How Great Lakes Earth ≠ Chaos Theory
The creation of Great Lakes Earth has often been criticized for disregarding chaos theory, which is defined as “the branch of mathematics that deals with complex systems whose behavior is highly sensitive to slight changes in conditions, so that small alterations can give rise to strikingly great consequences.” But here is the problem with that — the similarities between Great Lakes Earth and our Earth are too similar. Both are the third planet from a G-type main sequence sun. Both are 8,000 miles wide and weigh six sextillion tons. There are a North and South America, there is an Africa, there is an Asia, there is a Europe, there is an Australia and there is an Antarctica. The basic timeline is in sync — a turbulent, violent birth; a transition from fire to water; proliferation of life; continents crashing and splitting; a global icing giving rise to life getting more complex; a Cambrian Explosion; a series of mass extinctions; a formation of Pangaea; pretty much changes in the environment inspired by what happened back home.
For Great Lakes Earth to apply to chaos theory, it would have to be really alien.
1) “Superearth”
At first, the idea of a super-Earth does not sound so alien that we wouldn’t recognize it from Earth. But true to form, its mass is greater than Earth’s, and this complicates everything. Would the greater size augment the power of plate tectonics, or would it turn them into a problem? How would the global climate be affected? How strong of a magnetic field would it be bathed in? Would the power of convection behave differently? And ultimately, would life gain a foothold in such a planet? This is a headache, one worsened by the sad fact that many astronomers have conflicting viewpoints of how “super-Earths” work. So I thought that any excessive headache would be averted if we leave this alternate Earth’s diameter and mass unaltered.
Super-Earths are one thing. But super-moons are something else. Recent news have put up “Supermoon” on the headlines, and this tempted me to experiment with other moons, orbited by the gas giants.
The moon of Great Lakes Earth is planned to be as big as Ganymede, the biggest moon on our solar system. It is 3,273 miles wide and twice as massive as our moon. However, this would raise problems. If it orbits Great Lakes Earth from a distance of 240,000 miles, the tidal pull would have been devastating for the world. The record-breaking tidal point at the Bay of Fundy in Nova Scotia — 47.5 to 53.5 feet separating high from low — would become the global average. Coastal cities like New York, Miami, New Orleans, Buenos Aires, Rotterdam, Casablanca, Osaka and Shanghai would never have a chance. The solution is simple — just have it orbit the Earth from a farther distance, no less than 300,000 miles. But wouldn’t this prolong Earth’s rotation, slowing the day down? Maybe…if Supermoon were the size of our moon.
2) More Than One Sun
One sun is powerful enough for life to thrive in. But unisolar systems aren’t exclusive. Some others orbit around two, even three, stars. So the famous twin sunset scene in the first Star Wars film does have a basis in fact. The problem is that for an Earth in a binary system to be habitable enough for life, it would need to be orbiting either star much farther than 93 million miles. It won’t affect the length of day — Jupiter orbits the sun from a distance of 483.8 million miles, yet has a ten-hour rotation — but it will affect revolution. Back to Jupiter, though it has a faster day than Earth, it has a longer year — almost twelve times as long! The farther a planet is from a star, the slower its revolution.
There is another problem with putting Earth in a binary system, and it has to do with culture. Sun worship is a cosmopolitan form of religion — Helios in Greece, Ra in Egypt, Surya in India, Tonatiuh in Mexico, to name a few. A culture under two suns would have been utterly unrecognizable. Why would there be two suns? Sibling rivalry? King and queen? Parent and child? But how and why would they share the same position?
3) More Than One Moon
An Earth orbiting two suns is one thing. An Earth being orbited by two moons is something else. Imagine the implication two or more moons orbiting Earth would have on the nightscape and the tides. Granted, it would be easier for animals to see, but it would also be easier for animals to be seen. In the predator-prey relationship, this would have been one-sidedly easy. To make matters worse, just like my Supermoon situation, two moons would intensify the tidal bulges, making the waves bigger and more destructive.
