I think there’s a piece of pepperoni between my bicuspids I could probably use his legs to help me dislodge.

As luck would have it, I’ve got a similar number of anuses.

The Ukranian is kind of hot, if you know him give him my insta @numberfor002

Dog: Yeah, you see the problem is it’s already in my mouth. If you would have asked a bit sooner, this could have turned out differen – SQUIRREL OH MY GOD SQUIRREL DID YOU SEE THAT SQUIRREL IMMA MUNCH IT

Is there an all encompassing term for xylophones and all the instruments that are “Xylophones” with X feature(s)?

This bird, guys.

There’s nothing stopping me from writing a $480 million USD check either. Cashing it, on the other hand, that’s a you problem.

Ya’ll listen up up here’s the story about a little guy that lives in the blue world.

While I agree that evolution would progress roughly the same way, I don’t think it would result in exactly the same people.

This implies that you think I was saying it would be the same people, but I actually said the exact same thing as you, just in different words: “it wouldn’t be the exact same people, living the exact same lives, at the exact same time as now.”

With powerful people (like kings, emperors and their courts) being different, history would be different too

For sure, but from the timescale we’re discussing, the whole of human history is literally just a tiny fraction, a blip, at the very end. And until very recently, you could even argue the vast majority of human history was almost entirely inconsequential.

Well, I don’t think time travel backwards in this manner is possible, but if it is, it would have to operate under the laws of thermodynamics which means the energy (and maybe even some of the atoms) that was “transported back in time” would represent a paradox.

The energy and/or some of the atoms in you and the time machine were already somewhere in the past when dinosaurs roamed the earth. Which presents a paradox (and this is probably not even the only paradox), so how does the universe conserve energy in that situation?

Somehow the “original” atoms and energy that became you and the machine would need to be reconciled with the duplicates that suddenly turned up.

So maybe there’s a mysterious process that obliterates energy? What would it be and how would it work? Would that be equivalent to the false vacuum that could fundamentally destroy the universe as we currently know it?

Or maybe there’s nothing to actually stop duplication of energy and atoms and it’s entirely feasible to go back in time. You take the time machine back, see some dinos from space, and you managed to otherwise not change a thing. That means in some dozens of million years, you and that machine will be sent back to exactly the same time and location again because nothing has changed. Bam, now you and that time machine are in triplicate. But, with nothing really changing, the same process will occur again and again. Does it reach a point where there’s so much duplicated energy / matter that something fundamentally different has to happen? Would all those duplicate yous and time machines coalesce into a giant cosmic object that comes crashing down to the Earth like a giant asteroid, thus killing off most dinosaurs and paving the way for human evolution? Hmmm.

I don’t believe that kind of time travel is possible. But, if it were possible, the odds of finding that exact individual (who probably didn’t actually exist) at that exact time are so minuscule that for all practical purposes, it may as well be impossible. But, if that were also possible, it did happen, and that was the only thing that happened differently, then I’m thinking the most likely outcome is that evolution would pretty much continue on the same course, probably even with humans eventually evolving.

It’s common to think of the evolutionary process in a more or less linear fashion that could theoretically be traced back to a figurative Adam and Eve, but the reality is, it’s so much more messy and convoluted than that. Evolution is a culmination of many factors such as the environmental conditions and populations that exist during a given time frame. So even if there was one specific common ancestral individual who happened to live at the exact time the dinosaurs were alive, which that individual is not a thing that existed, there would almost certainly still be a population of others of the same species living in the same conditions – so theoretically would still ultimately lead to the same evolutionary outcomes in most instances.

So, I think it’s very possible people would still exist. But, it wouldn’t be the exact same people, living the exact same lives, at the exact same time as now.

On the other hand, who is to say that the common ancestor hadn’t already produced the offspring that specifically lead to you and I being born before it was eaten? Who’s to say that individual getting scared and eaten wouldn’t have happened anyway, regardless of whether you were there or not? Who’s to say that wasn’t actually the defining moment that ultimately resulted in the evolution of people (and you and I specifically)?

I dunno, this is all getting a little too timey-wimey for me.

And so much more: Like burning away the hair growing out of your ears without also burning your fingers!