Can we artificially make prehistoric sized bugs?

I’d rather we do that than live on it. I don’t why some people are so excited about going to live on Mars. It’s a red, hot, desert rock. I imagine anyone who isn’t super into researching Mars would get bored quickly.

3 Likes

Hot? It’s cold enough to snow dry ice (frozen CO2). With an average global temperature of about -80 degrees F (-60 C), it would take a lot of heating up our little neighbor planet so bugs don’t freeze to death.

2 Likes

We Canadians know the metric system, but for every day, personal things (including most shopping) we prefer to use the Imperial system.

The clue is ‘personal’. Most people are more comfortable with using number bases other than 10 to relate to their world. Most practically in division.

There’s good reason why the attempt to make time metric (French Revolution) failed so miserably.

Metric is great for precise, standardized international trade, industry and science. Not so much for day to day life.

(He said, after lifting his 2-4s of empties out of the basement and heading for the hardware stuff for some 2x4s to fix the deck.)

But back to roaches…
What’s the smallest known species?

1 Like

There is a certain probability that, after many years, certain genetic mutations associated with the new living environment would become established well enough that a significant change in size would occur, but it would not be gigantism, but rather an increase in size by cirka two sizes for invertebrates.

Stop it, I’m blushing.

2 Likes

Do you think it is possible that post-cataclysmic conditions (like after the dino-killer asteroid) in effect, induced a kind of ‘ecological island’ dwarfism on surviving insect species?

My issue with the whole idea of travel to mars, even outerspace really, is the amount of energy required to get anything up there.

If you look at diagrams of a rocket, the fuel to payload ratio is absurd and if it was a more popular method of transportation, we’d probably have a few more zeros at the end of our atmospheric carbon-dioxide concentration, measued in ppm.

Which one of the 4600 species of cockroach are you referring to? The dweller beneath the American sink is quite small compared to some of the roaches found in other areas. See Madagascar Hissing Cockroach.

This topic was automatically closed 60 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.