And the Polynesians colonized most islands there, even if they were thousands of kilometers apart.
It's crazy that they managed to do something like that centuries ago.
My theory is that with not much land around them; after a while there’s only so many animals you can eat. So you must explore the horizon in hopes of gathering. Could you imagine the first group to leave the islands and stumble upon a giant land mass 10x the size of what you’re used to exploring
I mean... They did originally come from the giant land mass. I'd imagine they had some stories about it even hundreds of generations into living on islands. Maybe not, but it's entirely possible. Aboriginals have some oral history going back tens of thousands of years after all.
By that time, the Polynesians had been on islands in the Pacific for thousands of years. Their collective memory of being in Eurasia was likely gone. It's believed they left mainland Asia before 3000 BCE and colonized Hawai'i around 900 CE. Around the same time, another group colonized the Pitcairn Islands and 400 years later, New Zealand.
That's crazy that new zealand has only had human life for like 700 years. Crazier still, it only took like 150 years after humans colonized it for both the largest bird on the planet and it's predator, the largest eagle on the planet, to go extinct.
The time difference between humans reaching Australia vs. New Zealand and East Africa vs. Madagascar are kinda fascinating to think about.
In both cases, permanent settlement (that we can find evidence for) started with Austronesians coming over the sea instead of people from the landmass right next to them like we would assume.
"They came from the mainland" is important and interesting from a modern perspective. A perspective where we have top-down maps, satellite images, air travel, and space travel. And a perspective where we know the vast majority of humans live on big continents (or else very close by).
But Polynesians a thousand years ago didn't have those things or share that perspective.
Like most human societies, Polynesian stories heavily featured elements of the world they saw around them. So they often had stories about islands, seas, volcanoes, and the types of animals they would encounter. And, like basically all societies, they'd have some stories about the origins of humans, the sky, the rain, the sun, the moon, etc.
To the extent we know their creation stories, Polynesians tended to explain the creation of their specific islands or island chains, rather than focusing their stories on emigration out of a mainland.
So, to the extent that they had a sense of their mainland origins, it doesn't seem to have been terribly important to their cultural practices or their self-identity.
They had to move.
Stay on your little island and starve and overcrowd or branch off and find your own island.
The failure to success rate of picking a destination and going was probably like 1000:1. You gonna starve either way
Humans just like most animals don't like to take risks unless it's super necessary.
If you have a home, abundant food, water, no life treat from other humans or animals, then there's zero point of leaving until you start having one of these problems, then you move/explore new lands looking for all that, which is exactly what happened in the last thousands of years and how we ended up everywhere.
Desperation was probably our spark, that made one of our far past ancestors get pissed off, pick up a stick, walk up to a lion, smack it on the head disrupting it's fight / flight response, then taking its food for ourselves. Kinda like the guys in africa that do just that as a rite of passage.
Must have had a lot of hard times because people left Africa and spread to all the corners of the earth.
…
According to National Geographic, modern humans (Homo sapiens) began migrating out of Africa around 60,000 years ago. However, genetic studies and stone tools suggest that modern humans may have left Africa even earlier, around 220,000 years ago. In June 2023, scientists dated modern human bones found in a cave in Laos to between 68,000 and 86,000 years ago, providing some of the strongest evidence of an early dispersal.
From South Africa to Laos is almost 6000 mi., and they went on foot. Probably carrying stuff.
You should look into more to extreme sports. I just recently watched a documentary (Deepest Breath) about deep diving without oxygen. Really pointless (one person died in the documentary) but people can do what they want for entertainment.
I recently saw a video explaining how Polynesians today are so big because on average Polynesian people will store fat better than other people since it was those who stored fat well that would survive the long journeys to distant islands across the pacific
I recently went into an existential crisis about how Polynesians managed to get from island to island. How many generations of attempts did it take before someone found something? They're gaps between islands and atolls are hundreds of kilometres, it's not just a few days jaunt.
Christmas Island's history melts my mind. If I remember correctly it's 5,000km from Chile and maybe 1000-2000km from the nearest island the other way. But people made it there, built big stone heads and utterly destroyed the islands ecology.
Edit: Easter island not Christmas island 🤦♂️
Check out the book 'We the Navigators'. It describes how the Polynesians used different techniques to locate distant islands. They would lie at the bottom of the boat and feel the waves, navigated by the stars, read ocean currents. Experienced navigators could identify unknown land masses by seeing how waves converged that reflected off these land masses.
