[SunkenCiv]

Before the local BS committee storms in and sez otherwise, the book "Rare Earth" is a fetid, smoking pile of uniformitarian garbage.

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[muawiyah]

While you guys dwell on the big picture I'm busy redating all the Spanish townsites I've found East of the Mississippi to sometime around 1550 - 60 AD ~ the reason being the occurrence of a megadrought in that period that literally drove EVERYBODY above the fall line in the East, and above the falls and major rapids on the Mississippi and its tributaries.

We just had a taste of a North American megadrought, and already the deaths from hantavirus are underway ~ and black plague ~ and some other strange stuff, and a SARS like virus just popped up in Saudi (which had a drier than normal year) and is killing people.

This thing lasted between 70 and 80 years, with a core period of 17 years where NO RAIN seems to have fallen in Virginia.

They came, they started settlement ~ bringing in horses, pigs, chickens, wheat, barley, oats, other old world crops and animals and BINGO they were suddenly gone.

Earth is large enough it can constantly replenish burned over lands no matter what happens ~ that's probably a unit in the design module for successful life on the surface ~ and at this moment I doubt anyone has figured that one out due to the complexity.