I knew someone who utterly refused to believe that dinosaurs weren’t the first organisms in existence. He literally thought it was dinosaurs, then there was an asteroid impact and then basically humans arrived about 10 minutes later.
People have absolutely no understanding of the immense amount of time that has existed before we came along.
Mind he also gave me that whole if earth was 1 cm closer to the sun, we would all burn up malarkey, so maybe he’s just an idiot.
I wonder if they would ever understand this, or just think it’s a cool fact.
“If a tree is so basic, then why aren’t there trees growing in the middle of the ocean?” seems like the sort of argument that would impress Ray.
Bull kelp:
Sharks are older than the rings of Saturn.
Sharks are older than the current rings of Saturn, and I’ll bet that the e-ring (the one which is primarily made of ice spewed out of enceladus) has been around for significantly longer than we give it credit for.
Sharks are possibly older than the north star
According to claims on social media platforms such as Reddit and X
I fucking hate modern media.
I always thought that this was because Polaris wasn’t aligned with the Earth’s axis until fairly recently.
Its because Polaris is actually three stars in a trenchcoat, two of which are older than sharks with one of them being younger. Polaris Aa, the brightest star and what we call the North Star, is probably younger than sharks, while Polaris Ab is probably older than sharks. Polaris B is almost certainly significantly older than sharks.
Sharks have existed for so long that they have made almost TWO orbits around the milky way.
The species has existed for longer than Pleiades
The species has existed for longer than Pleiades
Now that blows my mind. I often think of astrological timescales to be so much longer than anything on earth.
Not to continue to blow your mind but their species is old enough to have witnessed the first light from the birth of the North star (if they weren’t busy being absolutely magnificent apex predators)
Who the fuck has a basic question like this and posts it on Twitter rather than just looking the answer up
Hey grok, get a load of this guy 👉
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Huh. Yeah I never knew. Never really thought about it but knew not nonetheless.
It’s such a shame that all of human knowledge isnt readily available to this person. Oh it is, on the very device he’s using to post this, how embarrassing
For anyone wondering (numbers in million years ago (mya))
- 538: cambrian explosion
- 419: sharks
- 385: tree ferns, horsetail trees & co. (also, Ginkgo)
- 245: conifers (lignin)
- 230: lignin decomposing
- 130: flowering plants (like, maple)
- 65: forests covering the globe
- 1.5 to recently: four glacial periods
Maybe it feels counter-intuitive to some that sharks were there before trees…
But I hope it is intuitive that there was water long before there was soil? Then it’s just a small step to realize life in water has had a much longer time to develop.
Mosses were likely already there though
Trees aren’t basic just because they don’t move.
Can blow some MFers mind when you tell them trees took Earth by surprise and were so new that they didn’t rot. Trees just fell over and stayed there forever, well … until they got turned into oil.
The first trees also caused climate change by absorbing a lot of CO2 from the atmosphere. And now the burning of those same trees is causing a second round.
☝️🤓 Trees turned to coal. Oil came from plankton and marine life.
