I mean, the planet is likely smoother than a lot of ball bearings
The highest point and the lowest point aren’t very far deviated. Less than 6 miles up and less than 6 miles down. Basically a little less than 0.001% deviation.
Edit: After doing a bit of digging it looks like Earth would be comparable to a 1 inch grade 1000 ball bearing. Grade 1000 are not remotely close to the highest grade, in fact it’s one of the lowest grades of ball bearings.
I’m guessing smoothness doesn’t consider the non-spherical shape of the planet, just the bumpiness of it. But I’m also some random on the Internet, so who knows
I think I’m missing what the smoothness of the planet has to do with it being basically an iron-nickel ball covered by a bit of rock, but being a meat popsicle, I tend to miss a lot of things.
The difference in diameter between the pole and the equator is only about 26 miles.
7926 miles vs 7900 miles
So a difference of about 0.03%
Yeah I’d say that’s pretty spherical
Edit: Rereading this it comes of a bit rougher than I intended. Basically what I’m saying is something can be spherical without being a perfect sphere, infact if to be a sphere (in common usage of the word) only applied to perfect examples of a sphere than nothing would be a sphere. Definitions are pretty wishy-washy a lot of the times, especially when it comes to describing the world as it is.
Earth is an oblique spheroid, technically. But calling it a sphere is true enough to observers that I’d say it still counts.
But is it Earth itself that kills the birds? Seeing as it is the rock quality of the Earth we’re after, how many birds die from being struck by it? Does flying into the ground count as being struck by the Earth, if it is the bird that launches itself against it?
If you restrict it only to being struck by a rock then actually, while still probably the title holder, the meteor actually probably has a much lower body count than one might first assume. In fact I wonder if there’d be any way to calculate the average number of birds/avian creatures in the space occupied by the meteor at the time who could have been directly hit by the meteor not just killed off from second order effects.
Once again: dinosaurs are not birds and birds are not dinosaurs.
That’s akin to saying that beloved character actor Margo Martindale is a prehistoric fish or that a prehistoric fish is beloved character actor Margo Martindale.
Woah woah woah, don’t bring beloved character actress Margo Martindale into this. Beloved character actress Margo Martindale had nothing to do with this. Leave beloved character actress Margo Martindale alone!
I’m just saying that beloved character actor Margo Martindale is not a fish and that no fish is beloved character actor Margo Martindale, that’s all! I would never defame the good name of beloved character actor Margo Martindale!
You seem to have stumbled on the fact that fish is not a useful term because you cannot come up with a consistent definition of fish that doesn’t include beloved character actor Margo Martindale without excluding things that are obviously fish. It’s the same with “tree”.
You are correct that dinosaurs are not birds, but birds are dinosaurs in the same sense that you are a mammal.
Here’s the thing. You said a “birds are dinosaurs.”
Is it in the same clade? Yes. No one’s arguing that.
As someone who is a scientist who studies birds, I am telling you, specifically, in science, no one calls birds dinosaurs. If you want to be “specific” like you said, then you shouldn’t either. They’re not the same thing.
If you’re saying “dinosaur clade” you’re referring to the taxonomic grouping of Dinosauria, which includes things from ankylosauruses to herrerasauruses to jackdaws.
So your reasoning for calling a birds a dinosaur is because random people “call the feathered ones dinosaurs?” Let’s get tyrannosauruses and deinonychuses in there, then, too.
Also, calling someone a human or an ape? It’s not one or the other, that’s not how taxonomy works. They’re both. A bird is a bird and a member of the dinosaur clade. But that’s not what you said. You said a bird is a dinosaur, which is not true unless you’re okay with calling all members of the Aves class dinosaurs, which means you’d call blue jays, ravens, and other birds dinosaurs, too. Which you said you don’t.
Are you responding to my post or one you made up? You seem to be putting a lot of words in my mouth.
Of course I mean clade. Of course humans are apes. Of course scientists say birds are dinosaurs. You even say that “no one is arguing that.” And that’s exactly how taxonomy works.
Scientists say “non avian dinosaurs” amazingly often. That statement doesn’t make any sense unless birds are dinosaurs.
Hasn’t there been more and more discoveries leaning in that direction? Not that all, but more and more, including everyone’s beloved Tyrannosaurus Rex was just a giant bird?
First off, Yes, dinosaurs are birds. Unlike the word “fish”, which was in used long before terms or concepts like “monophyletic” were invented, “dinosaur” is a scientific term that arrived around the time scientists were developping cladistic classification, and the scientists have made the choice of defining it as a clade (a theoritical last common ancestor+ all of its descendants). Therefore, any descendant of a dinosaur is a dinosaur.
For older words, the scientist definition doesn’t need to be taken into account in general use, for example, the scientific definition of “berry” is famously different from it’s popular definition, but you don’t use the scientific definition in everyday life. But for “dinosaur”, a word coined by scientists referring to something that is only known through science, it makes less sense to ignore the scientific definition.
As for dinosaurs not being birds, that is true for most, but if birds are dinosaurs, then there were some dinosaurs that were birds. There’s actually two conflicting definitions of birds: If it’s a theropod that could fly or is descended from one that could, and is closer to any modern bird than to deinonychus, then birds (=Aves) appeared either in mid Jurassic or in and were already quite diverse before the K-T extinction, including the enanthiornithes and hesperornithes groups, that disappeared during the extinction.
If you define it as the common ancestor of all modern birds and its descendants (=Neoornithes), then they appeared in the late creataceous.
Using either definition, it is clear that they all look more at birds than like anything else, and a layman seing one if them out of context would immediately think of them as a bird (tho maybe a strange one) rather than as a dinosaur. So unlike for berries or fishes, there would be no conflict between either the scientific definition of “bird” and the popular one. Either way, only 3 separate lineages among them survived, so the meteorite did kill whole bird species.
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