Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Workers Drilling in Romania Broke into a Cave Sealed for 5.5M Years

travelandtannins.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 67 posts

Re: Workers Drilling in Romania Broke into a Cave Sealed for 5.5M Years

#41

Post by rbanffy »

nbernard wrote: post #39
hvb2 wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You could just look for isotopes from the atmospheric nuclear tests that were conducted? Doesn't need to be a reactor I would assume?

Indeed. That's one of the reasons why the "Before Present" time scale (that uses 1/1/1950 as the epoch) is sometimes called "Before Physics" (another one being that 1950 is less and less "present", of course)!

> that uses 1/1/1950 as the epoch

I guess we can say this is when humankind reached adulthood, became able to drink and got a driver’s license. And a gun.

Re: Workers Drilling in Romania Broke into a Cave Sealed for 5.5M Years

#42

Post by rbanffy »

weaksauce wrote: post #7
statictype wrote: post #3

Interesting that being sealed for 5 million years did not yield any life forms more complex than insects. Maybe sun and space are importance factors for intelligence.

the sun is energy so i’d expect there to be a correlation there.

There’s residual and radioactive heating from the Earth itself that can provide energy for an ecosystem. We expect Jupiter’s moons to provide similar environments because of tidal deformations (which provide enough energy for Io’s vulcanism).

Re: Workers Drilling in Romania Broke into a Cave Sealed for 5.5M Years

#45

Post by rbanffy »

visarga wrote: post #33
andrewstuart wrote: post #12

Great first line for a story.

It is indeed well written but I feel it has LLM smell, not that is a bad thing.

Let’s not be racist, please. It doesn’t matter if the intelligence is based on carbon or silicon.

Re: Workers Drilling in Romania Broke into a Cave Sealed for 5.5M Years

#46

Post by RamblingCTO »

broken-kebab wrote: post #35

Speleology aside, just a few days ago in one of HN discussions I was told LLM-produced content is already indistinguishable from human-made. But I'm sure I would have pretty good chances to correctly guess even the exact brand which helped to write this sloppy text. And it's the same with many stories I read.

I know what you mean. Flowery and fluffy. I don't see any clear giveaways, but it feels like it and is a bit annoying to read because the information in there isn't very dense.

Re: Workers Drilling in Romania Broke into a Cave Sealed for 5.5M Years

#47

Post by TacticalCoder »

This already happened in the past: they found a cave totally sealed since so long that spiders still had eyes, but non-functioning ones (for they were totally in the dark for generations and generations, eyes didn't make sense anymore).

Just as the holy books predicted. Oops, sorry, just as Darwin predicted.

Re: Workers Drilling in Romania Broke into a Cave Sealed for 5.5M Years

#48

Post by somenameforme »

quuxplusone wrote: post #18
statictype wrote: post #3

Interesting that being sealed for 5 million years did not yield any life forms more complex than insects. Maybe sun and space are importance factors for intelligence.

That has a lot more to do with whether the cave started out containing anything "more complex than insects." 5 million years isn't, like, an evolve-monkeys-from-scratch number of years. It's arguably an evolve-humans-from-chimps number of years. But if your cave doesn't contain any chimps... or even if it does but they all starve to death in Year 2 out of 5,000,000...

We went from wolves to chihuahua in just 40k years. Yeah selective breeding and all that, but it emphasizes that you can have very extreme changes in very brief periods of time. Imagine chihuahuas didn't exist today, and somebody said that within 40k years you could turn a wolf into one. It'd sound absurd!

Re: Workers Drilling in Romania Broke into a Cave Sealed for 5.5M Years

#50

Post by lelanthran »

croes wrote: post #44
BlackRabbit1 wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Still the linked article reads like slop

Doesn’t mean it is. I bet you can find pre-AI articles that sound like slop too.

I keep requesting this here, but so far I haven't been given any links.

There's probably a good reason for that.

Post reply on HN