Greenland sharks have existed for hundreds of millions of years through their ancient lineage while Saturn’s iconic rings are believed to have formed far more recently, possibly only 10 to 100 million years ago.

That means sharks were already swimming in Earth’s oceans long before Saturn wore its most famous feature.

Article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenland_shark

  • aramis87@fedia.io
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    55
    ·
    2 days ago

    Sharks have existed long enough that they’ve circled the entire Milky Way galaxy.

    Twice.

  • wolframhydroxide@sh.itjust.works
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    3
    ·
    1 day ago

    I commented this when the last poster made this claim a month back: Sharks are older than most of the current, eaily-visible rings of Saturn. The E-ring is primary composed of material ejected from Enceladus, and there is no indication I have found which would suggest that the hydrothermal processes which cause the jets are anything new. Additionally, just because most of Saturn’s current rings were formed more-recently doesn’t mean there weren’t rings back then. The gas giants have hundreds of moons, and they certainly used to have more. I think it is an undeniable, generally - accepted fact that the gas giants have all had significant rings at some point in the past (and they all, in fact, do have rings, just not all as spectacular as Saturn’s current ones.

    • doenietzomoeilijk@discuss.tchncs.de
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      1
      ·
      1 day ago

      …which makes me wonder what the odds are of earth getting a ring once Kessler kicks off. But I suppose most of that junk is just going to burn up in the atmosphere and/or crash on somebody’s house.

  • starik@lemmy.zip
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    44
    ·
    2 days ago

    The rings are practically brand new. And in another 100 million years, they’ll be gone. We are lucky to be around to see them.

    • partofthevoice@lemmy.zip
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      4
      ·
      2 days ago

      Imagine the infinite number of things we completely missed out on, and the infinite more that we inevitably will also miss out on.

      • starik@lemmy.zip
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        8
        ·
        2 days ago

        The epic stories of history and prehistory that were never recorded and we will never know make me cry. Who lived the happiest life? Who endured the most pain? What was the most deserved comeuppance? Who got away with the most devious conspiracy? People have been around for hundreds of thousands and years, and these questions have answers, but we’ll never know them.

        • partofthevoice@lemmy.zip
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          2
          ·
          1 day ago

          There’s a cool relationship between event and interpretation, which seems to dissolve the idea that any of those actually have answers.

          If there were no life in the universe, what then exists? Is there still a meaningful distinction between a lake and a sky, when in fact the same molecules make up both the atmosphere and the lake? Without intelligent interpretation, doesn’t the difference of things become arbitrary because scale becomes arbitrary? Everything starts and ends with equilibrium — for example from the Singularity to Heat Death. What’s in between is just a noisy decomposition process.

          To me, it seems like the act of interpretation is vital for anything to be meaningful in the first place. If you play that to its end, it should also mean the interpreting agent plays a role (via its process of interpretation) in assigning meaning to the arbitrary. In effect, it takes what is arbitrary and makes it non-arbitrary. It creates the foundation of knowledge.

          So you could also argue, we didn’t actually miss anything. There was nothing of meaning occurring. Any meaning to past events would have to be assigned post-hoc, to an interpretation of past.

          Or you could argue, the significance of a human-event is nonexistent if it were never interpreted. I.e., interpretation would have given it significance, though would have probably been phenomenologically interpreted as recognizing significance.

          • starik@lemmy.zip
            link
            fedilink
            English
            arrow-up
            1
            ·
            1 day ago

            There were a lot of experiences that were experienced, but never recorded. If a tree falls in the woods, and 100 people witness it and die without speaking a word of it, does it make a sound? Yes!

            • partofthevoice@lemmy.zip
              link
              fedilink
              English
              arrow-up
              2
              ·
              1 day ago

              Yeah, actually. Take the person who lived the most suffering. Let’s call them person X (pX).

              It’s actually not fair to say nobody interpreted pX’s suffering, because pX did. However, I also notice that this isn’t solely dependent upon what the person “goes-through,” in a physical, social, or other external sense. This is true because we all suffer in different ways with varying degrees of tolerance or perception of the things which might cause us to suffer. For example, how would you compare the worst physical versus mental ways to suffer, loss of limb or loss of loved? It’s tough.

              So, what I imagine you have to end up with is, what matters is how events are internalized. That’s where you gauge suffering. Yet also true then, what you’re left with here is the subjective interpretation of events by pX. It’s just their interpretation.

              • starik@lemmy.zip
                link
                fedilink
                English
                arrow-up
                2
                ·
                1 day ago

                Yes! I want to know how bad the worst life was. Taking into account pain tolerance, perception of time, everything.

                • partofthevoice@lemmy.zip
                  link
                  fedilink
                  English
                  arrow-up
                  2
                  ·
                  1 day ago

                  Doing a little bit of thinking here…

                  Do you think it’s possible to suffer while believing that you’re not suffering? Perhaps, to be in agony while wholly believing that you’re in euphoria?

            • partofthevoice@lemmy.zip
              link
              fedilink
              English
              arrow-up
              1
              ·
              1 day ago

              Those 100 people did interpret the tree falling, though.

              Better might be: if a tree falls in the forest and only a protein was present (yes, a protein), did it make a sound? No — because sound doesn’t exist. Air ripples propagate and are interpreted as sound by ears, and there were no ears present to do the interpretation.

              Similar if there was a human present. Did the tree make a sound? No — because the didn’t do anything different based on whether the human was present or not. The tree didn’t all of a sudden make anything. New information was interpreted, dare I say even curated, by the interpretation itself.

    • Buddahriffic@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      3
      arrow-down
      1
      ·
      1 day ago

      Sharks showed up in the fossil record at about the same time the Appalachian mountains stopped their mountain building activity, 450 mya.

  • 卩卄卂丂乇@lemmy.8th.world
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    3
    ·
    1 day ago

    The Greenland Shark genome has roughly 6.5 billion base pairs, which is the largest genome of any shark sequenced.

    From Wikipedia’s page.

  • Godric@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    4
    arrow-down
    1
    ·
    2 days ago

    I love it when complex life finds a niche that just keeps on working. Crabs, Crocs, and Sharks keep catching Ws

  • Tollana1234567@lemmy.today
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    3
    arrow-down
    1
    ·
    2 days ago

    also “sharks” in the early part of the evolution are more closely related to chimaeras than to elasmobranchis(which are true sharks, rays, skates)

      • village604@adultswim.fan
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        2
        ·
        2 days ago

        Thanks for reminding me about the chimera I made in the mythical beast photoshop assignment for my desktop publishing class 20 years ago. Our teacher was annoyed because he liked mine better than the chimera he made (he was a great teacher).

        I think I still have my Photoshop 2.0 disc around somewhere.