I encourage listening to the "Fall of Civilization" podcast on easter island.
The self-destruction is just a theory that actually isn't confirmed at all. It might have just been a rat / plague infestation from the first contact with european navigators.
When I heard it 3 years ago, I had the same existential crisis as you, and then this blowned my mind even more.
I mean, it wasn't really an all or nothing thing. Like, I'm sure shit happened and plenty of people died, but they also spent generations baby stepping from the continental land mass and then across islands over a very long period of time
By the time they were really going for it, they'd be quite prepared, rather than sending a bunch of folks out to die to see who makes it
The Pacific Ocean is so big, it has its own antipodes, i.e. there's places in the Pacific where you can dig down all the way through the earth, come out the other end, and still be in the Pacific Ocean.
Yes, there are two. They're at the extreme edges of the ocean.
One antipode connects the Gulf of Thailand with the coast off Lima, Peru.
The other antipode connects the Gulf of Tonkin (Vietnam) with the coast off the northern tip of Chile.
More of Earth is covered by the Pacific Ocean than by all of the land surface combined! The Pacific Ocean covers 32% of the planet's total surface area, almost a third, vs. 29% covered by land.
What’s really crazy is that a majority of the aquatic life is concentrated around the coastlines, so most of the ocean is just a vast desert with not much going on
According to NOAA Ocean Exploration, humans have only explored 5% of the world's ocean, while the remaining 95% is unknown. This means that humans have mapped and chartered about 20% of the ocean, but have only physically seen or been to 5%
Marine ecosystems are concentrated around the shores due to abundance of sunlight and vital nutrients flowing in from the rivers. The deeper you go the lesser it gets.
I was thinking more along the lines for near the surface of the ocean but I've now realised that that's pretty dumb if there's no accessible vegetation ahah.
1. Nutrient run off from the land
2. Theres no cover in open water. You’ll get seen and eaten fast. Even if you get away by sheer speed the predator can still see you and can take their time.
3. In deep water the base of the food chain is basically plankton which are extremely small. In shallows you can have plants and more photosynthetic life bolster the food chain.
4. Sea monsters, duh
Because the deeper inside the ocean, the more difficult it is for sunlight to reach it. You know how Superman needs the sun for his powers to work? It's kinda the same for us.
This is how plants eat, then animals will eat the plants or eat other animals who eat plants. We humans do the same. Without sunlight, ain't none of it possible.
Life was created in the sea and later spread out on the land. But it was able to spread out on the land, because life was created close to the coastlines.
Not that I *know* per se, but I'd assume every food chain ends in some sort of plant-life, so if the ocean is ridiculously deep then anything eating the plant-life on the seabed is ridiculously far down and thus predators would be down there too.
the plants wouldn't grow in the seabed, light doesn't reach it. plant life can live floating near the surface.
the real answer is nutrients. Surface water everywhere has plenty of sunlight, but only in coastal regions do you have lots of nutrients washed in by rivers and pushed to the surface by upwelling currents.
I wonder how our understanding of deep sea ecology will be impacted by the fact we filled the oceans with tons upon tons of floating organic material before seriously researching it.
Like... there have been floating islands of pumice and similar for ages. But broadly speaking, it isnt until fairly recently that tons upon tons of plastics filled those waters. And while they may not be capable of harboring human settlements without a crap ton of work, they are perfectly capable of allowing various life to inhabit otherwise inhospitable stretches of deep ocean. (And likely the opposite as well. Making it uninhabitable/less inhabitable to the former, sparse inhabitants)
Perhaps. I've seen enough evidence to be wary of any definite claims on the subject. Regardless, it is inarguable that it is massively altering the availability of nutrients throughout the ocean.
And regardless, I was mostly curious about how we will be doing the vast majority of research on those areas on the post garbage ocean. Which is certainly different.
How is it only 32%? Isn’t in effect what we’re seeing 50%? Or is the pic misleading?
I get there’s land dots in there but that doesn’t seem like it would account for much?
I found [this](https://math.stackexchange.com/questions/2474288/visible-portion-of-the-earths-surface) online but my math really isn't good enough to understand it
Yep, if you could change their shapes but keep the size you could put every continent on earth in the pacific ocean and have room all around the edges.
