy, tailed vegetarians, and the Tropican species will be chimp-descended tough guys ready to kick some wimpy tailed ass. Our historical theories are all based on a single primate midway between bonobo and chimp, able to swing either way--cooperation or war. Within such a species, the tribe with better tools (and immune systems) usually spreads. But when it's different species, with different diets, instincts, and levels of aggression, then what happens? Does technology trump human nature when the nature's not quite human? All we know is that we don't know.

BIOLOGY

Jaredia is more fertile than our world. There are obvious losses--Africa, India--but millions of square kilometers miles of new coastal lands and islands (from the lower sea level), and the immense new tracts of fertile land in Siberia, Australia and Tropica more than balance this. Further, the New World probably has richer fauna, even in areas where they are no greener. Consider: our oldest human-inhabited continent is Africa, and it has the most large animals. Second oldest is Eurasia, and it has the next richest megafauna--elephants, tigers, camels, ancestral horses. Australia, the next, has very little; but it's small and dry. Next come the Americas, a very large fertile land, yet they too have very few really large mammals. Bears, bison, moose... what else? The most recent human-settled lands, Madagascar and New Zealand, have no more large animals than Australia--we ate them all within a few generations. Jared Diamond has explored the reasons in "Guns, Germs, and Steel," but here, let's just say that exposure to earlier, less skilled hunters is like inoculation, and led to a higher survival rate--to coexistence. Jaredia's land-bridges guarantee early settlement worldwide--and thus, the early adaptation and survival of more large New World and Australian animals.

In some of my variant Earths, multiple species of intelligent life must share the Earth; or humans branch early into several species. This world, excepting Tropica, is much more uniform--racially, ecologically, and culturally.

Even in our world, with its extinctions and migration barriers, big-brained primates are scattered over a hemisphere--orangutans live in Indonesia. On Jaredia, with such easy migration corridors, prehumans will be worldwide, and whether people first evolve in Asia or the Americas, the new species will quickly fill the world, and races are less likely to develop. Though, of course, with African apes out of the picture, and tropical forest and savanna girdling Jaredia, "human" may have a different meaning, at least superficially. We may still be descended from apes of some sort, but other primates are possibilities--and not only primates. It's worth remembering that (even restricting the field to land animals) elephant brains are as large as ours, while Arctic wolves have chimp-sized brains, and bears aren't far behind. Parrots and ravens have recently proven to rival apes in intelligence. Jaredia has a rich pool of big-brained creatures, the right environment to shape them, and plenty of time. If apes don't blunder into the right niche, other creatures will.

It's hard to say how much difference this would make. My guess is that even if some of the contenders started out herbivorous, they'd be omnivores soon after they developed fire and tools, for big brains burn a lot of fuel, and fat and protein are concentrated food sources. The only crucial difference between such people and us might be temperament. Aggression, territoriality, sociability, gender differentiation? And subtler traits: socially adept like bonobos or adept with tools like orangutans? The dominant sense may be sight, smell, touch or hearing. Such differences would shape history--but be taken for granted, essentially invisible. Don't we take our intraspecies aggression level, our tool-dexterity, and our smell-blindness for granted?

CULTURE

With zones much like our Fertile Crescent in Bengal, Manchuria, California, and over short straits in Greenland, and Australia, there's a chance farming and herding would start far from our Mideast. But wherever it began, that convenient tropical corridor from Bali to Cape Horn would quickly spread domesticated plants and animals around the world. Tortolia and Amazonia will have a long head start over our Americas--tens of thousands of years at least, and possibly millions, if, as seems possible, one of them is humanity's cradle. Indeed there's every reason to treat Eurasia and the Americas as one supercontinent.

But the greatly increased fertility of Australia will also have cultural effects. In our world, Australia wasn't just held back by isolation; the total population was low and mostly poor; there was room for few innovators. On the eve of European invasion, Australia had only 300,000 people. Much smaller New Guinea had well over a million! But on Jaredia, the combined New Guinea-Australia is so large and rich it could sustain many millions. Enough to speed innovation? Certainly. The continent would be a cultural heavyweight at least on a par with China or Siberia. But enough innovation so Australian ships would first explore the Pacific and Indian Oceans, exporting the Dreamtime to Zealand, Madagascar and (the big prize) Tropica? Australian temperate crops might do well on its south coast, and both continents have similar tropic zones too.

But Cape Horn's much closer to Tropica. It's deep water, no casual voyage, but if some Patagonian Columbus can sweet-talk a local queen into some funding...

Or would a New Zealander be first, island-hopping along the Macquary-Balleny chain? In our world these isles are small, cold and little known, but on Jaredia, they're warm, fertile, larger, and more numerous. Fishermen might discover the New World--and, probably, like the Basques, keep their mouths shut for centuries, as they quietly spread along the coasts.

