Gregory's ServerTIL that sharks (a group of fish) are an order of magnitude older than Polaris (literally a star)
Sharks: 419 - 359 million years
Polaris (α UMi Aa): 45 - 67 million years
I’ll need to sit down, stare at a wall for a bit, and process this.
 58 comments
  @esther When I was on the site that shall not be named I followed an amazingly cool lady She removed fish hooks from sharks mouths And the sharks let her & look for her She's very friendly & even answered my simple minded questions Losing contact with amazing people like that is another reason I think Emo Slunk is a twat @staringatclouds The fact she exists and has this relationship with sharks makes me feel a bit better about the world all the same!  @staringatclouds @esther incidentally, "emo slunk" - I just love it. I shall try and remember to use it myself, with your permission. @esther That’s not the age I’m seeing. “Over 500 million years” is what Wikipedia says currently. @blazemongr you're looking at one of the other two stars in that 3-star system.  @dequbed I knew about the rings. it's just that stars always feel like they should be older than anything else, even though that's absolutely not the case often  @esther But no! That's what was thought. However, this gets quite crazy based on some newer research. TL;DR: Polaris Aa only appears young because it has canibalized another star.   @esther Sharks are unusual and beautiful creatures who have never maimed or killed more humans than humans have maimed and killed other humans. As a child I did my best to save a wild group of young stranded hammerheads being mercilessly beaten by a group of young humans. I carried as many as I could to escape to deeper water, beautifully prehistoric creatures with skin as smooth as silk. I hope one of them haunts Trump's nightmares.  Thanks for the interesting and thought-provoking observation. The slight issue here is that we are not comparing like with like. This comparison is of an instance of a thing (Alpha Umi Aa) with a category of things (sharks). If I was to compare the category of sharks with the category of stars, I'd correctly observe that the category of stars are far older. Equally, an individual shark doesn't hold a handle to an individual star like Alpha Umi Aa. @esther Now THIS is a TIL I can sink my teeth into. No, really. It's one of the coolest TILs I've seen in a long time, thanks for sharing! @esther You got me wondering and I found out you can lower the comparison by almost another order of magnitude by swapping Polaris with Rigel (bright one that's lower right in Orion). Wikipedia says 7-9 million years for that star. There's a possible ancestor of humans, Sahelanthropus, wandering the savannas of Africa in that timeframe. @esther it's wild to think that the universe is 13.8 billion years old and life on earth has been around for at least 3.7 billion years. that's more than a quarter of the time the universe has existed for!! just on our silly lil planet  Somewhat related. There are sharks alive today that harrased Henry VIII's fleet. True Old repetitious DNA @esther I've got this feeling when I read that shark's age represents a non-trivial portion of the whole frickin universe. @esther @burritojustice I like this variation too: Sharks have been around for 3% of the universe’s entire timeline Why? Life on Earth is about 4 billion years old. And new stars appear every second in our galaxy. @RyekDarkener@mastodon.social did you seriously think I don't know that? Or did you just want to be a smartass? @RyekDarkener@mastodon.social then go talk to those. Or better yet, don't. Because this shit is obnoxious.    @esther@strangeobject.space I wasn't even ready for the fact that Polaris is a triple star system, and now you tell me this? @esther And when you’re finished with that, you can ponder that sharks are also older than trees!   @esther "When i was young, we didn't have this Polaris and we did perfectly fine without it"  who knew?? 😲 |
Sources:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shark
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polaris