Re: Betting against Elon Musk?
"There are plenty of animal species that have been around for hundreds of millions of years. Ever heard of sturgeon, jellyfish, sharks?"
Although this is OT my pedant mode causes me to want to correct this. Sharks and jellyfish are major animal groups, not species. Sturgeons are a family. Before long it will be a very small family because most species are critically endangered.
Within groups species arise and depart. Looking at us, we're really very recent - Neanderthals are a bit older and they've already gone. Most of the stone tools you see in museums were not made by our species, but by previous human species none of whom would have been capable of building rockets.
This is part of the famous misunderstanding of Darwin - that we are descended from apes. No. At some point we had a common ancestor species. Then we diverged. The ancestor species was not any species of modern ape.
One of the biggest shocks to the Victorian world, and it preceded Darwin's publication, was realising from the fossil record that species go extinct, and thus the idea that they were created ab initio by God, a few were drowned in the Flood, and then all the rest survive - was wrong. It was extinction not natural selection that really put the kybosh on Creationism (except in the more backward parts of the world). Tennyson knew about it and suddenly realised that Nature far from being a kindly product of a beneficient creator was quite ruthless with her children. "From scarped cliff or quarried stone/she cries "A thousand types are gone,/ I care for nothing, all shall go."
If something gets off this damp rock and visits other planets, it is quite possible it will be a species that isn't us, which is why human exceptionalism is quite pointless.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