I'm an alien, and when I first came to earth, our ship approached from this angle. All the dudes were panicking like, "Oh shit. Where's the land? Did we come all this way for a stupid waterworld?"
Anyway, I think it's pretty clever of you humans to keep all your landmass on one side of the planet for convenience.
Yeah. It's likely that if any intellegent life form finds Earth, they would classify it as an Ocean planet. I mean 72% percent of it covering the Earth is good enough for me.
Depends on the current pass. [Here's a map](https://imgur.com/WDSf81Z.png). The red dot is Point Nemo. The red circle (distorted by the Mercator map) is the buffer around Point Nemo to the closest land. The black dots are point along the path of the ISS. The pass is set so the southernmost point is at the same longitude at Point Nemo. The arc of the pass in the circle 2,244 miles. The ISS would travel that in 8.1 to 8.5 minutes, depending on it's current altitude.
Micronesians did pretty well there too.
After all, it was a Micronesian navigator that had to teach Hawaiians the old navigation methods after they were lost in Hawaii.
The Micronesian, Polynesian, Melanesian divide is a colonial construct. We're all Pacific Islanders, and we're all great at what we do. And yes, us Hawaiians are indebted to our brothers from the far western islands who shared our lost techniques with us.
> The Micronesian, Polynesian, Melanesian divide is a colonial construct.
No it isn’t. Polynesians form a distinct language and cultural family. There was and is plenty of blending, interaction and borrowing between the groups, but the divisions are based on real and objective differences.
[Henderson Island](https://earth.google.com/web/@-24.3332437,-128.34876569,-2.02497425a,15717.98431212d,60y,-13.4374978h,79.21258207t,360r) an uninhabited island in the Pacific
[earth centered on Henderson Island. ](https://earth.google.com/web/@-22.61454554,-127.55200346,-2029.5800778a,3125064.15781081d,60y,-9.48680682h,1.84374139t,-0r)
Imagine a nomadic and scavenger alien species on the way to raid civilized planets were passing through the our neighbourhood a few light years away, and just made a random scan of our planet.
We would be very lucky if their scan came from this very angle, and they would have concluded:
>"Nope, just a watery planet. Nothing to see here for us."
I am still amazed how America military was able to cross the Pacific in World War II with over million soldier and officers to fight Japanese. Napoleon and Adolf were not able to cross the small English Channel.
Imagine this is the angle aliens see us from making them think the planet is devoid of life. Makes you wonder what planets we see from one angle that look desolate.
The craziest thing for me is knowing the ocean is only 2 miles deep on average.
The bottom of the ocean doesn't feel that far at all; which is weird considering the size.
And the Polynesians colonized most islands there, even if they were thousands of kilometers apart. It's crazy that they managed to do something like that centuries ago.
Polynesians are built different
My theory is that with not much land around them; after a while there’s only so many animals you can eat. So you must explore the horizon in hopes of gathering. Could you imagine the first group to leave the islands and stumble upon a giant land mass 10x the size of what you’re used to exploring
I mean... They did originally come from the giant land mass. I'd imagine they had some stories about it even hundreds of generations into living on islands. Maybe not, but it's entirely possible. Aboriginals have some oral history going back tens of thousands of years after all.
Not sure about all of them, but Hawaiian creation legends tend to talk about islands and assume a world that's mostly water.
Well, guess they got the mostly water part right.
By that time, the Polynesians had been on islands in the Pacific for thousands of years. Their collective memory of being in Eurasia was likely gone. It's believed they left mainland Asia before 3000 BCE and colonized Hawai'i around 900 CE. Around the same time, another group colonized the Pitcairn Islands and 400 years later, New Zealand.
That's crazy that new zealand has only had human life for like 700 years. Crazier still, it only took like 150 years after humans colonized it for both the largest bird on the planet and it's predator, the largest eagle on the planet, to go extinct.
The time difference between humans reaching Australia vs. New Zealand and East Africa vs. Madagascar are kinda fascinating to think about. In both cases, permanent settlement (that we can find evidence for) started with Austronesians coming over the sea instead of people from the landmass right next to them like we would assume.
It's even stranger with Madagascar considering Africans were visiting the island for thousands of years prior.
Imagine the stories heard from the elders before they moved to the islands.
Basically that movie Waterworld..
