but imagine you’ve just gotten use to living on a moss planet over the past 40 million years, and now all of a sudden you walk outside and all the moss is gone
Moss
Submitted 8 months ago by fossilesque@mander.xyz to science_memes@mander.xyz
https://mander.xyz/pictrs/image/29a5789d-9c81-4505-9450-2e53105a732e.png
Comments
OpenStars@discuss.online 8 months ago
ngwoo@lemmy.world 8 months ago
The ocean was purple once, and another time the only thing taller than little bushes were twenty foot tall mushrooms shaped like asparagus
Classy@sh.itjust.works 8 months ago
And 80ft horsetails
buttfarts@lemy.lol 8 months ago
Seriously?! 80ft horsetails? I knew they were a prehistoric plant that can grow through asphalt but had no idea they got that big
affiliate@lemmy.world 8 months ago
scary to think of how big the horses themselves must have been
Clinicallydepressedpoochie@lemmy.world 8 months ago
Ok now, I get that it’s a theory but you can’t just assume this one is 100.
finley@lemm.ee 8 months ago
Fortunately, there was no thinking until a very long time after that.
ignotum@lemmy.world 8 months ago
Hey! Those are my ancestors you’re dissing you know
ChickenLadyLovesLife@lemmy.world 8 months ago
FWIW a lot of “moss” from that time was very unlike what we think of as moss today.
AmosBurton_ThatGuy@lemmy.ca 8 months ago
What was it like? Genuinely curious!
ChickenLadyLovesLife@lemmy.world 8 months ago
Here are some modern-day variants of mosses that don’t even look like what we typically think of as “moss”.
Snowcano@startrek.website 8 months ago
Go on…
Classy@sh.itjust.works 8 months ago
Just like there is SpaceEngine, we need a Earth sim that let’s us to back to any time and have a realistic simulation of that epoch based on the best of modern knowledge.
Comment105@lemm.ee 8 months ago
Now I’m curious if there’d be any massive gaps in the timeline, where we don’t know if we could reasonably pick any fitting environment to render.
Paradachshund@lemmy.today 8 months ago
I want to see a visualization of this now.
backgroundcow@lemmy.world 8 months ago
Paradachshund@lemmy.today 8 months ago
Good attempt, but there wouldn’t be bushes, right?
UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world 8 months ago
You’re thinking about this like it’s just a single uniform endless pasture of gray-green moss. But you have to recognize all the moss is competing for space and resources.
So you’ve got 40M years of different kinds of mosses all developing novel evolutionary strategies as they try to one up one another. Just a rainforest of mosses, with an uncountable variation of shapes and colors and compositions.
Moss bushes. Moss trees. Hanging mosses. Floating mosses. Dense spongey moss. Brilliantly colored moss. Poisoned moss. Cannibal moss. Stinging moss. Velvety moss. Venus Fly Moss. Moss of a thousand different color variants.
And every few hundred years, you get a new moss meta strategy for being the best kind of moss that pushes all the other moss out. Played across 40M years, it’s this big squirling fractual of warring moss tribes, until finally another organism figures out the optimal play on all moss and then it’s over as fast as it started.
IsoSpandy@lemm.ee 8 months ago
I would play this game. Like spore, but just moss
LazaroFilm@lemmy.world 8 months ago
That moss have been long and painful to wait for this.
daniskarma@lemmy.dbzer0.com 8 months ago
Thanks for make me realize that I had that big of a timespan to live in a beautiful mossy earth and I just missed it and landed on scorched land earth.
nikaaa@lemmy.world 8 months ago
yesterday someone posted a closeup of moss on a street to show how fascinating it is. i can’t find it anymore, but it was cool. maybe somebody still has that picture?
Sauerkraut@discuss.tchncs.de 8 months ago
Go to Iceland and there are huge fields of lava rocks covered in a thick yellow-greenish moss because there isn’t enough soil for anything else to grow. It is surreal and probably what most of the earth looked like for those 40 million years
fossilesque@mander.xyz 8 months ago
Yes. Seconding and insisting you drive to this restaurant in the Westfjords. I hated seafood until I went here and it broke me. I now love seafood.
tripadvisor.com/Restaurant_Review-g189967-d109911… 5.0 at almost 900 reviews for a reason. It’s in the middle of fucking nowhere.
fossilesque@mander.xyz 8 months ago
Classy@sh.itjust.works 8 months ago
Oh I feel special, that was me!
jol@discuss.tchncs.de 8 months ago
Certainly not all land of earth. Moss requires moisture to survive and lacks the root system of developed plants to get water deep in the soil.
Eiri@lemmy.ca 8 months ago
On the flip side, if you could time travel to that epoch, the ground would be extremely comfy for the feet.
TheTechnician27@lemmy.world 8 months ago
happy Kris noises
KillingTimeItself@lemmy.dbzer0.com 8 months ago
mmmm oil, or gas, or coal, whatever the moss ended up doing, it was something.
Nobilmantis@feddit.it 8 months ago
We stand no chance against the mighty moss
headset@lemmy.world 8 months ago
Is difficult to take such an interesting fact seriously when is presented in such a stupid way.
NewNewAccount@lemmy.world 8 months ago
Sorry, sir. Will only present you interesting facts in a serious manner from now on.
ngwoo@lemmy.world 8 months ago
Interesting facts in a stupid way or stupid facts in an interesting way. We only have enough for 50%.
OutlierBlue@lemmy.ca 8 months ago
where_am_i@sh.itjust.works 8 months ago
Make sure you jump on that couch when you see one!
nikaaa@lemmy.world 8 months ago
make sure you hump that couch when you see it!
ftfy
CeruleanRuin@lemmings.world 8 months ago
It always staggers me when I remember that for roughly sixty million years during the Carboniferous Period, there were trees but no microorganisms capable of decomposing them.
Just sixty million years of branches falling off and trees falling down and… just sitting there on the ground, not rotting at all.
XOXOX@lemmy.world 8 months ago
Now consider wild fires during that period.
Knock_Knock_Lemmy_In@lemmy.world 8 months ago
Fire hadn’t been invented yet.
affiliate@lemmy.world 8 months ago
they must have been wild
sushibowl@feddit.nl 8 months ago
Note that although species can be described as tree-like, they didn’t quite look like modern trees do. Also, much of the world was swamp, and much of the dead plant material sank into these bogs and decayed into peat.
The amount of CO2 trapped during this period caused the atmosphere to be around 35% oxygen. This allowed life with inefficient respiratory systems to grow much bigger in size without suffocating, mainly insects. Think woodlice 6 feet long, spiders the size of dogs, millipedes as big as cars, and dragonflies as big as eagles.
RagingHungryPanda@lemm.ee 8 months ago
No, I don’t think I will
hex@programming.dev 8 months ago
I LOVE the thought of a world-covering swamp with pseudo-trees and giant fucking bugs. Such a stimulating thought. I’d love to explore and see it.
ChickenLadyLovesLife@lemmy.world 8 months ago
It was a lot more fun to believe that coal was crushed dinosaurs.
pumpkinseedoil@mander.xyz 8 months ago
We have oil for that
OpenStars@discuss.online 8 months ago
Sus: bacteria predate trees by like… a lot. There may not be many fossils of them:-), but surely they would eat whatever they could.