Sharks Rule, Rule

Wow, sharks @439mya, Polaris @70mya. They're more than 6 times older! This is NUTS!

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What's even crazier is sharks are even older than trees!

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- Interestingly, Sharks became a thing around the same time that massive fungi structures that looked like trees existed.
  
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- 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.
  
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That's way back. What else was around in the oceans back then? Bony fish? Crabs? My octobuddies?

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- Queen Elizabeth
  
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And they're gonna go away because some wingnut convinced a bunch of people that their fins cause boners.

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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.

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- That's not even 0.1% of the total fish we kill every year. Granted, that's just sheer numbers, not weight
  
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- Sharks hunt smaller predatory fish, which hunt for the same fish as humans. By killing sharks the fishermen are actually increasing their competition.
  
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- And meanwhile there have been 108 attacks on humans in 2022
  
  https://www.floridamuseum.ufl.edu/shark-attacks/yearly-worldwide-summary/
  
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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".

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- 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
  
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Oh is THAT what that's about

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- 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
  
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I'm sexually attracted to shark fins, so they certainly cause boners for me.

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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.

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That can't be true. I distinctly remember the shark in Jaws: The Revenge roaring. So get your facts straight.

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- And it always plays this ominous music when approaching their prey.
  
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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.

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- 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:
  
  https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/new-technologies-reveal-strange-jaws-prehistoric-sharks-180977396
  
  You'll note the Goblin Shark still has hints of that design.
  
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- I made sure to say barely instead of not at all, but you're right, there was certainly some evolution happening
  
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Do any fish?

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- 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
  
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Wtf https://www.snopes.com/articles/465478/sharks-north-star/

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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.

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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

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I feel cheated that the north star is in fact 3 stars.

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- Me too. It’s a sick fact. Sharks are still older than trees tho…
  
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- Happens a lot. Sometimes a "star" is actually a whole galaxy.
  
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- 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!
  
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- 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.
  
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I want to know how three stars can form as a system at very different times. Shouldn't they have similar ages?

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- My understanding is that, on a cosmic scale, these timeframes are not tremendously different!
  
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Technically just one of the three stars (the big one). The other two are 500 million and 1.5 billion years old.

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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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- My grandfather, in the army in the 1950s, mentioned that there was an eyesight test by having cadets look at a star and ask them how many light points they saw.
  
  I'm not convinced it was Polaris and its partners, there might have been another star system used as the test. I learned about Polaris being a triple star system years later.
  
  If anyone knows what star systems would had been used as an eye test... I imagine it's something that could be within our eyes limits.
  
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Source? Stars in multiple star systems are usually the same age.

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- 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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- https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2021ASPC..529...72N/abstract is my source for the ages but if there's newer data please enlighten me!
  
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- The snopes article someone posted goes into that
  
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Sharks watching stars come and go: strange fireflies...

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I always thought they were gigantic balls of gas burning millions of miles away

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- Pumbaa, with you, everything's gas.
  
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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.

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and will continue to do so.

Humans: hold my beer.

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- 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.
  
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- Life will always be there. We just wouldn't be involved.
  
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Age 45 - 67 Myr. (Source: Wikipedia).

Holy shit, by a lot.

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It’s just a widdle baby star.

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Fuck that's a cool fact.

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I know right? What the fuck 🤯

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