I actually fact checked this and it’s true.
Wow, sharks @439mya, Polaris @70mya. They’re more than 6 times older! This is NUTS!
What’s even crazier is sharks are even older than trees!
Interestingly, Sharks became a thing around the same time that massive fungi structures that looked like trees existed.
So there could be planets where mushroom forests are dominant like one might see in the science fiction televisual dramas.
worship the 🍄, for Toad has spoken.
Honestly, I disagree. It is much more surprising to me that lifeforms I recognize are older than stars. They’re different timescales in my mind that I never even considered comparing.
That’s way back. What else was around in the oceans back then? Bony fish? Crabs? My octobuddies?
Queen Elizabeth
And they’re gonna go away because some wingnut convinced a bunch of people that their fins cause boners.
That and because they’re considered a pest by fishing boats. Humans kill 100 Million Sharks a year, and we sure as heck aren’t eating that many fins. If we did there would be a massive mercury epidemic causing infant deformity, dementia, organ failure, and loss of fertility.
That’s not even 0.1% of the total fish we kill every year. Granted, that’s just sheer numbers, not weight
Weird flex but okay
My point being we sure as heck could be eating that many fins
That would be a huge mistake, sharks are filled with Mercury.
Delicious mercury.
Sharks hunt smaller predatory fish, which hunt for the same fish as humans. By killing sharks the fishermen are actually increasing their competition.
Huh? what are these smaller predatory fish that we don’t eat?
smaller sharks for instance.
And meanwhile there have been 108 attacks on humans in 2022
https://www.floridamuseum.ufl.edu/shark-attacks/yearly-worldwide-summary/
A family member once had to resort to traditional chinese medicine so solve an issue - and it acctually worked, I will admit upfront - but I kept hearing how shark cartilage capsules was the best to reinforce joints and one day I just snapped and replied along the lines of “by that same logic, to obtain insulin we should be grinding pig pancreas into pills for insulin”.
we used to use cow pancreas to get insulin actually. fortunately bioreactors exist and some clever people figured out how to gmo bacteria to make insulin
Oh is THAT what that’s about
I’m sexually attracted to shark fins, so they certainly cause boners for me.
And then you add the fact that sharks have barely evolved because they’ve been the perfect silent killer since the dawn of time.
Another fun fact:
Sharks don’t make sound. They don’t have any organ for the purpose of making sound. That is creepy as all hell.That can’t be true. I distinctly remember the shark in Jaws: The Revenge roaring. So get your facts straight.
And it always plays this ominous music when approaching their prey.
Sharks played the cello one billion years before the Big Bang occurred.
Just to get in the zone when hunting
Just because they didn’t change their appearance doesnt mean they did not evolve. It is somewhat misleading to say that, but conveys a point I guess.
More relevantly, the fossil records for sharks are mostly their teeth and jaws, because all their other bones are cartilage and rarely fossilize.
“Sharks haven’t significantly evolved in appearance in 350 million years” is therefore based on reconstructions made under the assumption that the old sharks mostly looked like current sharks, which may or may not be true.
Though we can get a surprising amount of information that way, for example one change is that their jaws used be more at the end of their snout instead of more underslung like today, like so:
You’ll note the Goblin Shark still has hints of that design.
I made sure to say barely instead of not at all, but you’re right, there was certainly some evolution happening
Yeah, thankfully Megalodon isn’t cruising around anymore. Though that might have delayed European expansion until they had metal clad vessels…
That sounds like a fun story, like a Pride and Prejudice and Zombies but instead it’s Master and Commander and Megalodon.
Can we even know for sure that Carcharocles Megalodon is in fact excinct?
You can’t prove the non existence, but you can be very sure about some things. Megalodon lived near the surface, because it liked warm water(AFAIK), so it’s likely that if it wouldn’t be extinct there’s a high chance that we would notice it, since Megalodon was kinda big.
Yeah okay, seems plausible then. It’s more fun to believe otherwise though, not gonna lie. After all, there’s still so much we don’t know about our oceans.
I just saw one the other day at the 7-11
Do any fish?
Yes, actually. Example: Triglidae
They are bottom-dwelling fish, living down to 200 m (660 ft), although they can be found in much shallower water. Most species are around 30 to 40 cm (12 to 16 in) in length. They have an unusually solid skull, and many species also possess armored plates on their bodies. Another distinctive feature is the presence of a “drumming muscle” that makes sounds by beating against the swim bladder
Wow, this is one of the most complicated Snopes analyses I’ve seen. But it seems like the statement is accurate with caveats. If the brightest component of Polaris is probably 50 million years old what was there before wasn’t really Polaris. And then it doesn’t make a difference whether sharks have been around for 450 million or 195 million years.