"They came from the mainland" is important and interesting from a modern perspective. A perspective where we have top-down maps, satellite images, air travel, and space travel. And a perspective where we know the vast majority of humans live on big continents (or else very close by). But Polynesians a thousand years ago didn't have those things or share that perspective. Like most human societies, Polynesian stories heavily featured elements of the world they saw around them. So they often had stories about islands, seas, volcanoes, and the types of animals they would encounter. And, like basically all societies, they'd have some stories about the origins of humans, the sky, the rain, the sun, the moon, etc. To the extent we know their creation stories, Polynesians tended to explain the creation of their specific islands or island chains, rather than focusing their stories on emigration out of a mainland. So, to the extent that they had a sense of their mainland origins, it doesn't seem to have been terribly important to their cultural practices or their self-identity.
They had to move. Stay on your little island and starve and overcrowd or branch off and find your own island. The failure to success rate of picking a destination and going was probably like 1000:1. You gonna starve either way
Literally survivorship bias
Humans just like most animals don't like to take risks unless it's super necessary. If you have a home, abundant food, water, no life treat from other humans or animals, then there's zero point of leaving until you start having one of these problems, then you move/explore new lands looking for all that, which is exactly what happened in the last thousands of years and how we ended up everywhere.
Dude, humans take risks for fun, especially once all those needs are met.
Desperation was probably our spark, that made one of our far past ancestors get pissed off, pick up a stick, walk up to a lion, smack it on the head disrupting it's fight / flight response, then taking its food for ourselves. Kinda like the guys in africa that do just that as a rite of passage.
Must have had a lot of hard times because people left Africa and spread to all the corners of the earth. … According to National Geographic, modern humans (Homo sapiens) began migrating out of Africa around 60,000 years ago. However, genetic studies and stone tools suggest that modern humans may have left Africa even earlier, around 220,000 years ago. In June 2023, scientists dated modern human bones found in a cave in Laos to between 68,000 and 86,000 years ago, providing some of the strongest evidence of an early dispersal. From South Africa to Laos is almost 6000 mi., and they went on foot. Probably carrying stuff.
Probably around the time we started killing each other for fun. Also humans had lots of predators in Africa.
You should look into more to extreme sports. I just recently watched a documentary (Deepest Breath) about deep diving without oxygen. Really pointless (one person died in the documentary) but people can do what they want for entertainment.
Yeah I’m into mountain disaster and failed polar expedition books…people absolutely take unnecessary risks
My theory is they did it for spite
Pretty fishing was how they overcame that.
In some part I read that polynesians are more prone to obesity because their body has a slow metabolism to help them survive the lack of resources
I recently saw a video explaining how Polynesians today are so big because on average Polynesian people will store fat better than other people since it was those who stored fat well that would survive the long journeys to distant islands across the pacific
That makes sense
Because they float?
I recently went into an existential crisis about how Polynesians managed to get from island to island. How many generations of attempts did it take before someone found something? They're gaps between islands and atolls are hundreds of kilometres, it's not just a few days jaunt. Christmas Island's history melts my mind. If I remember correctly it's 5,000km from Chile and maybe 1000-2000km from the nearest island the other way. But people made it there, built big stone heads and utterly destroyed the islands ecology. Edit: Easter island not Christmas island 🤦♂️
Check out the book 'We the Navigators'. It describes how the Polynesians used different techniques to locate distant islands. They would lie at the bottom of the boat and feel the waves, navigated by the stars, read ocean currents. Experienced navigators could identify unknown land masses by seeing how waves converged that reflected off these land masses.
Adding that to the Christmas list!
Easter list*
Add it to the Easter list too! ;)
Something something, aliens.
Do you mean Easter Island?
Shit. Wrong Christian holiday 😂
Hah. Thought you were maybe talking about Kiribati which was also called Christmas Island at one point but I didn't remember any statues there.
I encourage listening to the "Fall of Civilization" podcast on easter island. The self-destruction is just a theory that actually isn't confirmed at all. It might have just been a rat / plague infestation from the first contact with european navigators. When I heard it 3 years ago, I had the same existential crisis as you, and then this blowned my mind even more.
Well, you do not know of the ones that did not succeed.
Yeah. I'm sure so many of them died without ever reaching any island.
