There’s no joke though. It doesn’t fail to be funny, it’s not intended to be funny at all. It’s just propaganda.

I like my wife and son, but if I had to go, I’d pick the civilization we call the Minoans in Crete. They had malls that were ancient ruins before the pyramids went up, women in positions of power, tits consistently out, sunny beaches, and IIRC two thousand years of mostly unbroken prosperity. Maybe I’d get to be some eccentric noblewoman’s pet scientist. Maybe I’d just fish for a living in a sleepy village.

If there weren’t, we’d be under martial law right now and the 50501 protests would have been massacred.

Now, I can’t begin to guess how many, beyond the fact that it’s enough to prevent the real Soviet-style dipshit psychopath shit from happening. But it’s at least that many.

Wikipedia says they date back 480 million years, during the Ordovician period. I think the atmosphere would have been pretty breathable, but plants wouldn’t conquer the land in a serious way for at least another 60 million years or so, with bugs following them. Nothing saw those mountains. If you time-traveled to the Pangean mountains, you would be the only being to ever observe them in their formative years. Eons would pass before the first plant set root at their feet. The sterile and desolate emptiness would be beyond human experience.