A new model suggests that in 250 million years, all land will collide into a supercontinent that boosts warming and pushes mammals to extinction.
      • lol3droflxp
        1•2 years ago

        Why would that be though? Last time there was a supercontinent it also supported large animals

      • ANGRY_MAPLEEnglish
        2•2 years ago

        Losing the plankton in the ocean on top of losing vegetation would also cause oxygen problems, iirc.

        • IndiBronyEnglish
          2•2 years ago

          One of the planet’s mass extinction events was The Great Oxidation Event. Future lizard scientists will study our time period and coin it The Great Carbonisation Event!

  • @[email protected]English
    11•2 years ago

    That fucking website with its 3 quarter screen popup forcing registration. Fuck new York times and it’s bullshitty bullshit.

  • @[email protected]English
    7•2 years ago

    In the geological timescale for the supercontinent to reform, we and mammals would have evolved as well. Humans would evolve into Xenu™©® for all we know.

  • BananaTrifleViolin
    23•2 years ago

    This is the problem with believing too much in models. A model can show you anything you want - it’s output is only as good as the parameters and algorithms you set it.

    Modelling the climate in the next 50-100 years is already extremely difficult and fraught with inaccuracies but we have lots of models and data to extrapolate from, so we do have a crude idea where we’re going. But we can’t model next years weather with accuracy, just the base trend. Crucially important warning for climate change but limited otherwise.

    Modelling out to 250 million years is basically a crock of shit. The tectonic movements are predictable and gross predictions that a pangea arrangement might be warmer may have some validity but modelling the climate and evolution and status of mammals is pure conjecture.

    Good thing about modelling that far is you will never have see you model’s accuracy being tested. Publish a paper, play into current fears around climate change with an irrelevant prediction about 250million years away, get an article published in the New York times and egos massaged all round.

    • @[email protected]English
      2•2 years ago

      We’re not supposed to leave Earth. We evolved to survive and interact with Earth’s systems. Death is inevitable. Entropy is our God.

  • @[email protected]English
    1•2 years ago

    Please! We can’t predict the weather for tomorrow with enough certainty and you want me to believe that we know how it will behave for the next 250 million years?!

  • RobEnglish
    15•2 years ago

    I, for one, welcome our new insect overlords.

      • @[email protected]English
        1•2 years ago

        Okay, maybe graphen + light circuits will have infinite cycles of operation and be fine with passive cooling…

        And there’s experiments with surface-only electron waves tech (what’s it’s name?), which could work on the potential difference of wind blowing over it.