Identifying the way the world turns, and possibly what the world may turn into, is of the greatest significance for our understanding of the past, present and future way of living.
When Alfred Wegener devised his thesis about continental drift, at the time, the main scientific vision about the creation of the Earth was that of an expanding Earth. Some of the atlases contain illustrative renderings of just what an expanding Earth may have looked like. An earthly core that ripped apart into the outline of the continents as the Earth expanded.
It was pretty much thought that whatever land mass appeared in a given radius on the Earth was there and shall be there in its particular space forever. But, then Wegener proposed the idea that the continents had formed from a super-continent, something that had been proposed by many scientists before him, but with little effect. However, Wegener's idea, although thoroughly rejected at first, has now come to be the dominant paradigmatic concept about the formation and life of continents on Earth.
The idea is simple enough, and in fact represents a reductionism view of reality. Wegener reduces his interpretation of the existence of the continents to the possibility that the single movement of the continents, drifted away from their central resting place in Pangaea, to their present position today, may explain all there is to know about the continents. In fact, the so-called theory of continental drift, is actually nothing more than a specific thesis.
The idea of continental drift proposes the possibility that the continents came from a single land mass on a lop-sided Earth from some 200 million years ago, and that the continents are inevitably drifting once again towards a single land mass to be accomplished in another 200 million years.
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