Inspired by this thread, and hopefully not too derivative…
There’s a people-less identical Earth on the other side of the Sun. Animals run happy and free, and you have first dibs on where to live. Where’s you first pick, geographically? Feel free to elaborate as to what you take, if you like.
Orange County, CA, if I had a portable desalination plant (or some other way of getting fresh water.) Otherwise, the site of Johannesburg. Not too hot, not too cold.
First I’d want to know a little more about those animals. If this planet is identical to Earth except that H. sapiens never evolved there, then probably there never was a Pleistocene extinction event (causes debated, but anthropogenic is most likely). So you’ve got sabretooths, cave bears, carnivorous quadrupedal kangaroos, and a lot of other potentially dangerous mammalian megafauna who have no fear of humans because they’ve never seen one . . .
This is true, Brainy (can I call you Brainy?), except that if there was the event you speak of, the “new” animals wouldn’t be scared of us either. Not much of a choice, you ask me.
Manhattan. I don’t really care about that piece of land myself but at some point, a group of rich New Yorkers are going to get shipped over and then get homesick. I will be 10 times more rich as Donald Trump on this version of earth.
Yes, you may, but what are these “new” animals? If you mean the “old” animals . . . those that, on our Earth, went extinct in the Pleistocene . . . well, that was my point.
Or perhaps by the “new” animals you mean those that evolved since the Pleistocene . . . well, most of those are afraid of humans (for very good reasons), as you’ll find out if you take a walk in the woods.
I’d agree that somewhere in the Med would be best. You’ve gotta have a nice climate, with with few natural disasters. California’s nice but has easrthquakes, so that’s out.
Say, the south of France. Great climate, few disasters. Not a lot of poisonous animals, either.
Just to clarify…is this a world where there were never any people, or a world where all the people are dead? (Plague, or war, or everyone decidede that being a “-2” world was too lame to live with, so they all offed themselves, whatever.) If it’s the latter, there might be some infrastructure (or at least some good ruins) left.
But, anyway…I’d probably pick southern Marin county, California. One of the most beautiful places on Earth, and colonizing a perverse, lifeless version of Earth is probably the only chance I’m ever going to have to make a nice home, there.
Damn, I didn’t someone would beat me to it, but you beat me to it
I was going to drop down at the tip of Manhattan island with a humungous stash of Lender’s frozen bagels (motto: “for frozen, they’re really pretty good”) and a solar powered toaster oven. Then, regardless of whatever economy develops, I will be in a position of great power and influence WAHAHA.
I will also have the appropriate cabling to power a Playstation 2 or N64 for an hour at a time.
But seriously, I’m not a real outdoorsy type of guy, so I would probably only want to visit Earth-2 rather than live there. “Animals run happy and free” is a great mental image but not one that draws me as a place to live, especially animals like Cave Bears that also want to live where I’d want to live and aren’t afraid to say so.