But if civilization has started on the south side of the imaginary line that goes around the circumference of planet, and to assume the country of Ecuador, we would have clock faces that read the other way.
And we might have maps that are "upside-down" to what we use today; up would be down, left is right, and right is wrong. (ok, maybe not the last one)
Actually I've puzzled about that myself- who decided which way would be the "top" of the earth and which would be the bottom? When you see the Solar system from one side, the planets revolve counter-clockwise; but from the other side, they revolve clockwise; who decided which side of the ecliptic plane was "up"?
That being said, I usually realize after a short time following my reasoning that clearly one of the two "sides" had to "win"; a map would be drawn one way or another, you can't have it both ways. And lamenting over the fact that things are the way they are rather then a way they could be is both a case of "The grass is greener on the other side" despite everything being otherwise probably nearly the same as well as curious, in that you don't find people flipping a coin and wondering what would have happened had it been heads. (unless said coin flip was for something really important, in which case they clearly had a gambling problem).
What If questions of this sort, such as "what if civilization had started in the southern hemisphere?" are "fun" in a way to consider, but they are of course exercises in futility; While the results of the question are generally logical and make sense, the change from what we know happened is never explained. Why would civilization have appeared in the south first? It wasn't a probabilistic factor, it was any number of geologic and topographical features and the changes to those features and the changing climates and ecology as a result of those different features that dictated what animals would, or would not, live in certain areas. In turn, the abundance of animals to hunt was of critical importance to the survival of our predecessors; they went where the food was; additionally, even if there were probabilistic factors at play here (and how could there be? This isn't quantum mechanics) there is simply far more land in the northern hemisphere. If civilization had started in the south, it might not have been humans at all but rather intelligent sea-dwelling animals; perhaps a more evolved form of a dolphin or something.
So a simple what-if question has now become essentially a discussion about what for all intents and purposes and by most definitions can be called a parallel universe; or at the very least, an alternate history. of course it doesn't explain why these intelligent sea dwellers came to be either, which is the crux of my minor beef with such what-if scenarios.
For example, I recall one what-if scenario that explores what Earth's history would be like had we no moon; this could perhaps be possible if there simply was no comet/meteoroid to hit earth and separate the moon from its crust. What followed was somewhat gruesome, in that it explained, and followed rather logical arguments, that life as we know it wouldn't exist, and might not exist at all.
It's always the entirely different alternate history's and what-if scenarios that are explored, though. Nobody explores how life might have been in 1940's Germany if Adolf for some reason or another always wore a silly hat in public.
