explain xkcd:Museum
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| Asteroid Threat |
 Title text: Paleontologists have long worried that the dinosaurs blasted into space 66 million years ago will one day complete their orbits and fall back down. |
Explanation
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This is incomplete: This page was created by a reentering dinosaur. Don't remove this notice too soon. If you can fix this issue, edit the page! |
It's generally agreed by scientists that most dinosaurs went extinct as a result of the Chicxulub asteroid impacting the Earth near the Yucatán Peninsula 66 million years ago, either directly or indirectly.(but it wasn’t just the asteroid, as there were several other factors involved in the mass extinction. And the world was already going through a mass extinction event when the asteroid struck, so it just accelerated the mass extinction.) This comic posits that another asteroid is soon going to hit the Earth again. Because the impact location will be on the exact opposite side of the planet (the antipode), the comic takes the absurd notion that because it will act the 'opposite' way, it reverses all the original effects and bringing dinosaurs back from extinction, which is absurd.[citation needed]
The general consensus is that the dinosaurs went extinct as a result of the environmental effects of the impact, those that weren't in the immediate vicinity of the impact itself, but the title text (in a possibly separate treatment) suggests that it actually launched the dinosaurs alive into space, thus circling the Sun in a long orbit that will some day intersect with the Earth again and, absurdly, they will land still alive. Which is ridiculous, as not only would they have to somehow survive the initial impact (apparently strong enough to have knocked them into space), then survive the airless vacuum of space, survived all the way to the present day and then their presumably meteoric return to the Earth's surface - a thoroughly impossible feat. But the comic acts as if they are going to be able to land back on the Earth and take control again.
Because Earth rocks have been found on the Moon, there has been some speculation that microscopic fragments of fossils from the era of dinosaurs or earlier may have landed on the moon, but no such fragments have been collected.
Transcript
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This is one of 30 incomplete transcripts: Don't remove this notice too soon. If you can fix this issue, edit the page! |
- [Two images of Earth are shown. At the top left is a small one, centered on southern West Africa, showing the Atlantic Ocean and the east coast of South America, with a dotted line through the Earth entering at the Yucatán Peninsula and exiting at the east-central Indian Ocean. Taking up most of the rest of the panel is a large Earth image centered on the Indian Ocean and containing a target symbol, comprising a circle and four spokes, aimed at a location in the east-central Indian Ocean.]
- [Caption below image:]
- Dire news: An asteroid is on course to hit the earth exactly opposite the Yucatán Peninsula, bringing back the dinosaurs.
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Maybe it's more of statistics than exhibitions. --While False (speak|museum) 21:17, 3 October 2022 (UTC)
pixels-assembly-3.png
how is it 0 bytes?? i see that it is shown as 0 bytes on the wiki, but the file itself, when downloaded is 5kb! how???108.162.221.209 16:41, 4 October 2022 (UTC)Bumpf
- If the question is how it can be written like that here, the answer is that I used the numbers of the wiki. —While False (speak|museum) 19:18, 4 October 2022 (UTC)
- Sorry, should have made it more clear. Do you know why it is shown as 0 bytes on the file page? 172.70.134.103 12:37, 7 October 2022 (UTC)Bumpf
- There's always the possibility that this is actually the Null image under the .png file format. Every other .png is defined by the delta required to display the desired graphic when starting from the baseline of this 'ur'-image, but if you ever wanted to display that graphic the undocumented format specifications allow you to omit all unnecessary bytes (including the magic header bytes) and it will happily produce its hardcoded "it's a PNG!" preprocessing template, which happens to be this image. Obviously, the PNG spec (and, ultimately, the original ancestor of the detailed source code tree for every subsequent implementation) was written before Randall ever got anywhere near to drawing this image so the chances are slim that he just happened to luck upon the exact image that happens to have a 100% compression rate because it just happened to consist of something Randall wanted to draw, and in the manner of Randall's artistry. But it's a non-zero likelihood that an arbitrary artist might draw exactly the same image as a purely arbitrary "index null" page's collection of pixels and so... This might not be the Best Of All Worlds, but there has to be some highly fortunate occurance to balance out all the unfortunate ones, statistically, and this is ours!
- (Or maybe there's a minor bug/data-error in the way the wiki database serves the front-end webserver, but I can't ask you to believe something as trivially random as that!)) 172.70.90.245 15:03, 7 October 2022 (UTC)
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- Sorry, should have made it more clear. Do you know why it is shown as 0 bytes on the file page? 172.70.134.103 12:37, 7 October 2022 (UTC)Bumpf
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