By Aaron W. Rockwell, Staff Writer
The next time you’re sipping on hot cocoa, eating airport sushi, and waiting for your flight at O’Hare International, you can now think about how much cheaper a dinosaur’s flight ticket would have cost.
Pangea:
Courtesy: Wikipedia
For those who were home schooled or skipped third grade: Pangea was a supercontinent that existed approximately 300 million years ago, and through a shift in plate tectonics, it began to break apart about 175 million years ago. This was before some of the more popular dinosaurs existed, but giant reptiles were still large and in charge during this period.
Flight Math:
The best math that I could find for airport flights is $50.00 + (distance * $0.11). Working with this, we are going to work back in time to how much Pangea flights would cost (yes, Aaron’s about to get down and dirty with some math!)
Another thing, with the continent so thin, the dinosaurs might have used just one time zone!
Average speed of a commercial flight: 550 mph (~900km/h).
Average speed of a sloth: .15 mph (~0.25 km/h).
Courtesy: wikimedia.org
Here’s the chart, the real mind-blowing thing discovered was: HOW SLOW A SLOTH TRAVELS:
| Sydney (SYD) to Bangkok (DMK) | New York (JFK) to Barcelona (BCN) | Rio de Janeiro (GIG) to Cairo (CAI) | Quebec (YQB) to Djibouti (JIB) | |
| Current World Distance | 4687 | 3821 | 6153 | 6746 |
| Pangea Distance | 11283 | 1654 | 3604 | 4281 |
| Current World Sloth Travel Time (hrs) | 31248.00 | 25475.93 | 41020.47 | 44970.07 |
| Current World Airplane Travel Time (hrs) | 8.52 | 6.95 | 11.19 | 12.26 |
| Current World Cost | $565.59 | $470.35 | $726.84 | $792.01 |
| Pangea Sloth Travel Time (hrs) | 75222.61 | 11026.08 | 24026.74 | 28539.95 |
| Pangea Airplane Travel Time (hrs) | 20.52 | 3.01 | 6.55 | 7.78 |
| Pangea Cost | $1,291.17 | $231.93 | $446.44 | $520.91 |
Sloth Travel Speeds (.15 mph):
Courtesy: eatrio.net
The average lifespan of a sloth is about 25 years. If a sloth was very diligent and traveled 8 hours a day, it would take it its entire lifetime to travel from Sydney to Bangkok in the Pangea world. Lucky for the sloth, they wouldn’t exist for a few million more years.
Methodology:
I used MS paint and did a pixel straight line distant calculation (with some help with Pythagoras’s theorem) on the Pangea image. I did not take into account the spherical nature of the planet, so the measurements have a 10% margin of error (guesstimating). Furthermore, straight line calculation makes sense to me, because this article started off as a discussion about flat-earth theory and plane flights.