We have remarked that Poul Anderson realizes that grass as we know it cannot be expected to grow on every terrestroid planet but that there will probably be some equivalent, a plant that grows across the surface and that can be cropped to ground level without being killed.
Now Anderson applies the same thought to Earth a billion years hence:
"Here every tree, bush, blossom, flitting insect was foreign; grass itself no longer grew, unless it was ancestral to the thick-lobed carpeting of glades; the winged creatures aloft were not birds, and what beast cries he heard were in no tongue known to him." (p. 207)
The continents are entirely unrecognizable, the equator is uninhabitably hot, the desert advances perceptibly, destroying cities, and trees grow to the tops of the Arctican mountains. Like Wells in the The Time Machine, Anderson imagines Earth close to the end of life.
7 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
Poul Anderson made some very interesting points, that you rightly stressed. Of COURSE plant and animal life on Earth would drastically change over a billion years. Grass, for example, would be very likely be replaced by another kind of plant carrying out the same functions.
Sean
Though before grass evolved in the late Cretaceous, and started diversifying in the post-dinosaurian period, there wasn't any equivalent of grass as a dense ground-cover. Particularly not in arid areas.
Immediately after the end of the Cretaceous, terrestrial vegetation was dominated by ferns for some time -- the blast from the asteroid impact devastated forests all over the world.
Grass was like mammals; formerly an unimportant niche species, given its opportunities by the hammer from the skies.
Once it evolved the capacity to dominate sub-humid environments it changed the whole structure of life on earth, as species that couldn't handle it dwindled and those that could exploded across the globe. We're creatures of the savannah ourselves.
Dear Mr. Stirling,
And I should have remembered how Poul Anderson used grass and other introduced Terrestrial plants on the planet Nike, in "A Tragedy Of Errors." Before humans arrived, fern like plants seemed to have been the dominant plant species. Grass and trees from Earth rapidly displaced the more primitive fern like species.
Sean
Presumably the Earth of Genesis has plants that are superior to grass -- possibly of the single large organism type, each an interconnected entity covering many square miles.
Dear Mr. Stirling,
And some of these plants would need to be trying to adapt to an Earth becoming more desertified as the Sun became hotter.
Hmmm, a successor plant to grass being some kind of "single large organism type, each an interconnected entity covering many square miles"? I admit to finding that hard to conceive or picture!
Sean
There are plants like that; they're called "clonal colonies". Quaking aspen sometimes form them -- there's one in Colorado that covers over 100 acres, all genetically identical, with interconnected root systems below-ground sharing water and nutrients.
Dear Mr. Stirling,
And I have heard of a species of trees doing the same things in Hawaii, albeit I can't, offhand, recall its name.
Sean
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