Another problem is that multiple moons would stabilize Earth’s axial tilt to the extent that seasonality would not exist, so the poles would not have nightless summers or pitch-dark winters. Everywhere from pole to pole would have the same climate and equal lengths of day and night — probably equatorial rainforests on a macrocosm.
4) No Moon
An Earth with no moon at all is more troubling than an Earth with more than one. So long as a large body of rock orbits the Earth, seasons would be rigid, ocean currents would regulate the planet’s climate, continents would move and life would thrive.
Without the moon, what would you get? A really alien planet with no seasonal or climatic variation. No continental plates mean islands dotting the planet from near and far. A shorter day, probably as fast as Jupiter. And it would be doubtful if life could be nurtured in such a planet at all.
5) Red Dwarf
True to their name, red dwarves are redder (therefore cooler) and smaller than G-type stars (the category of our sun). In order for life to thrive in such a system, Earth must orbit the dwarf in such a closer distance — close enough, unfortunately, for the planet to be tidally locked. So one side is perpetual daylight and one side is perpetual night. Surely an in-between, or “twilight zone”, would exist in order for life to gain any foothold.
6) No Cryogenian
Most scientists believe that complex, multicellular life may not be possible without the global big freeze known as “Snowball Earth”. How? At first, it seemed that when the ice finally melted 635 million years ago, the Earth gained a whole slew of oxygen. However, recent evidence had shown that prior to 800 million years ago, there was one-hundredth as much oxygen as today, and sponges can thrive in atmospheres of 0.5%. For Richard Boyle of University of Southern Denmark in Odense, the breakthrough wasn’t the rise of multicellular animals, but more specialized cells, which give rise to organs.
“What sets animals apart from plants and fungi is this irreversible cellular differentiation, which, for instance, is what allows animals to have more cell types,” says Boyle.
It’s hard to see how this could have evolved, because specialised cells lose the ability to reproduce on their own. Instead they have to be distinctly self-sacrificing, cooperating with other cells in the body for the greater good of the animal. Only the specialised reproductive cells, the sperm and eggs, get to create a new generation.
By contrast, plants don’t just rely on specialist sex cells to reproduce. They can also reproduce themselves from cuttings taken from their stems or roots. “You can’t take a cutting from an animal,” says Boyle. He thinks the severity of Snowball Earth may have pushed animal cells to abandon this flexibility, and specialise.
“During the Snowball period, life will have been confined to small geothermally heated areas, and will have experienced frequent extinctions and population crashes,” says Boyle. The populations that did survive were often reduced to just a handful of organisms. Boyle suggests that these little groups of survivors were often closely related, encouraging them to cooperate more than usual.
Boyle’s theory is not entirely convincing to the whole scientific community, but it is a compelling idea. It does connect to the basic point that without Snowball Earth, the Cambrian Explosion might never have happened — or at least to the extent of back home.
7) A Strictly Spineless Earth
Chordata, the phylum consisting of all backboned animals, make up two to three percent of the entire kingdom. The rest consist of worms, mollusks, echinoderms and the largest phylum of them all, the arthropods.
Back home, vertebrates are, on average, larger than invertebrates, and this allows them to occupy numerous niches, including the role of apex predator. But what would life on Earth look like if the chordates never existed on Earth?
These listed situations, among many, are extreme enough to qualify “chaos theory”, where the differences outweigh the similarities, thus resulting in a completely alien alternate Earth.
But in an alternate Earth where the similarities outweigh the differences, chaos theory may not apply.
1) Geography
Being an alternate Earth, of course it has to be recognizable from our own geography. But these near-identical shapes come from mostly-different origins, like a massive mountain chain splitting Africa in half 250 million years ago, Russia getting uplifted at the same time and the British Isles formerly being fitted next to what we’d call Germany and France, to name a few.
This is what Great Lakes Earth is believed to have looked like from 250 to 200 million years ago. The green circle is our best idea of latitude zero degrees — the equator. It’s been remarked that a supercontinent of that arrangement would encourage the evolution of endotherms, or warm-blooded animals. But our history says that this would not be a necessary course of action.
