[HN Gopher] Matching dinosaur footprints found on opposite sides...
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Matching dinosaur footprints found on opposite sides of the
Atlantic Ocean
Author : geox
Score : 106 points
Date : 2024-08-26 00:02 UTC (22 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (phys.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (phys.org)
| aaroninsf wrote:
| Isn't one of the plots for some Jurassic Park sequel that
| velociraptors like, swam to other islands?
| Windchaser wrote:
| Hitched a ride on the boats, as I recall
| nnf wrote:
| Thinking about just how long the earth has been around fascinates
| me. I read (or listened to, rather) _The Ends of the World_ by
| Peter Brannen, which was captivating. The audiobook is well-
| narrated too. We humans tend to think that the planet just "is"
| the way it is, but this is just how it exists in this moment in
| which we find ourselves observing it. The earth has worn many
| faces over the ages.
| ck2 wrote:
| What I want to see is the Theia collision rendered in realistic
| 3D
|
| (and if there was enough gas around for sound to carry, that
| too!)
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theia_(planet)
|
| I guess this is close but not like the Hollywood blockbuster it
| should be
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kRlhlCWplqk
|
| https://www.nasa.gov/solar-system/collision-may-have-formed-...
| lnxg33k1 wrote:
| I also am fascinated by it, have a look at this simulator,
| which show the face of earth at some given points
| https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/travel-through...
| Electricniko wrote:
| There are also some cool animations out there that show the
| drifting, smashing, and more drifting of the plates. I like
| ones like these that provide some modern landmarks, or
| showing it in reverse, so you can track individual places
| through it all:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f6bWbDl2ItM
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q-ng6YpxHxU
| shagie wrote:
| How about... https://dinosaurpictures.org/ancient-earth/ (
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35856820 405 points by
| ohjeez on May 8, 2023 | 73 comments :: original with comments
| by author - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17286770 )
| nine_k wrote:
| Earth has been around for so long that it's exhausted most of
| the Sun's life-supporting resource. We have barely a billion
| years to figure out where to go next before Sun overheats earth
| beyond any habitability; more realistically, just a few hundred
| million years. No time to waste.
| lm28469 wrote:
| 200 years of industrial revolution and we're well on the way
| out don't worry about what's coming in a billion years
| apetersson wrote:
| Because we're juuust about to become an interstellar
| species, right? Right?
| c-smile wrote:
| We MUST, having life on just one planet waiting for the
| next mass extinction event here is too optimistic.
| AlbertCory wrote:
| Why must we? There are other intelligent life forms in
| the Universe, undoubtedly. What makes us so special?
| exe34 wrote:
| We're the only ones we've found so far.
|
| personally I'd say don't bother, but I'm a nihilist.
| AlbertCory wrote:
| "don't bother" doing what? Looking for them?
|
| The chance of our ever encountering one in person is
| close to zero. We might find evidence that they're there,
| but that's about it.
| vsuperpower2021 wrote:
| They are also 20 feet tall and wear propeller hats, no
| doubt.
| pandemic_region wrote:
| Yes, right after we crack this problem of self driving
| vehicles. Won't be long hold tight.
| FredPret wrote:
| "On our way out"!? If you believe this, why? Who told you
| this? Do you actually think 8 billion people are about to
| drop dead?
|
| On the other hand, if you're deliberately spreading
| hyperbole to get people to act, please stop - it's
| backfiring.
| JohnMakin wrote:
| Do you actually think they literally meant 8 billion
| people are going to drop dead? because the meaning was
| fairly obvious as written - after 200 years of industrial
| revolution we are left in a situation where the planet we
| live on may not be inhabitable in a relatively short
| period of time
| FredPret wrote:
| Again, that's a crazy thing to conclude from even the
| most pessimistic global warming predictions.
| JohnMakin wrote:
| > Again, that's a crazy thing to conclude from even the
| most pessimistic global warming predictions.
|
| Not really considering the "most pessimistic" predictions
| have the Atlantic current completely shutting down within
| the next 100 years (wipes out food supply), tons of
| countries like bangladesh becoming actually inhospitable
| from heat/humidity index (billion+ people dead), sea
| levels rising several meters (massive percentage of
| humanity lives near a coast), etc. - could go on for a
| while. Frankly, I don't think you really understand what
| you are talking about and suspect you're going to turn
| this into a pedantic "well that won't _completely
| annhilate all human life_ so you are wrong " kind of back
| and forth that I don't feel like engaging in so I'll just
| wish you a good day and move on.
| FredPret wrote:
| You realize we get a say in all this right?