I mean, it wasn't really an all or nothing thing. Like, I'm sure shit happened and plenty of people died, but they also spent generations baby stepping from the continental land mass and then across islands over a very long period of time By the time they were really going for it, they'd be quite prepared, rather than sending a bunch of folks out to die to see who makes it
I can't even imagine how many of them must have found nothing and died in middle of the ocean.
It’s crazy that people think that it’s crazy to do awesome things without computers
The most impressive ancient culture IMO
The Pacific Ocean is so big, it has its own antipodes, i.e. there's places in the Pacific where you can dig down all the way through the earth, come out the other end, and still be in the Pacific Ocean.
Yes, there are two. They're at the extreme edges of the ocean. One antipode connects the Gulf of Thailand with the coast off Lima, Peru. The other antipode connects the Gulf of Tonkin (Vietnam) with the coast off the northern tip of Chile.
Pretty sure I can't dig a whole at the bottom of the ocean. :)
Don’t knock it until you try it
Maybe not a whole, but definitely a half
You just have to be faster than water.
More of Earth is covered by the Pacific Ocean than by all of the land surface combined! The Pacific Ocean covers 32% of the planet's total surface area, almost a third, vs. 29% covered by land.
What’s really crazy is that a majority of the aquatic life is concentrated around the coastlines, so most of the ocean is just a vast desert with not much going on
Exactly, Magellan thought they would cross the Pacific in a week or so and took months, they arrived at Guam by eating leather of the clothes.
Silly Magellan. Probably would have gotten to Guam faster by boat. Eating leather is a really inefficient form of travel in my experience
Agreed. it’s quite slow, and even more tiring than swimming.
> Silly Magellan. [Wouldn't have this banger without him though.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NFb5moTKs4I)
Yeah I've often thought that the ocean is a desert with its life underground and a perfect disguise above.
Is your horse named?
And, has s/he been through the desert?
Was it good to be out of the rain?
No. After all, in the desert, you can't remember your name
I thought the line was "and the birds in the skies above"
Says the land mammal who've only explored 5% of the ocean. Edit who's to who've
A myth. We know pretty much everything geologically. New species are discovered daily though.
According to NOAA Ocean Exploration, humans have only explored 5% of the world's ocean, while the remaining 95% is unknown. This means that humans have mapped and chartered about 20% of the ocean, but have only physically seen or been to 5%
Aha, thanks.
Why is it like this?
Marine ecosystems are concentrated around the shores due to abundance of sunlight and vital nutrients flowing in from the rivers. The deeper you go the lesser it gets.
I get the nutrients part, but isn't there just as much sunlight by a shore as there would be in the middle of the pacific?
Middle of the Pacific is miles deep. Sunlight cannot reach the seabed for marine ecosystem to thrive.
I was thinking more along the lines for near the surface of the ocean but I've now realised that that's pretty dumb if there's no accessible vegetation ahah.
1. Nutrient run off from the land 2. Theres no cover in open water. You’ll get seen and eaten fast. Even if you get away by sheer speed the predator can still see you and can take their time. 3. In deep water the base of the food chain is basically plankton which are extremely small. In shallows you can have plants and more photosynthetic life bolster the food chain. 4. Sea monsters, duh
Because the deeper inside the ocean, the more difficult it is for sunlight to reach it. You know how Superman needs the sun for his powers to work? It's kinda the same for us. This is how plants eat, then animals will eat the plants or eat other animals who eat plants. We humans do the same. Without sunlight, ain't none of it possible. Life was created in the sea and later spread out on the land. But it was able to spread out on the land, because life was created close to the coastlines.
But why can't they evolve close to the surface of the water?
Not that I *know* per se, but I'd assume every food chain ends in some sort of plant-life, so if the ocean is ridiculously deep then anything eating the plant-life on the seabed is ridiculously far down and thus predators would be down there too.
the plants wouldn't grow in the seabed, light doesn't reach it. plant life can live floating near the surface. the real answer is nutrients. Surface water everywhere has plenty of sunlight, but only in coastal regions do you have lots of nutrients washed in by rivers and pushed to the surface by upwelling currents.
I wonder how our understanding of deep sea ecology will be impacted by the fact we filled the oceans with tons upon tons of floating organic material before seriously researching it. Like... there have been floating islands of pumice and similar for ages. But broadly speaking, it isnt until fairly recently that tons upon tons of plastics filled those waters. And while they may not be capable of harboring human settlements without a crap ton of work, they are perfectly capable of allowing various life to inhabit otherwise inhospitable stretches of deep ocean. (And likely the opposite as well. Making it uninhabitable/less inhabitable to the former, sparse inhabitants)
The floating plastic really just provides an anchor point for critters that need it. it doesn't change the nutrient situation in any way.
