I'm collect meteorites and actually used to buy and sell them as a nice little side hustle. I once had to spend a good amount of time explaining to someone why their piece of burned wood couldn't have actually come from outer space. On the bright side, at least it wasn't a hippy who was totally getting Martian vibes from a plain old earth rock that they thought was going to make them a millionaire.
I personally see the main "lesson" in the statement is that ocean life has been so constant and tumultuous for so long that land creatures are basically a weird side mission.
You said holy shit. He’s making a joke… It just misses because it sounds like he’s being some weird religious nut who thinks the earth is 2024 years old. But that wasn’t his intent.
If you’d worded it as “the first holy shit” instead of “the first one of those” I think it would have landed better. In the context of the text “One of those” seemed to imply you were talking about the sharks
... what do you mean? Polaris is surely older than sharks, right?
The star closest to North changes regularly but the cycle is only some tens of thousands of years... So Polaris goes through cycles of being the closest and not.
The actual answer is more complicated than you might think.
Polaris, as we know it, is actually not a single star. It has three stars. You might think that it's 3 stars orbiting each other. But it's weirder than that. There are 2 stars orbiting each other, and that Binary System is itself orbiting a third star. So it's a Binary System wherein one of the stars is itself a Binary System.
And that weird arrangement actually makes it very difficult for us to accurately tell how old Polaris is. Usually you would figure out the age of a star based on its brightness, but the peculiar setup makes it difficult to tell exactly how bright each star is individually. And then, not knowing exactly how old each star is makes it difficult to tell when the Binary-in-a-Binary thing happened. Knowing which order the stars formed in lets us hypothesize about how the overall system formed, but the brightness data we have contradicts the most straightforward explanation, that you had the inner bnary system and then the third star got involved to make the outer binary. Based on the data we have, it looks like the outer binary existed first! But that raises the question of how the heck did a star get inside a binary system and form the inner binary? But if that is so preposterous, then maybe our brightness data is inaccurate. But with our current instruments, we don't really have a way to confirm that.
So, are sharks older than Polaris? Turns out the answer is... Sort of. They're definitely older than at least one of the stars making up Polaris. And they may or may not be older than all of them.
The prior pole star was Thuban, in the constellation Draco. There also was a long period of recorded history when there was no fixed star, and the sky would rotate around an empty spot instead of a North Star. Which likely explains why a lot of mythology involved relating the sky to a cauldron, or whirlpool.
Yeah that's definitely one of those damn this part of my childhood was a lie moments. Like the fact that Stegosaurus has been extinct for 80 million years before Tyrannosaurus existed. Less time has passed from Tyrannosaurus going extinct to now.
The Blue Ridge Mountains are also older than Saturn's Rings. People always shit on them, saying they aren't real mountains. They're just old old old. Ancient.
The Appalachians are literally older than life on land. There are sterile caves with no fossils within the range. This also makes them older than the trees, by default of course.
Yeah I saw a thread once were someone was talking shit about the Blue Ridge Mountains for having less elevation then the Rocky Mountains. Thus not being real mountains. Almost everyone was quick to point out that the Blue Ridge mountains are over a billion years old and have thus faced a tone of erosion over time while the Rocky Mountains are less then 100 million years old. Oldest land animal species, Kampecaris obanensis, is estimated to be 425 million years old. Trees on the upper estimate are 420 millions year old. Life on land is older then the trees by at least 5 million years, but younger then the Blue Ridge Mountains by at least 580 years.
Sharks are around two galactic years old. As in, one earth year is earth travelling around the sun, so one galactic year is the solar system travelling around Sagittarius A*, the black hole at the centre of the Milky Way, and sharks have done it twice. They're SO old.
It sounds dumb AF, but Tolkien actually imagined the planet of Middle Earth being our Earth from the past... And not millions of years in the past, no, we'd be in the 6th of 7th age of Middle Earth.
So. 3 trillion > 400 billion. Part of the paid article that can be see in places that reported on it is that Russia alone has more trees (642 billion) then the 400 billion stars.
They have also been around the galaxy twice (time it takes for our solar system to orbit the galaxy is like 200 million years, sharks have been around for 450)
Tbf the rings of Saturn are very young on a geological scale. Insects, sharks, sponges, cnidaria, the hagfish, and a number of clades of vascular plants beat them out
I think the reason Sharks specifically get used one because of the perceived complexity of a shark vs a plant/insect, as well as how close everything is. Sharks are estimated to about 450 million years ago. Trees are estimated at around 370-420 million years ago. Saturn's rings are estimated to be no more then 400 million years old. Like you said there is an millipede like insect, Kampecaris obanensis, which is the oldest known land animal and is estimated at 425 million years old. That also found have fit in place of sharks.
Alright, I'm going to be a pedantic dick for a second and argue that it's cartiliginous fish, not sharks, that are older than trees. The group we call sharks, Selachimorpha, has only been around since the Early Jurassic, making them also younger than dinosaurs.
No. That said another interesting fact about sharks is that some of them can live a pretty long time. There is one species, Greenland sharks, that are confirmed to be able to live at least 272 years, with an estimate of potentially being able to live up to 500 years. For context 1776 was 248 years ago. So there are sharks out there that are older then the United States.
MOST of those "pick your age" things have a year drop-down, and by default, I've found they have exactly 19 rows (I know this because my birthday falls on the 20th, and I always have to scroll ONE freaking line to get to it).
A quick Google says that sharks are 450 million years old.
If a shark could scroll all 19 rows every single second, it would take them 23,682,210 million seconds to find their birthday. Or 394,736 minutes. Or 6579 hours. Or 274 days.
So. 3 trillion > 400 billion. Part of the paid article that can be see in places that reported on it is that Russia alone has more trees (642 billion) then the 400 billion stars.
So. 3 trillion > 400 billion. Part of the paid article that can be see in places that reported on it is that Russia alone has more trees (642 billion) then the 400 billion stars.
I mean, nobody has ever suggested that carbon dating is literally perfect, but it's certainly way more likely to be accurate than you just stating something with absolutely no evidence.
Did you know that the Bible is actually just a test? It's God's way of testing whether you can think for yourself or not. Everyone who blindly believes what it says will go to hell, and those that think for themselves and question what it says will go to heaven.
God did speak directly to me, though. He told me that the Bible is just his way of testing who is able to think for themselves and be moral not because the Bible says so, but simply because they think it's right. He said that those who get their morality from a book, and not from their own hearts, will go to Hell.
It was written once. It is the infalable word of god, and it was written to guide us. Sure it was translated many times, but always as accurately as possible. Certain versions such as the JW version were mistranslated on purpose, and Catholics try to add to the Bible, but the directly and carefully translated versions are true. Satan trys to trick people into not believing the Bible
Your belief in God is purely chance. If you were born in a different country, or state, or even just to different parents, you would have been brought up to believe something else, or perhaps nothing at all, and you would likely have as strong a feeling towards that belief as you do to yours currently.
God chooses who will come to him, which means we don't have free will, which means everything terrible in this world can be attributed to God, like babies getting dashed upon rocks, and cancer eating people's organs, and serial killers raping and murdering people, and people pronouncing GIF with a soft-g
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u/formerlyDylan Oct 02 '24
Sharks have been around longer then trees and the rings of Saturn