This is what our Earth looked like during the Carboniferous Period, a chapter in Earth’s history where we can find the famous giant arthropods haunting the coal swamps. Yet this classic hothouse image is set during an ice age, so it wouldn’t be farfetched that, storytelling permitting, dinosaurs would evolve in the equatorial north.
This is our Earth if it underwent the same hothouse climate Great Lakes Earth underwent. Marked in red was the extent of Köppen climate type Af — tropical rainforest 144 million years ago. Marked in pink was the extent of that same category six million years ago, just before the Pleistocene Big Chill. It’s a similar kind of degradation to the Cenozoic Era back home — from the global hothouse of the Eocene descending down to the frigid Pleistocene. Actually, this relates to the next factor.
2) Radiation
As with back home, Great Lakes Earth would be repeatedly marred by mass extinctions. However, the first extinction event — 444.4 million years ago, 155.6 million years after the Cambrian Explosion — would also be the worst, in which 90% of all species would be extinct. Groups that back home were predominant in the majority or whole of the Palaeozoic Era — like the trilobites, homalozoans, orthocones, and dinocarididans — would become extinct. But a 90% loss — how much would survive from there? According to a recent study, Earth is large enough with a diverse enough geography to support one trillion species. And a 90% loss means 100 billion survivors of animals, plants, fungi and microbes. And at this point, chordates would have consisted of a very small minority of the animals. So any arthropod, mollusk, echinoderm, cnidarian, worm, sponge and, yes, chordate, would radiate, evolving into shapes and forms unfamiliar to us yet still recognizable as the animals listed earlier in the sentence.
The term “living fossil” is out of date, especially when one considers that the coelacanth, the very mascot of the term, is actually a recent addition of the coelacanthiform order. Still, the list provided online tempts me to experiment with the idea that a past mass extinction would drive anyone on the list to extinction.
Another method is to experiment on what would happen if culturally popular groups either never existed or became extinct. On Great Lakes Earth, corals have been extinct for 444.4 million years. Who would take their place? Let’s say that on Great Lakes Earth, the culturally significant Lepidoptera (butterflies and moths) and the ecologically successful Diptera (flies) never existed. Who would be next in line? Great Lakes Earth is full of such answers to these two questions.
3) Morphology
Physical appearances are easy to take for granted, therefore easy to throw anyone off. As far as genetics and environmental pressures involving their chosen niches are concerned, looks can be deceiving. Falcons, for example, are often referred to as among the raptors, yet genetics say that falcons are most closely related to parrots and songbirds, not hawks or eagles.
Rabbits are often referred to as rodents, and even though they share a common ancestor, rabbits and rodents are separate orders, despite their similarities in appearance and behavior.
A more extreme example of this sort of thing is Afrotheria. This supergroup consists of marmot-like hyraxes, hedgehog-like tenrecs, shrew-like sengis, whale-seal-hybrid-like manatees and elephants. They all look so different from each other that they could not be possibly related. Yet the genetics say they are.
It is genetics that connect the whales to Artiodactyla, the even-toed ungulates, yet due to the environmental pressures of living the niche of completely aquatic animal, they look nothing like deer, cattle, sheep, goats, pigs, giraffes or camels.
The greatest example of this issue is Gastornis.
Traditionally viewed as hunters of horses in the jungles of Eocene Europe, recent evidence has shown that Gastornis was actually a gentle giant, a vegetarian. Even more surprising is who its closest living relatives are.
That’s right. Gastornis was, in reality, a large, terrestrial anseriform bird. Anseriformes is a group normally associated with blunt, flat bills to suit their vegetarian diet and short legs with webbed feet to make them effective swimmers. But Gastornis had long, heavy legs and a broad, heavy beak. There is no way that it could have been an overgrown duck. Yet, the genetics say that they are kin.
On Great Lakes Earth, whales, armadillos, anteaters, pangolins and sloths are afrotheres. All diurnal raptors are falconiform birds. And so on and so forth.