|
| Humanity is immensely capable of large-scale adaptation.
|
| 10k years ago we were getting chased around by sabre-
| toothed tigers.
|
| 1k years ago we were still dying of hunger and lack of
| hygiene.
|
| 100 years ago the first biplanes took to the sky.
|
| Now look where we are. Human progress is exponential.
| There's every reason to believe that we'll be capable of
| dealing with our problems as they come. Malthus was wrong
| 200 years ago, and you are wrong now.
|
| We have clean energy options in solar, nuclear, and
| battery storage. These are getting better, cheaper, and
| safer every day. We've got people working on geo-
| engineering solutions. We've got remote work. We're
| automating and localizing manufacturing.
|
| Defeatism is not the way.
| Qem wrote:
| Beware the Asymptotic Burnout hypothesis proposed to
| explain the Fermi Paradox: https://royalsocietypublishing
| .org/doi/10.1098/rsif.2022.002...
| 00N8 wrote:
| Tragic as it would be, that worst case global warming
| scenario is still more of a "set human population levels
| & quality of life back 200 years" situation, rather than
| a literal extinction event though. I see a lot of
| hyperbole & doomerism around these topics online & I
| think pushback is fair.
|
| We should be doing more to prevent the worse global
| warming outcomes. The stakes are billions dying or having
| miserable lives, which should be motivating enough. I
| don't think it helps to spin a dark fantasy about it
| being too late & humans actually going extinct. In the
| long run, an 8x reduction in human population & a few
| centuries of bad weather isn't really even a close call,
| let alone a legitimate extinction risk.
| goatlover wrote:
| What does an "uninhabitable" Earth mean? Do you mean less
| habitable than the Sahara or Antartica, or the Himalayas?
| Because some people do inhabit those places, and more
| could if they needed to. There's no scientific evidence
| whatsoever that all of Earth will become uninhabitable
| for humans. That's just doomerism.
| cyberax wrote:
| > may not be inhabitable in a relatively short period of
| time
|
| This is pretty much nonsense. Worst climate change
| predictions do not make the planet "uninhabitable", only
| some parts of it.
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| The Roman Empire took 250 years to collapse, yet in
| hindsight we still consider it to have just stopped at
| one point. Likewise, we look at mass extinction events in
| the geologic histories as if they were one off blips, but
| e.g. this Hangenberg Event I just googled spanned 100K to
| several hundred thousand years:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hangenberg_event
|
| But we're living a mass extinction event if you consider
| biodiversity and populations in non-human species has
| plummeted; bug populations have halved in a decade, with
| that bird populations have taken a hit, ten billion crabs
| starved because of a heat wave
| (https://www.fisheries.noaa.gov/feature-story/research-
| confir...), etc.
|
| No, 8 billion people won't drop dead, and life will
| continue in many ways, but in our lifetimes we'll see
| worsening food scarcity because of climate change
| (already happening), consequent famines, mass migrations,
| wars, etc.
|
| But for a lot of people it mainly means food gets more
| expensive and the relative wealth of food choice we've
| had will be reduced, and houses will be built differently
| depending on the new climate trends.
|
| That or the gulf stream will stop and the northern
| hemisphere gets covered in a mile of ice again. But that
| too won't happen overnight.
| goatlover wrote:
| So humans aren't on their way out, it's not even clear
| global human civilization will collapse as opposed to
| adapting and mitigating before then.
| roamerz wrote:
| >>Do you actually think 8 billion people are about to
| drop dead?
|
| In no more than 100 years or so, yes.
| ada1981 wrote:
| NOTHING CAN STOP WHATS COMING. NOTHING.
| cortesoft wrote:
| So only about 100 times the length of time Humans have
| existed as a species. I feel like we are on a pretty good
| pace.
| oceanplexian wrote:
| We are now but if humans go back to the stone age because
| of a world war or something, we may not have a second
| chance. The people after us will have none of the same
| advantages since we extracted all the easily accessible
| fossil fuels that made the industrial revolution possible.
| graemep wrote:
| And a few more billion to figure out where to go next after
| the heat death of the universe.
|
| I think we have more urgent problems.
|
| I very much doubt humanity will be around in a few million
| years time. We will have died out, or evolved significantly,
| or altered ourselves. In a billion years there will be
| nothing even remotely resembling us.
| sandworm101 wrote:
| It isn't "we" as in humanity. It is "we" as in all life on
| earth. The bears and the whales will have to do something
| too, they just don't know it yet.
| amelius wrote:
| They will have evolved strong cognitive skills by then.