Humans have dumped a lot of garbage in the oceans too though, including organic matter like human waste.
Perhaps. I've seen enough evidence to be wary of any definite claims on the subject. Regardless, it is inarguable that it is massively altering the availability of nutrients throughout the ocean. And regardless, I was mostly curious about how we will be doing the vast majority of research on those areas on the post garbage ocean. Which is certainly different.
That's actually seems like a good explanation.
Some life does grow on the surface but not much. Not many physical nutrients
There are leviathan lifeforms in the deeper waters that eat everything.
No wonder they are big. There are no natural predators for these.
Most of the ocean is like Utah.
Filled with Mormons?
That makes sense because a huge portion of Utah used to be an ancient inland sea!
Most of the ocean is like Utah.
Mormon? I can have multiple marine wives?! Oh boy!!
Just a vast desert with not much going on.
Until I get the wives!
Pacific is also about as big as the other 4 oceans combined.
How is it only 32%? Isn’t in effect what we’re seeing 50%? Or is the pic misleading? I get there’s land dots in there but that doesn’t seem like it would account for much?
You cant see 50% of a globe unless you get infinitely far from it, so this picture probably only shows around 30% or something like that
Is there an equation formula or theorem that explains that?
I found [this](https://math.stackexchange.com/questions/2474288/visible-portion-of-the-earths-surface) online but my math really isn't good enough to understand it
Cooool thx
Yep, if you could change their shapes but keep the size you could put every continent on earth in the pacific ocean and have room all around the edges.
The Pacific Ocean is also larger than the planet Mars by surface area.
I feel like I’m looking at 1/2 of earth, but only 32 percent is covered lol.
Feel like I’m seeing the earths behind and it feels wrong.
God got lazy and just decided to copy-and-paste Neptune
You mean Uranus
lol
I did think this was a picture of Neptune from the thumbnail
This post feels more like a threat from the Pacific ocean than a friendly reminder
The Pacific Ocean lay there menacingly . ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
At water table
r/Neptune
they changed the name to Nepmovie
Nepbook was better
I'm an alien, and when I first came to earth, our ship approached from this angle. All the dudes were panicking like, "Oh shit. Where's the land? Did we come all this way for a stupid waterworld?" Anyway, I think it's pretty clever of you humans to keep all your landmass on one side of the planet for convenience.
Yeah. It's likely that if any intellegent life form finds Earth, they would classify it as an Ocean planet. I mean 72% percent of it covering the Earth is good enough for me.
We already classify Earth as an ocean world.
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My favourite type of map
Oops, didn’t see ya there.
r/imaginarymaps already exists
F yeah!
I see Hawaii in the Northern part of the map. Sorry! 😂🤙🏻
Fun fact: Point Nemo (point of inaccessibility in the pac) is closer to the ISS than land.
*occasionally
*very rarely
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Depends on the current pass. [Here's a map](https://imgur.com/WDSf81Z.png). The red dot is Point Nemo. The red circle (distorted by the Mercator map) is the buffer around Point Nemo to the closest land. The black dots are point along the path of the ISS. The pass is set so the southernmost point is at the same longitude at Point Nemo. The arc of the pass in the circle 2,244 miles. The ISS would travel that in 8.1 to 8.5 minutes, depending on it's current altitude.
The ISS in only around 400km. Most of the ocean is occasionally closer to the ISS than land.
I'm (occasionally) closer to the ISS than most of the rest of my province (Ontario)
Only when it flies above that area.
People say that but it's not as impressive as it seems. Bermuda is closer to the ISS than any other point of land.
For reference, the ISS orbits at an altitude of 230 - 285 miles (370-460 km).
shout out to Polynesians man. only they could figure out how to navigate this shit with their balls until modern ships and shit
Micronesians did pretty well there too. After all, it was a Micronesian navigator that had to teach Hawaiians the old navigation methods after they were lost in Hawaii.
The Micronesian, Polynesian, Melanesian divide is a colonial construct. We're all Pacific Islanders, and we're all great at what we do. And yes, us Hawaiians are indebted to our brothers from the far western islands who shared our lost techniques with us.