Or... would Tropicans reach Zealand and Australia and Patagonia first? Could reverse colonization really happen? True, this sounds like Jaredian heresy. Society should progress much faster on the supercontinent (tailor-made for it, after all). But... if Tropicans evolve separately, from a different species, as would be likely, it could be millions of years earlier or later. They, unlike the Americans and Australians of our world, are totally decoupled from the rest of Jaredian evolution. A smaller land- and population-base might make their rise to civilization more leisurely, but if by chance Tropican people evolved first, they might build deepsea vessels and settle the supercontinent while its natives are still chipping flint. For more important than the factors speeding the rise of civilization, on a scale of thousands of years, are still-unexplored evolutionary pressures working on a scale of millions of years. And in the case of Tropica, they're working on a continent whose very coastline we aren't sure of! Tropica is an evolutionary wild card that could upset all Jaredian predictions.

THE RANDOMIAN FACTOR

"The grass always looks greener on the other side of the fence."

That old proverb isn't about jealousy, as most people think. It's subtler than that. You see, it's literally true. When you look at grass you stand on, you're looking down--you see the leaves end-on, so a lot of bare earth is visible too. When you look over the fence at your neighbor's grass, you see it full-length, at a low angle, so the grass-blades overlap and hide the ground. Even if your lawns are identical, your neighbor's grass really does look greener.

And this effect crops up in other places. Ever notice, on a busy, multi-lane road, how you always get stuck in the slowest lane? Lady Luck isn't out to get you--by definition the most crowded lane will have the most people in it! Clear, fast-moving lanes have fewer drivers. More often than not, you really ARE in a worse-than-average lane, the other lanes ARE greener--till you move over, and slow them up!

Now, the opposite principle applies to alternate earths. Consider:

Let's say you're contemplating Randomia, an alternate Earth no better or worse than ours, with roughly the same biomass, same amount of arable land, about the same population... just re-distributed. Now, what regions will you notice the most? First, your home, of course, and then, other well-known regions--and well-known means inhabited.

Randomia will always look worse! For, by definition, most readers will be from our world's high-population zones. Random changes will, on average, degrade them. And the lands that improve, that become the heartlands of Randomia's civilizations, are likely to be barren obscure lands in our world, mere names (if that) to non-Randomian readers. The Jaredian version of Europe is cold (millions of European readers groan), while the green Sahara nurtures great civilizations (a handful of Saharan readers cheer). If you love civilization, Randomia will probably stunt or kill the ones you love; its greatest civilizations will arise from lands (and creatures) you barely know and dismiss as primitive.

So the grass always looks browner in a parallel world--because what you value most, what you KNOW to value, is generally lost. This principle makes it hard to see alternate worlds fairly.

So, if I seem foolishly optimistic about these alternate Earths, postulating island leagues and tropical civilizations and intelligent lemurs or elephants or mega-ravens... just remember I'm fighting the Randomian factor. Your view is colored by the degradation of what you know and love; so my predictions of new growth and life in the unlikeliest regions, will seem fatuous. Yet they grow from the same data as the doom and gloom--your perceptions are naturally tilted toward seeing the losses. Factor Randomia in, before you mock.

The two problems Jaredia poses weren't what I expected. I'd thought the thesis of "Guns, Germs and Steel" could be worked out in a sort of Petri dish--just add people and watch them grow! But people aren't added--they evolve from the system. And the factors speeding sapiogenesis (the evolution of intelligent life) are even worse understood than the factors speeding civilization. Since biological evolution comes first and takes longer, it injects huge uncertainties into the Petri dish--the race toward civilization is almost irrelevant, a mere ten or twenty thousand years. The million-year question is, do intelligent species develop at all, and if so, what, and how many, and where?

Damn.

In short, the climate of the equatorial strip I've built would indeed be uniform enough to speed the spread of early people, and then trade in domesticated plants and animals--fostering a worldwide rise of civilization, with fewer continental mass extinctions--cultural OR biological! But I'm not so sure just what that climate would be. Rainforest, encouraging fishing cultures and crops like taro or yams? Or drier, open forests, even savanna, encouraging storable grains and seed-based agriculture? Or drier yet--nomadic herders?

Similarly, I'm confident we'd see either one species with few races (at most, the cold-tolerant tribes of the African and European tundra might form a second race) or two species, one on the supercontinent, one on Tropica. But I have grave doubts these people would look or behave like us. They could be marsupials or mini-elephants or giant raccoons.

To sum up: in our world, Jared's theory is probably right--environment shapes culture, and his factors make sense. BUT... his theory is only relevant when dealing with one intelligent species, on a world like ours. For environment also shapes people--and biology trumps culture!

I may soon take a short vacation from my game of tilt-the-axis. Instead, I plan to build our familiar world, with its axis un-tilted--but our world as it'll be if carbon dioxide stays high for a million years or so. Our current geography, but with CO2 at, say, 600 or 700 parts per million--enough to melt Greenland and Antarctica. Once the world stabilizes, if it ever does, what'll it look like, that flooded greenhouse Earth we're so busily creating?

Drop by, in about six months, to check out Dubia, a doubtful world. No, I lied. It's really named in honor of the world's foremost advocate and producer of greenhouse gases--both via his oil/car policies and his hot-air speeches. George W. Bush.

Dubya.

Coming soon. And, I'm afraid, coming for real.

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