• NateNate60@lemmy.world
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    5 months ago

    The answers to all these questions, for those curious:

    1. The unfinished pyramid symbolises that the United States is constantly changing and evolving.
    2. The Antarctic Treaty says that Antarctica isn’t part of any country’s sovereign territory. Countries can and do venture into Antarctica, and in fact, you can even do this yourself if you want. There are Antarctic bases all over Antarctica.
    3. There is no commercially popular commercial plane route that requires it, but there are people who have flown planes over Antarctica. The problem is just that there aren’t any major population centres that far south. The equivalent is not true for the Arctic because there are a lot more big cities in the northern hemisphere.
    4. The footage isn’t lost. You can view it on YouTube.
    5. They mounted the camera on the lunar module. The most popular picture of Apollo 11 is actually one of Buzz Aldrin. Armstrong is the one who took that picture.
    6. There’s not much reason to. It’s cool, sure, but there’s not much interesting to see on the moon and it costs a lot to get there.
    7. Humans didn’t evolve from monkeys. Humans and monkeys evolved from a common ancestor. That common ancestor is no longer around.
    8. “Garbage DNA” isn’t “garbage”. Most of it is just DNA that we haven’t figured out the function of yet. Some DNA is actually unnecessary though. Those are telomeres. Since cellular reproduction involves copying DNA, and the process also involves some DNA at the end being lost, the extra unnecessary bit is needed to prevent the good parts from being lost.
    9. They wrote down on paper where they wanted bricks to go and then piled bricks in those spots. While people didn’t exactly live in “wooden huts” (they lived in houses that looked like actual medieval houses, because they were), cathedrals and the Houses of Parliament are more extravagant because their owners had a lot more money to spend on their design and construction.
    10. (I could not determine the meaning of “pre-Luvian” architecture)
    11. They’re not spaceships. They just look like spaceships. The Ancient Egyptians put out so much art that it’s very likely that they eventu,ally would draw something that resembled a spaceship (or some other modern object).
    12. Most such findings have been fabrications, but those that were found were probably just really tall humans. Human height follows a normal distribution, and there have been tens of billions of humans alive, so eventually someone, by luck of the draw, will end up two and a half metres tall. Additionally, the idea of “really big person terrorising smaller people” isn’t exactly super original or particularly hard to come up with.
    13. A search of early Christian art, which would have been made around the first century CE after Jesus’s crucifixion, doesn’t show any examples featuring mushrooms.
    14. (Missing)
    15. This is probably referring to the Tree of Life. It’s not even shaped like a pine tree, mate. There are plenty of Old World plants with leaves like that.
    16. Dragons primarily appear in European cultures. Eastern cultures don’t have the same dragons. We also call those creatures “dragons” as well but they really look nothing alike. Western dragons are like flying lizards, while Eastern dragons are more like snakes.
    17. Because people find it cool and will buy media with such imagery, particularly those who aren’t religious.
    18. Because people find killing others as a gameplay mechanic fun.
      • Plum@lemmy.world
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        5 months ago

        Or: before Noah’s flood 5,000 years ago. The flood that carved the grand canyon in something less than 40 days and 40 nights.

        :<

        • Blaster M@lemmy.world
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          5 months ago

          It kept going for 150 days before it started receding. Still, the grand canyon’s way older even so.

    • AmidFuror@fedia.io
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      5 months ago

      Regarding #8: 99% of what’s currently considered junk DNA is indeed junk. While we still discover new regulatory functions for a tiny fraction of intronic and intergenic sequences, we do not rely on lack of evidence of function to conclude that most of it is junk. There is positive evidence that only a small fraction of the human genome can be under selective pressure for its sequence.

      About 50% of junk DNA are repeat sequences derived from transposons and viruses which are now inactive. A tiny fraction of these have taken on regulatory functions as the genes around them have adapted to their insertion. Most are still junk. There isn’t strong selective pressure to shrink genome sizes and plenty of mechanisms that increase it. There are species of Allium (garlic and onion families) with genome sizes ranging from about 2x to 8x the size of the human genome.

    • captainlezbian@lemmy.world
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      5 months ago

      I can expand on 9. Gravity goes in a constant linear direction for all intents and purposes. This allows for easy creation of right angles. Once you’ve got an L, string, and a small weight you can start doing some real cool shit if you dedicate your entire life to carving brick and stone.

      • NateNate60@lemmy.world
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        5 months ago

        For right angles in particular, the Egyptians have known for millennia that stretching out a circular rope of 12 cubits into a 3-4-5 triangle will produce a right angle.

    • Tar_Alcaran
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      5 months ago

      About #4, it wasn’t so much “lost” as “thrown out because it didn’t really matter and tape is expensive”. But it was refound in the late 00s.

      Also, the pineal gland was named that way because, and this will shock nobody, it’s shaped like a pinecone. This question is about as smart as asking why the middle finger is in the middle