this post was submitted on 16 Jan 2024
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If we follow the logic of the Loki series, they can do whatever. History might change up until the asteroid strikes but after that all dinosaurs are wiped out anyways and history will go on the same as it did before.
Dinosaurs didn't all get wiped out though! Birbs are theropod dinosaurs, and the only known extant dinosaurs
Remember: you cannot ride birbs.
I bet I could ride a cassowary or emu.
Moa mount please
Can we ride ostriches?
Yeah but you have to risk romance.
… hwat
Ostriches are furry fuckers, sort of
Huh, interesting. Seems like something that wouldn't happen just with ostriches
Now that is a proper war bird. How fucking majestic would it be to ride into battle on a birbosaur like a moa‽
Last ones that were big enough for that went extinct pretty recently in 1800th afaik
what about the giant saddle-shaped fossil
In order to be fossilized something has to be in specific conditions. It probably just gets destroyed
that is true, but its still possble for it to fossilize
Possible and very unlikely
I mean, in terms of preserving the timeline and not leaving the tiny chance of fossilised saddles. They brought it with them, why not just take it back too so it's not even there.
I feel like it's a lot more likely to be preserved than thin spongy dinoflesh. It's already somewhat preserved, actually, so when the layer of molten debris comes in from the direction of central America it's just going to get covered and leave a permanent imprint.
I don't have any experience burning leather but wouldn't "molten debris" be hot enough to completely destroy it?
Edit: Don't thing's like dinosaur skin only get preserved if they fell in tar pits or were encased in amber?
The main factor for preservation is a lack of biological activity to break down the creature's remains. If it's incased in anything hot that cools quickly, has any antibacterial qualities, or even just the right amount of soil alkalinity then it can be preserved. For hides, though, it's normally more of an imprint left behind than any recoverable bodymass.
In fact, some fossils found in swamps have been almost perfectly preserved due to the Saponification of the oils and lipids in the carcass.
In general, being covered by a wave of hot dirt like in my previous example would seal them up like a can of soup. All of the liquids and chunks would keep moving around until they settled, but any thick hides or bones might still leave recoverable fossils.
That might leave some archeologists very confused, especially when they try to date it and it turns out to be from the future.
it would probably be paleontologists since no human existed at the time and dating just doesnt work like that, since the saddle fossil still aged millions of years (also from stuff this old its hard to age things, so its more probable something around the same layer would be aged instead of the specific fossil)
well obviously I was making a joke about the dating part
yeah
in the Pratchett novels he talks about a sort of 'rubber-band history' that tends to be self-healing. It's the entire plot of one of the novels, a political leader escapes an assassination that was 'meant' to happen, and it ends up in reality having some sort of weird split where the world gets torn between an attraction point where she lives and another where she dies.
What if you scare our common ancestor to run across the ground to safety and end up getting eaten by a predator that sees it running?
Then I would have created the grandfather paradox and destroyed the entire universe. Cool, right?
I don't believe that kind of time travel is possible. But, if it were possible, the odds of finding that exact individual (who probably didn't actually exist) at that exact time are so minuscule that for all practical purposes, it may as well be impossible. But, if that were also possible, it did happen, and that was the only thing that happened differently, then I'm thinking the most likely outcome is that evolution would pretty much continue on the same course, probably even with humans eventually evolving.
It's common to think of the evolutionary process in a more or less linear fashion that could theoretically be traced back to a figurative Adam and Eve, but the reality is, it's so much more messy and convoluted than that. Evolution is a culmination of many factors such as the environmental conditions and populations that exist during a given time frame. So even if there was one specific common ancestral individual who happened to live at the exact time the dinosaurs were alive, which that individual is not a thing that existed, there would almost certainly still be a population of others of the same species living in the same conditions -- so theoretically would still ultimately lead to the same evolutionary outcomes in most instances.
So, I think it's very possible people would still exist. But, it wouldn't be the exact same people, living the exact same lives, at the exact same time as now.
On the other hand, who is to say that the common ancestor hadn't already produced the offspring that specifically lead to you and I being born before it was eaten? Who's to say that individual getting scared and eaten wouldn't have happened anyway, regardless of whether you were there or not? Who's to say that wasn't actually the defining moment that ultimately resulted in the evolution of people (and you and I specifically)?
I dunno, this is all getting a little too timey-wimey for me.
If you go that far back, every member of that species is either everyones' ancestor or their branch of the family tree died off at some point or developed into a different species. While I agree that evolution would progress roughly the same way, I don't think it would result in exactly the same people. With powerful people (like kings, emperors and their courts) being different, history would be different too
This implies that you think I was saying it would be the same people, but I actually said the exact same thing as you, just in different words: "it wouldn’t be the exact same people, living the exact same lives, at the exact same time as now."
For sure, but from the timescale we're discussing, the whole of human history is literally just a tiny fraction, a blip, at the very end. And until very recently, you could even argue the vast majority of human history was almost entirely inconsequential.
I'm not sure what you mean by that