NASA is more than manned space travel with lots of unmanned missions to other planets and moons. If space travel causes brain damage, it's more like Elon will have problems.
I think we can know this counterfactual. On bad science fiction shows like Sliders, they visit "parallel universes" where just one or two things are changed from our world.
In one episode, they finally believe themselves to be "home". Until, late in the episode, one of them notices that the Golden Gate Bridge is blue. Supposedly, nothing else is even slightly different than the one they are from.
Well, if we examine that premise, it's pretty dumb. At some point in the 1930s when it was built, someone had to source the paint for the damned thing. The plant that made the paint, even if it was the same one, used different pigments. Mined somewhere other than where they found the raw materials for whatever color of orange the bridge really is. Each of these slight changes, 70 years before the protagonists showed up, would have caused even bigger changes. Trucks taking different routes, causing different traffic patterns, different delays. Suddenly, people are being conceived 5 minutes earlier, or 5 minutes later (or not at all). It's doubtful that anyone born after whenever the divergence occurred (whenever that was) is genetically identical. Doubtful that anyone born even half a generation later has the same birth name.
Pretty safe to say if the dinosaurs weren't godbombed, there wouldn't be humans. The number of magical convergences is too high, even for a shorter period of time.
An alternate idea is that mammals, due to some survivability superiority, were the inevitable outcome and that god-bombing only accelerated us to that. The butterfly effect is sci-fi.
If you want wild speculation, imagine there was no accelerant and lizard-people eventually ruled the planet — perhaps in the way we're headed, they would end up god-bombing themselves ... and then finally the mammals get their (long over) due.
Popular opinion seems to be that the cockroaches are waiting their turn.
What allowed mammals to take over from the reptiles / birds in the first place wasn't some inherent superiority, it was the dying out of all the ginormous hunter-killers, both animal and plant, that allowed for 'gentler' animals (mammals) and plants (grasses) to emerge. Mammals were there, grasses were there, with all the advantages that their unique physiology gave them. They were just too slow and killable in the dinosaur era to do anything more than just stick to tiny enclaves where the big dinos couldn't get them.
After the KT event that killed the dinosaurs, mammals sought to fill the niches left by dinosaurs. They grew big and huge. The few dinos that did survive, sat at the top of the food chain, enormous flightless birds. Sharks took over in the water because all the reptiles that were there were gone. It took mammals 40 million years after the bomb dropped to slowly spread over and gently outcompete the big bads. Collectively.
But it couldn't have happened in the first place without Giant Meteor making the choice for us. The Cretaceous was just that gnarly, and it would have only gotten gnarlier. The world found a local maximum, and then that maximum got flattened. The only thing that could have ended it, did.
But just because some mammal or another evolves into a sapient doesn't make that sapient "human" in the way we're using the word in this context.
The path from the little critters that existed at the time of the dinosaurs to H. sapiens today is very specific, and we know of at least 2 or 3 bottleneck events in our recent evolutionary history. The idea that our species could have arisen anyway is beyond absurd. The universe does not work in this fashion.
Ok, so it's your theory that mammals could continue to evolve in a completely different direction, with different evolutionary pressures for say 45 or 55 million years, but then all of the sudden veer off in a wild direction where they follow pretty much the same exact path that early human ancestors followed...
Such that, at the end of it all, we have something that either or both looks like an anatomically modern human and would (hypothetically) be able to have fertile offspring with a H. sapiens human?
Because, I have to tell you, that's pretty batshit.
just read an article yesterday that its not an asteroid its a super volacano that killed the dinos. of course, I don't care. I wish academics would allow us to study 40K years in the past without it being contraversial or feeling the need to injure peoples reputations
I really like the site, too. I noticed there's no ads at all, and no subscription. The About link explains the site adequately and briefly, but no mention of the owner. I'm curious of the ownership - it doesn't appear to be a business with any revenue for such a good idea.
I would guess 24in60.com - people occasionally respond not to the comment they mean to but that comment's parent, and the only other discussion on keane's comment is about 24in60.com. That's just an educated guess, though, as there's no way to know unless kebaman clarifies his comment (either through responding or editing it).
Perhaps saving planet earth and kick starting clean alternative energy will be what excites the current or near future generation. After that, outer space exploration will still beckon. I can only hope I'm around to watch.
Since high school cross country in the 1970's, we were told the proper distance running form is rolling heal-to-toe, while for the short distance sprinters the form is to land on toes or the balls of the feet. This could be one of those shockers where something I've learned turns out to be false.
Still, I'm still finding it hard to imagine running, say, ten miles by landing on the front part of the foot and not the heal first. Maybe we humans aren't naturally evolved to run ten mile distances. I give it a try, but I suspect I'll be a heal-to-toe distance runner.
I really recommend that you check out the book Born to Run [1] which examines barefoot running and how we've evolved. It's been a while since I read it, but I believe it even includes a chapter about persistence hunting [2].
There is a great deal of evidence that humans not only can run long distances, but have evolved to do so. The idea is that before primitive weapons (bow and arrow or whatnot), this is how we caught food -- by simply running it down.
From other sources:
"Biomechanical research reveals a surprising key to the survival of our species: Humans are built to outrun nearly every other animal on the planet over long distances."
Of all the primates, only humans have giant Achilles tendons and glutes, both of which are distance running adaptations. Ditto for our highly efficient sweat-cooling system.
Strange. I can't image running heel-to-tow on any distance. While I usually walk heel-to-tow -- running this way just feels painful. By landing on the front part my muscles act like a spring upon impact. I find mid-foot strikes barely acceptable.
Edit: Re-read the article. I guess I just ran in cheap "minimal footwear" all my life. Now is this a good or a bad thing?
You can get used to landing on your toes. It took me quite a while to get used to, but I managed to run a half-marathon six months after I started doing it.