| oceanplexian wrote:
| A billion actually seems weirdly tangible.
|
| I can imagine a billion dollars or a billion bits. Working
| with computers we deal with units of a billion pretty
| often. I also know how long a year is and as I get older
| they feel pretty short. Obviously we won't personally be
| around to see it but it does feel like the clock is
| ticking.
| Nevermark wrote:
| Exactly.
|
| Barring a major disaster, by 2100 we will have a vibrant
| Earth + off-Earth resource ecosystem via machines/AI.
|
| And mastered the ability to adapt food production and our
| bodies to off earth environments.
|
| Compounding acceleration by science, tech & econ has
| anlready initiated the trend toward fully-designed, post-
| biology, post-evolution life.
|
| Time is now hyper-deflationary. Every succeeding year is
| worth more than the preceding one.
|
| A multi-system economy is only thousands of years away. A
| galactic civilization, a few hundreds of thousands.
|
| The earth & sun won't look much different by the time we
| are sending probes, perhaps with warp drives, to other
| galaxies.
| icedchai wrote:
| 2100 seems highly optimistic. We haven't landed a person
| on the moon in over 50 years. Space travel is really,
| really hard, and you're talking about sending probes
| light years away...
| phs318u wrote:
| Love the optimism but unless we master ourselves first,
| WE will be the major disaster.
|
| Right now, all we seem to be doing is putting ever more
| powerful tools in the hands of the same, barely evolved
| ape minds. Not a recipe for long term success AFAICT.
| autokad wrote:
| also whats interesting is that 66 million years ago, the
| continents were mostly where they are now. 120 million years
| ago Africa was touching Brazil
| ggm wrote:
| ie the rate of movement is not a constant, speed of
| continental drift varies over time?
| maxerickson wrote:
| 120 years ago, huge swaths of the US had been recently clear
| cut and didn't have a lot of forests on them.
|
| It doesn't even take ages for things to change.
|
| It's unfortunate that the public idea of conservation has
| become so associated with stasis.
| goatlover wrote:
| The idea of preserving pristine environments as they were
| needs to go. There are none, and environments are always
| changing.
| rexpop wrote:
| Bit of a straw man. The ecologists I know of are interested
| in cultivating biodiversity and preserving habitats from
| the corrosive influence of development, pollution, and
| climate change. "Pristine" isn't a term I've heard used
| much in this context. The language of "virgin" land belongs
| to the lexicon of settler colonialism, not
| environmentalism.
| throwawayk7h wrote:
| Is this the same specimen?
| layer8 wrote:
| No.
| patrickmay wrote:
| I am sitting on my hands to resist the temptation to send this to
| my creationist aunt and uncle (who are otherwise great people).
| MisterTea wrote:
| Simple rebuttle: the devil put those foot prints there to test
| their faith.
| andrewflnr wrote:
| I've never heard this line from a real creationist, only ever
| as a strawman. Anyway, as far as I recall they don't
| (officially) have any problems with fossils like this.
| They'll just say the split happened during the Flood, like
| everything else.
| Windchaser wrote:
| The amount of energy it takes to split two continents and
| send them thousands of miles away from each other would be
| enough to boil off the oceans. Just think of the incredible
| amount of rock that has to be melted and resolidified (all
| of the rock in the rock floor between the two continents,
| or that was previously elsewhere). And resolidifying means
| releasing heat.
|
| Yeah, this simply can't happen in just hundreds of years.
| 0cf8612b2e1e wrote:
| If the initial premise is that an all powerful being
| created, well, everything. I am not sure that arguing the
| specifics of how manipulating continents is physically
| demanding is going to sway hearts and minds.
| andrewflnr wrote:
| Creation scientists actually do go pretty far, though, in
| trying to make things as physically plausible as they
| can. I think they're aiming for a theory where God makes
| specific events happen, like creation itself, or
| unleashing water in the ground and air to generate the
| Flood, but aside from that physics pretty much runs as
| designed. And to their credit, this would be sort of a
| local minimum in divine interference required for the
| theory... if the rest of the physics worked.
|
| Ed: though I suppose that implies less than it ideally
| would about the attitudes of random believers on the
| street, who might well be a lot less principled about
| where they let divine interference into their model...
| andrewflnr wrote:
| Yes, that's a much more relevant counter-argument. I did
| add the qualifier "officially". :)
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| Or as Pratchett put it, put there as a prank.
| insickness wrote:
| I subscribe to Bertrand Russell's hypothesis that the earth
| was created five minutes ago. Events that you remember do not
| necessarily have to have happened; memories were put in our
| minds. Impossible to prove wrong.
