Sharks are so cool, man. They’ve just been chilling on the planet for 400 million years, swimming the oceans while epochs passed them by in their periphery. Their entire biology is pretty much unchanged. They’ve been sharks the whole time.
Evolution always finds new nooks and crannies of state space to explore.
Kind of. Mutation rate of our dna is "managed" by the dna/chromosomes/genes to reduce the rate in critical areas.
> the chips are stacked against them.
Wikipedia says: "This reproductive method enables the asexual desert grassland whiptail lizard to have a genetic diversity previously thought to have been unique to sexually reproductive species."
Doesn't look to bad?
I'm not sure which Wikipedia article that is or if there has been revision between when you checked, I didn't find that in the Wikipedia articles for Telidae or Parthenogenesis. The Parthenogenesis article notes that it's controversial whether this is a threat to their ability to adapt.
So I may have been wrong with that example and I thank you for correcting me. I stand by the statement that evolution can get stuck in local minima but I may have been wrong about the Telidae.
Also: life on earth is almost as old as the universe itself, within the same order of magnitude. 4.1 GYA (billion years ago) vs 13.8 GYA. We're old and intelligence is hard.
(And none of those shark-equivalents have developed a space program.)
I’d love to see some space sharks!
We're pretty good at accomplishing things like that.
One day, there's some space sharks swimming in a sea of liquid helium and doing deep dives to get to the smaller creatures that devour the seabed of diamonds.
The next day, we're figuring out how to use space shark squeezings in our fusion reactors.
Unless, of course, the space sharks figure out how to kill us first. They will probably try if that's useful to then.
It's the circle of life.
There is a credible argument that what the literature terms genocidal tendencies—where conflict isn’t resolved when it ends, but when the enemy is destroyed—is a precondition for conquering a world. So if we met space sharks, barring enlightenment, they’d probably seek to destroy us, too.
Since we're not seeing any aliens, life on Earth must have started very early.
The universe still has plenty of time to burn, especially red dwarfs. It's sad to think about starless skies, though.
The heme is pretty magical. Probably not a hard requirement, but it sure has been useful for us here.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_River_(Kanawha_River_tribu...>
(Blew my mind when I first encountered this a few years back.)
Good call, abc123