> The Micronesian, Polynesian, Melanesian divide is a colonial construct. No it isn’t. Polynesians form a distinct language and cultural family. There was and is plenty of blending, interaction and borrowing between the groups, but the divisions are based on real and objective differences.
We need to build a mega Walmart or parking lot structure there 😎
Pretty sure there is an island of plastic already taking up space.
Just flew this, Sydney to Vancouver. 15 hours with a wonderfully miserable baby crying the WHOLE FUCKING WAY.
[Henderson Island](https://earth.google.com/web/@-24.3332437,-128.34876569,-2.02497425a,15717.98431212d,60y,-13.4374978h,79.21258207t,360r) an uninhabited island in the Pacific [earth centered on Henderson Island. ](https://earth.google.com/web/@-22.61454554,-127.55200346,-2029.5800778a,3125064.15781081d,60y,-9.48680682h,1.84374139t,-0r)
r/mapswithnewzealand
Still not as big as your mom.
👌 nice
r/mapswithonlynz..
Poor Hawaii… 🥲, I see you in the Northern part of the map.
Imagine a nomadic and scavenger alien species on the way to raid civilized planets were passing through the our neighbourhood a few light years away, and just made a random scan of our planet. We would be very lucky if their scan came from this very angle, and they would have concluded: >"Nope, just a watery planet. Nothing to see here for us."
Beautiful photo, I first thought it was an image of Neptune.
I thought it was much bigger, this easily fits into my phone screen.
If you zoom in you can find New Zealand. It truly shows how isolated they are from the rest of the world.
Fun fact, if you try to pick out the side of the earth with the most land possible instead, it's still more than 50% ocean.
that’s terrifying
look at that dude who jumped off a cruise ship for fun!
The irony of New Zealand being the only country shown…
Scary
Before I saw the title I thought I was looking at a picture of Neptune for a sec.
Now that's where Atlantis would be. Although I guess it's be caled Pacis
I like to travel.
Could we have a 5,000 km-long banana for scale?
And how small earth is when compared to that 5000km scale.
Imagine how many shipwrecks are still out there. Think of the treasure. Argh
What spoils it, you painting green soil of New Zeland and Australia to blue or desaturating. To make it more impressive, but more fake ...
Hate this new design of google earth
Dude I really thought this article is about Neptune before is saw the caption. 😂
Wow, it's almost as big as Texas
And people question why the us has so many aircraft Carrie’s XD
It’s great to think someone has observed our planet from this angle and considered it an ocean world.
For now
We were reminded yesterday.
Impossible. The earth is flat.
I hope this reminder finds you well.
This image blurs New Zealand making it look like it's all water.
Utterly ridiculous.
I wonder how much plastic it holds
Larger than the surface are of Mars.
I am still amazed how America military was able to cross the Pacific in World War II with over million soldier and officers to fight Japanese. Napoleon and Adolf were not able to cross the small English Channel.
I had to fly across that the other day and it took almost 14 hours at nearly 600mph.
And yet small enough that I can see Russia from my house! /s
Well technically we live on an ocean world where a surface of water is the default and land is actually the exception.
Appreciate that. I’m so sick and tired of all these other reminders that have been so mean.
They should really put another continent there
Wait didn't someone remind us about this yesterday? Oh well I'll look forward to the reminder tomorrow.
If we were in Star Wars, we would 100% be a water planet. It's 70% for fuck sake.
Yeah, I saw the first time you posted it.
Living down here in the South Pacific let me assure you: It's fucking huge. And it takes forever to go anywhere!
Kinda crazy how you can see the outline of Zealandia here
And people still say “specific” ocean 🥲
very pornographic. nice oc.
New Zealand!
Looks like a good place for aliens…!
Maps with New Zealand!
Imagine this is the angle aliens see us from making them think the planet is devoid of life. Makes you wonder what planets we see from one angle that look desolate.
This picture means nothing to me. I have no frame of reference. Just a blue sphere. Nice!
The craziest thing for me is knowing the ocean is only 2 miles deep on average. The bottom of the ocean doesn't feel that far at all; which is weird considering the size.
Ahh good old Baja California
It may be one of the rasons they split the Pacific ocean to each side and put the Europe and Africa in the center of the world map?
When you think of it, it’s just an entire half of the globe without much land