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Comment by zaken | Hacker News Reader

Sharks are older than trees

And the north star, Polaris, is a fraction the age of sharks at only 50-70 Mya (it's a trinary star system but the other two stars are much dimmer and not visible to the eye)

I love this fact.

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.

I think there is a theory that we’re not seeing any aliens simply because life on Earth started so early.

Or there are many planets with life, with each harboring their own equivalent to our sharks.

(And none of those shark-equivalents have developed a space program.)

There is life, then intelligent life like humans. Plus you have physical constraints like the speed of light.

I would love a "chatty" universe like Mass Effect but the problem is we'd probably be fighting Reapers

Light is slower in water. I think that explains why we are still waiting

That would be unfortunate.

I’d love to see some space sharks!

We'd almost certainly find some way to kill them if we ever ran across any of them.

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.

> We'd almost certainly find some way to kill them if we ever ran across any of them

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.

I think this is clearer:

Since we're not seeing any aliens, life on Earth must have started very early.

It’s more inaccurate as it’s stating an assumption as fact

That's not that early, no? There was probably enough C, H, N, O, P, S, Na atoms for life to start 10B years ago. You probably couldnt rely on iron being everywhere though but that's not such a hard requirement.

It's fascinating to ponder, for sure.

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.

Yes I love it too, wish more people appreciated it

Another Fun Fact: the Appalachian mountains formed before sharks existed, the rings of Saturn existed, and before bones existed.

But they're (possibly) younger than the New River!

<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_River_(Kanawha_River_tribu...>

(Blew my mind when I first encountered this a few years back.)

I think you misstated your fun fact

...but younger than the mountains. There you go!

ICYMI: https://youtu.be/IUmnTfsY3hI?si=WuUcwv_LLYh8gX4u

Good call, abc123

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