Racing Turtles

I ended up on the Wikipedia page for "oldest dated rocks" and it's got me feeling all sorts of fucked up about the sheer size of geologic timescales.

Rocks from the Hadean eon — the time when Earth was first forming — are extremely rare because the majority of them have been eroded or melted, or perhaps deep in the Earth, but there are some examples:

The oldest estimated Earth rock is a zircon sample with an age of 4.404 ±0.008 billion years. A few things stand out about that. First, the age of the Earth is estimated to be about 4.54 ± 0.05 billion years old. That's less than 100 million years between Earth's genesis and the creation of that zircon sample. Second, the margin of error on the age of the zircon is 8 million years. That zircon is so old that that's the most precise guess at its age.

The Earth has changed so much, geologically speaking, that a contender for the oldest known rock made on Earth was actually found on the Moon. Lunar Sample 14321, aka Big Bertha, was collected during the Apollo 14 mission in 1971. In 2019 it was estimated at over 4 billion years old. This is a meteorite from Earth, back when our planet was still forming and was being impacted by massive asteroids. There may even be others older than Big Bertha on the Moon, possibly making it the best place to learn about the Hadean eon.

But you know what has me really fucked up? The oldest known rock on Earth isn't actually from Earth. The Murchison meteorite fell in Australia in 1969. Parts of it are estimated to be about 7 billion years old. Again, the age of the Earth is roughly 4.54 billion years old, meaning that this meteorite is 2.5 billion years older than Earth — older than the Solar System and the Sun, even. Our Solar System was just a large cloud of space dust when this meteorite was formed. It's that old.

These rocks were formed on timescales so far beyond our comprehension that I feel insane just thinking about them.

Something that didn't hit me until the end of the post-that tiny 100 million year gap between the oldest earth rocks and the Earth's formation is longer than the time since the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs.

Deep time is quite something, isn't it?

*slaps a dragon* this baby can fit so much symboli– my arm has been eaten.

The Gimli Glider airplane accident is one of those things that seems stranger than fiction. Like, due to a series of communication and conversion errors, a Boeing 767 ends up taking off with a quarter of the fuel it should and loses both engines while cruising at 41,000 feet over rural Canada, which seems like a recipe for disaster because, while the plane can glide without fuel, there's not enough speed to make it to the nearest airport. HOWEVER, the first officer used to serve in the Royal Canadian Air Force and remembers there's a disused air base within their distance range. Yay! BUT they're not descending fast enough and will overshoot the airport and have no way to change the plane's speed. Oh no! HOWEVER, the captain flies unpowered gliding planes in his spare time and knows a strategy to slow it down by basically turning the plane nearly sideways so that the drag on the fuselage slows it down. If he's careful enough, he'll be able to land the plane at the old air force base. Yay! BUT it turns out that one of the runways is now used for drag racing and it's race day with people on the runway. Yikes! THANKFULLY everyone got out of the way and the plane stopped without hitting anyone and with only minor injuries to any passengers. Utterly absurd.

Honestly the queue and schedule post options on Tumblr are extremely underrated. No other major social networking site has the ability to do that with the same ease as Tumblr does, and we've had them for like a decade now. They're fantastic features and Tumblr doesn't get enough credit for having them.

I'm actually willing to assert that Tumblr actually has some of the best site functionality:

- queue/schedule system

- tagging that doesn't interfere with the actual content of posts

- the ask/inbox system

- ability to make likes/following lists private

- ability to reblog posts multiple times

- the "Keep Reading" feature

- ability to easily post different media. AFAIK Tumblr is the only social media site that lets you post audio without it being a video.

- dash is always in reverse chronological order

the ability to almost entirely customize your home page is pretty neat, too

I could go on about this forever but I firmly believe that Tumblr is a remnant from a time before companies figured out how to efficiently monetize social media, and as such it's designed with users instead of advertisers in mind.

That's both why it has continued to have active avid users in spite of a lot of technical /policy issues, and why it hasn't been massively profitable.

I treasure this garbage site.

There's an article on my computer I had to read for class called "The Caucasianization of Jesus Christ" but my brain just read it as "The Carcinisation of Jesus Christ" and so like.....crab jesus

oops

Just had a terrifying cryptid idea

A moose crossed with a kangaroo

I don’t even know how this would work but the idea of a creature with the energy of both a moose AND a kangaroo terrifies me to my core

Exactly!

angry centaur

See, I thought about that, but part of the terror of a kangaroo is the hopping part. I don’t know how a centaur would effectively communicate that terror.

@peachdoxie i had to give it a try lol

Dkfjzkofjzjckslfjhsb this is beautiful and terrifying to picture leaping through the woods/outback after me in the dark of a moonless night.

One question though: what do you think the scale on this to a human would be?

something like this for me. similar to a horse. but their hops would be….something

KANGAROOSE

It should be bigger considering the size of moose

You’re right.

@gallusrostromegalus If I have to imagine this terror, so do you.

Dear Goddes above, the steaks on those hoppers would be curative of all wounds.

Of course Kangarooses are also well known for their mastery of Boxing, giving them further Monk-like bonuses to unarmed combat uvu