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Sharks are so cool, man. They’ve just been chilling on the planet for 400 million years, swimming the oceans while epochs passed them by in their periphery. The
by chatmasta 10mo ago
Sharks are so cool, man. They’ve just been chilling on the planet for 400 million years, swimming the oceans while epochs passed them by in their periphery. Their entire biology is pretty much unchanged. They’ve been sharks the whole time.
- zaken 10mo agoSharks are older than trees
- colechristensen 10mo agoAnd the north star, Polaris, is a fraction the age of sharks at only 50-70 Mya (it's a trinary star system but the other two stars are much dimmer and not visible to the eye)
- echelon 10mo agoI love this fact. Also: life on earth is almost as old as the universe itself, within the same order of magnitude. 4.1 GYA (billion years ago) vs 13.8 GYA. We're old and intelligence is hard.
- baxtr 10mo agoI think there is a theory that we’re not seeing any aliens simply because life on Earth started so early.
- ssl-3 10mo agoOr there are many planets with life, with each harboring their own equivalent to our sharks. (And none of those shark-equivalents have developed a space program.)
- baxtr 10mo agoThat would be unfortunate. I’d love to see some space sharks!
- ssl-3 10mo agoWe'd almost certainly find some way to kill them if we ever ran across any of them. We're pretty good at accomplishing things like that. One day, there's some space sharks swimming in a sea of liquid helium and doing deep dives to get to the smaller creatures that devour the seabed of diamonds. The next day, we're figuring out how to use space shark squeezings in our fusion reactors. Unless, of course, the space sharks figure out how to kill us first. They will probably try if that's useful to then. It's the circle of life.
- JumpCrisscross 10mo ago> We'd almost certainly find some way to kill them if we ever ran across any of them There is a credible argument that what the literature terms genocidal tendencies—where conflict isn’t resolved when it ends, but when the enemy is destroyed—is a precondition for conquering a world. So if we met space sharks, barring enlightenment, they’d probably seek to destroy us, too.
- computerex 10mo agoThere is life, then intelligent life like humans. Plus you have physical constraints like the speed of light.
- alex1138 10mo agoI would love a "chatty" universe like Mass Effect but the problem is we'd probably be fighting Reapers
- readthenotes1 10mo agoLight is slower in water. I think that explains why we are still waiting
- BurningFrog 10mo agoI think this is clearer: Since we're not seeing any aliens, life on Earth must have started very early.
- simmerup 10mo agoIt’s more inaccurate as it’s stating an assumption as fact
- Ericson2314 10mo agoYes I love it too, wish more people appreciated it
- yread 10mo agoThat's not that early, no? There was probably enough C, H, N, O, P, S, Na atoms for life to start 10B years ago. You probably couldnt rely on iron being everywhere though but that's not such a hard requirement.
- echelon 10mo agoIt's fascinating to ponder, for sure. The universe still has plenty of time to burn, especially red dwarfs. It's sad to think about starless skies, though. The heme is pretty magical. Probably not a hard requirement, but it sure has been useful for us here.
- gusgus01 10mo agoAnother Fun Fact: the Appalachian mountains formed before sharks existed, the rings of Saturn existed, and before bones existed.
- sethammons 10mo agoI think you misstated your fun fact
- abc123abc123 10mo ago...but younger than the mountains. There you go!
- readthenotes1 10mo agoICYMI: https://youtu.be/IUmnTfsY3hI?si=WuUcwv_LLYh8gX4u https://youtu.be/IUmnTfsY3hI?si=WuUcwv_LLYh8gX4u Good call, abc123
- deleted 10mo ago[deleted]
- dredmorbius 10mo agoBut they're (possibly) younger than the New River! <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_River_(Kanawha_River_tributary)#Geology https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_River_(Kanawha_River_tribu...> (Blew my mind when I first encountered this a few years back.)
- nine_k 10mo agoThey've found a local optimum, and stay in it. There's no easy way out anyway.
- deleted 10mo ago[deleted]
- echelon 10mo ago> There's no easy way out anyway. Evolution always finds new nooks and crannies of state space to explore. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ndbw7SQMCcQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ndbw7SQMCcQ
- odyssey7 10mo agoYes, but maybe not from one specific lineage. E.g., extinction really is the end of the line for some species.
- maxbond 10mo agoNot always, species go extinct all the time. Evolution can get stuck in local optima. Consider the whiptail lizard, which has lost the ability to reproduce sexually. Will they be able to adapt to future changes of the environment? Maybe, but the chips are stacked against them.
- yetihehe 10mo agoNo one said that those nooks are not deadly. But evolution will explore them just in case.
- computerex 10mo agoEvolution doesn’t explore anything, mutations are random, selection pressure causes beneficial traits to become more common overtime.
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- Fnoord 10mo agoWhen they lose a tooth, they just grow a new one. How conveniently cool!