| andrewclunn wrote:
| Dang those dinosaurs were really good jumpers back when they
| lived 6,000 years ago...
| Fauntleroy wrote:
| It's absolutely impossible to reason with people like that, and
| I have to imagine you're already well aware. Evidence means
| nothing when "belief" can replace it.
| patrickmay wrote:
| Exactly. It's on the Topics Not To Discuss list at family
| gatherings.
| readthenotes1 wrote:
| I was having a discussion about the creation story in the
| Bible with my aunt one time and my dad walked in and said
| what are y'all talking about? Whether the creation story is
| literal.
|
| He said, and it amuses me to this day, no one takes the
| creation story literally!
|
| So there he was, in a strong relationship with a sister who
| he had known his entire life and didn't know that she took
| the creation story literally whereas he took it more
| poetically. And they grew up in the same household.
| ijidak wrote:
| Or, you could send them this:
| https://www.jw.org/en/library/magazines/g201401/creation/
| Loughla wrote:
| The problem is the greasy headline where it says matching.
|
| While it makes for good script on headlines, it makes terrible
| arguments for creationists.
|
| They use that vaguely misleading headline as a reason to
| discredit the entire premise of the article.
|
| Source: my creationist family members who did that.
| ada1981 wrote:
| Send them Elok Musk talking about Nick Bostrum.
|
| If you believe in Simulation Theory, you are a creationist!
| tgv wrote:
| Is it worth it to be right?
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| Why? Did they ask you to send them pictures of dinosaur
| footprints or something?
|
| Leave them be, you're not going to convince them of anything
| (if they are set in their beliefs) any more than they will
| convince you, no matter how much you'll claim "well I believe
| them if they show me proof". You wouldn't, as they can just
| point all around you for proof but you're not accepting it, and
| neither would they if shown proof of dinosaurs on different
| continents from millions of years ago.
|
| Their beliefs don't affect you, or, only as much as you let
| them. It really doesn't matter that you're right. What do you
| think you look like if you send them "proof" without them
| asking for it?
| tiahura wrote:
| A little loose with "matching."
| reaperducer wrote:
| ==, not ===.
| runjake wrote:
| As far as I can tell, matching == the same species of dinosaurs,
| not the same exact dinosaur.
| uneekname wrote:
| I was so excited for a sec thinking that the matched the prints
| somehow to one individual dinosaur! It's not exactly news that
| the fossil record matches on either side of the Atlantic,
| though still cool
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| It was a Reallybigasaurus. ;)
|
| It's always interesting to watch programs about paleontology and
| cosmology, and see them tossing around "millions" and "billions,"
| like "minutes" and "seconds."
|
| My mother[0] was a geologist, and our family vacations were often
| extremely educational. Every time we'd go through a roadcut on
| the highway, she would point out the layers, and tell me about
| the ages and whatnot.
|
| Today's XKCD sort of speaks to this[1].
|
| [0] https://cmarshall.com/miscellaneous/SheilaMarshall.htm
|
| [1] https://xkcd.com/2976/
| wlesieutre wrote:
| For the rest of us, Roadside Geology books: https://mountain-
| press.com/collections/roadside-geology
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| Those are very cool!
|
| I would have loved to have them. My mother probably would
| have approved.
| reaperducer wrote:
| _Every time we 'd go through a roadcut on the highway, she
| would point out the layers, and tell me about the ages and
| whatnot._
|
| One of the colleges I went to was in a mountainous area, and my
| geology class had weekly trips on Fridays to random road cuts
| around the region. We'd all pile out of the vans, and have to
| dig through the rocks and debris and write short reports about
| what we'd found, and present them the following Monday.
|
| Great class. Except if it rained on a Friday. That sucked.
| brailsafe wrote:
| The story's potentially neat and interesting, but for how many
| times it's been republished in mearly identical fashion across
| many mainstream outlets, there's doesn't seem to be a reference
| to a DOI or first-party source? I'm fine with having "matching"
| footprints have a different level of standard for geological time
| contexts, but give me something to read pls.
| drjasonharrison wrote:
| original paper with source:
| https://smu.app.box.com/s/e2ghm8ycjb1zf6hu9pooypdl4sosylbn
|
| I agree that online "click bait" science websites parrot the
| same content...google found the original paper though.
| lifeisstillgood wrote:
| Of course the footprints look the same, the dinosaurs all used
| the same replicators to make their space boots before jet-packing
| over the proto-atlantic
| goatlover wrote:
| Were the transporters malfunctioning that day?
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