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
Is a species being poached to extinction? If so, it’s probably because there’s some sort of fertility/virility “medicine” derived from it that Asian men will pay insane money for. -tiger -rhino -civet -pangolon -shark
I’m sexually attracted to shark fins, so they certainly cause boners for me.
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.
Happens a lot. Sometimes a “star” is actually a whole galaxy.
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!
deleted by creator
Shark facts aside, the fact that Polaris is a ternary system, rather than a single star has completely blown my mind.
deleted by creator
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.
deleted by creator
Amazing!
deleted by creator
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.
deleted by creator
deleted by creator
The snopes article someone posted goes into that
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. We would have to live long enough to be the last things to kill if that was the goal.
Life will always be there. We just wouldn’t be involved.
Age 45 - 67 Myr. (Source: Wikipedia).
Holy shit, by a lot.
It’s just a widdle baby star.
Fuck that’s a cool fact.
I know right? What the fuck 🤯