It is partly true. Polaris is in fact a triple star system. The youngest of the three stars (Polaris Aa) is indeed younger than sharks at between 45 and 67My old. It is in tight orbit with Polaris Ab which is 500My old, and Polaris B which is 1.5By old and a little bit farther away. Here’s a pic from Hubble:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Polaris_alpha_ursae_minoris.jpg
I feel cheated that the north star is in fact 3 stars.
Me too. It’s a sick fact. Sharks are still older than trees tho…
This cannot be true.
Oh. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/respect-sharks-are-older-than-trees-3818/
This should not be true.
I think it’s also worth mentioning that Polaris Aa, the youngest star in the triplet, is also the brightest by 3 orders of magnitude. Without Polaris Aa, we wouldn’t actually consider it as the North Star at all…so I think you are safe to continue using this as a fact.
Go blow some people’s minds, everyone!
Fun fact: the morning Star (first star we see in the morning) is in fact also the evening star (first Star we see in the evening). It’s also not a star; it’s just Venus.
ok lucifer
what a rollercoaster.
I want to know how three stars can form as a system at very different times. Shouldn’t they have similar ages?
My understanding is that, on a cosmic scale, these timeframes are not tremendously different!
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Shark facts aside, the fact that Polaris is a ternary system, rather than a single star has completely blown my mind.
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Unlikely Polaris. The luminosity difference between Polaris Aa and the other two is 3 orders of magnitude. Mizar and Alcor (the doublet second from the end of the Big Dipper) has been used for centuries as a vision test. If you can see the doublet, it’s equivalent to 20/20 (or 6/6) on an eye chart.
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Amazing!
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Source? Stars in multiple star systems are usually the same age.
I found a source saying he’s mistaken. If you scroll way down, it says all three stars are 70 million years old.
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Sharks watching stars come and go: strange fireflies…
I always thought they were gigantic balls of gas burning millions of miles away
Pumbaa, with you, everything’s gas.
People forget that life on earth has been around for an extremely long time. We believe that single cellular life first appeared around 3.5 billion years ago. We also believe that the universe is around 13.8 billion years old. That means life has been around and evolving for around 25% of the time the universe has existed. Life operates on a scale far beyond our comprehension.
Another fun fact about life. We think that multicellular life only appeared around 600 million to 1.2 billion years ago. So life was probably single cellular for billions of years. The complexity of life has rapidly increased since then and will continue to do so.
Edit: new research suggests that complex multicellular life may have appeared around 2.4 billion years ago.
and will continue to do so.
Humans: hold my beer.
Even if humans manage to kill off most life on Earth it will continue to exist, propagate, and become more complex. Again we’re talking about billions of years. There have been huge shifts in climate and mass extinctions many times before and yet here we are.
True, it would be difficult to completely turn Earth into a lifeless rock, but I think humans are up to the task.
There are plenty of things we can’t kill and, in fact, live on things we might use to kill them. Extremophiles that live in environments nothing else can. Bacteria that live off gamma radiation. We would have to dedicate ourselves to ridding all life on purpose to kill everything.
Eh I doubt it. Every single nuke ever built combined still doesn’t come close to the power of the Chicxulub asteroid (the one that killed the dinosaurs) and even that impact didn’t come close to eliminating all life on Earth. Unless someone accidentally compresses a mountain into an artifical black hole or something there probably is no way to wipe out all life on Earth.
Mars was once habitable but lost it’s magnetic field, wiping it’s atmosphere. Venus was once habitable but taken over by a runaway greenhouse effect.
I’m not saying they ever had life or that we’re going to suffer the same fate, but it’s definitely possible to wipe a planet clean.
Demagnetization 2024, We Can Get There™
Conservatoves would unironically do this to own the libs.
75% estimated extinction rate is quite close to me. :)
75% of all species, not all life. Larger species and photosynthesizers were more heavily affected, while smaller species, scavengers, and deep sea life were less affected.
And I’m not a biologist, but I’m pretty sure even 75% of all life, not species, still wouldn’t be close to completely ending life on Earth, cause in the end as long as some microbes survived around a hydrothermal vent somewhere total extinction would be avoided.
I still think that “lifeless rock” does not specify how lifeless - theoretically extinct or just lifeless enough to make human life either extinct or just miserable. I took it as the latter, and in that case even lesser cases than 75% of all species would suffice.
The first case, the theoretical and non-human focused pov is quite another thing. Like you said, there’s so many opportunities and adaptations for life to seap through the combs of doom :)
Yeah I think most people don’t know or comprehend that there have already been like 5 mass extinctions in our planets lifespan. It’s going to take something like getting hit by 4 gamma ray bursts at the same time to completely wipe life off of planet earth.
true, we’re just gonna be like a soft reset button, like a windows reinstall without formatting, where it just shoves everything into windows.old
Life will always be there. We just wouldn’t be involved.
Age 45 - 67 Myr. (Source: Wikipedia).
Holy shit, by a lot.
Fuck that’s a cool fact.
I know right? What the fuck 🤯
It’s just a widdle baby star.
