Thursday, September 06, 2007
The hammer and chisel of God
The dinosaurs flourished on this Earth for 165,000,000 years, more than a thousand times the entire duration, to date, of the species homo sapiens. But their fate was sealed from the beginning. At the very dawn of the age of the dinosaurs two enormous rocks collided out past Mars, and in the fullness of time one of the pieces -- only six miles wide -- hit the Earth and made the Gulf of Mexico. The resulting cataclysm destroyed the ecology and food web of the entire planet, and all the large species died.
If that collision -- a bit of luck, really, that manifested in the blink of an eye -- had never happened dinosaurs would still dominate the planet. After all, the time elapsed since their demise, 65,000,000 years, is only a fraction of the period they walked the Earth. With the dinosaurs still around, who really thinks that large primates would have evolved as they did? Where was the opportunity for man?
Has humanity's fate also been sealed in the blink of an eye?
18 Comments:
By 
, at
Thu Sep 06, 09:29:00 AM:
"Has humanity's fate also been sealed in the blink of an eye?"...When she's cute enough it has, repeatedly. In all seriousness though, the possibilties are intriguing.
By , at
Thu Sep 06, 09:43:00 AM:
What a happy thought to begin the day with. Oy!
By 
., at
Thu Sep 06, 09:49:00 AM:
Had the rocks not collided, continental drift would still have progressed, changing the niches of evolutionary opportunity. Africa would still have provided a comfortable and safe incubator for our species and in due time we would have slain every last one of those monsters.
By , at
Thu Sep 06, 10:36:00 AM:
And to think "global warming" will be far worse! Thank you Fat Al for leading us out of that terrible event. We need more liberal arts scientists to think ahead like Fat Al.
SEW
By , at
Thu Sep 06, 11:19:00 AM:
They say it's all over in the blink of an eye.
Don't blink.
-David
By , at
Thu Sep 06, 11:32:00 AM:
Well, let's see. This article in Sky & Telescope Magazine http://www.skyandtelescope.com/news/home/9588922.html correctly reflects that scientific evidence suggests that the asteroid fragment gouged out the 110 mile wide Chicxulub Crater on what is now the northern edge of the Yucutan Peninsula. It didn't carve out the Gulf of Mexico.
By , at
Thu Sep 06, 12:01:00 PM:
Every September, I recall that is more than half a century (62 years) since I landed at Nagasaki with the 2nd Marine Division in the original occupation of Japan following World War II. This time every year, I have watched and listened to the light-hearted "peaceniks" and their light-headed symbolism-without-substance of ringing bells, flying pigeons, floating candles, and sonorous chanting and I recall again that "Peace is not a cause - it is an effect."
In July, 1945, my fellow 8th RCT Marines [I was a BARman] and I returned to Saipan following the successful conclusion of the Battle of Okinawa. We were issued new equipment and replacements joined each outfit in preparation for our coming amphibious assault on the home islands of Japan.
B-29 bombing had leveled the major cities of Japan, including Kobe, Osaka, Nagoya, Yokohama, Yokosuka, and Tokyo.
We were informed we would land three Marine divisions and six Army divisions, perhaps abreast, with large reserves following us in. It was estimated that it would cost half a million casualties to subdue the Japanese homeland.
In August, the A-bomb was dropped on Hiroshima but the Japanese government refused to surrender. Three days later a second A-bomb was dropped on the city of Nagasaki. The Imperial Japanese government finally surrendered.
Following the 1941 sneak attack on Pearl Harbor, a Japanese admiral said, "I fear all we have done is to awaken a sleeping giant..." Indeed, they had. Not surprisingly, the atomic bomb was produced by a free people functioning in a free environment. Not surprisingly because the creative process is a natural human choice-making process and inventiveness occurs most readily where choice-making opportunities abound. America!
Tamper with a giant, indeed! Tyrants, beware: Free men are nature's pit bulls of Liberty! The Japanese learned the hard way what tyrants of any generation should know: Never start a war with a free people - you never know what they may invent!
As a newly assigned member of a U.S. Marine intelligence section, I had a unique opportunity to visit many major cities of Japan, including Tokyo and Hiroshima, within weeks of their destruction. For a full year I observed the beaches, weapons, and troops we would have assaulted had the A-bombs not been dropped. Yes, it would have been very destructive for all, but especially for the people of Japan.
When we landed in Japan, for what came to be the finest and most humane occupation of a defeated enemy in recorded history, it was with great appreciation, thanksgiving, and praise for the atomic bomb team, including the aircrew of the Enola Gay. A half million American homes had been spared the Gold Star flag, including, I'm sure, my own.
Whenever I hear the apologists expressing guilt and shame for A-bombing and ending the war Japan had started (they ignore the cause-effect relation between Pearl Harbor and Nagasaki), I have noted that neither the effete critics nor the puff-adder politicians are among us in the assault landing-craft or the stinking rice paddies of their suggested alternative, "conventional" warfare. Stammering reluctance is obvious and continuous, but they do love to pontificate about the Rights that others, and the Bomb, have bought and preserved for them.
The vanities of ignorance and camouflaged cowardice abound as license for the assertion of virtuous "rights" purchased by the blood of others - those others who have borne the burden and physical expense of Rights whining apologists so casually and self-righteously claim.
At best, these fakers manifest a profound and cryptic ignorance of causal relations, myopic perception, and dull I.Q. At worst, there is a word and description in The Constitution defining those who love the enemy more than they love their own countrymen and their own posterity. Every Yankee Doodle Dandy knows what that word is.
In 1945, America was the only nation in the world with the Bomb and it behaved responsibly and respectfully. It remained so until two among us betrayed it to the Kremlin. Still, this American weapon system has been the prime deterrent to earth's latest model world- tyranny: Seventy years of Soviet collectivist definition, coercion, and domination of individual human beings.
The message is this: Trust Freedom. Remember, tyrants never learn. The restriction of Freedom is the limitation of human choice, and choice is the fulcrum-point of the creative process in human affairs. As earth's choicemaker, it is our human identity on nature's beautiful blue planet and the natural premise of man's free institutions, environments, and respectful relations with one another. Made in the image of our Creator, free men choose, create, and progress - or die.
Free men should not fear the moon-god-crowd oppressor nor choose any of his ways. Recall with a confident Job and a victorious David, "Know ye not that you are in league with the stones of the field?"
Semper Fidelis
Jim Baxter
Sgt. USMC
WW II and Korean War
Job 5:23 Proverbs 3:31 I Samuel 17:40
http://www.choicemaker.net/
By , at
Thu Sep 06, 04:31:00 PM:
Its still amazing that these so called scientists can take few bone fragments and claim that all people are related to apes i mean that crack-pot DONLAD JOHANSON is the one who came out with that silly looking thing he called LUCY i mean these evoltionists are wacky
By , at
Thu Sep 06, 04:43:00 PM:
Thanks for your posting and, especially, thank you for your service Mr. Baxter.
Andrew
By Dawnfire82, at
Thu Sep 06, 07:39:00 PM:
Although I have no idea what it had to do with dead dinosaurs and alternative histories...
spam?
By , at
Thu Sep 06, 08:56:00 PM:
Aunt Mary, please explain to us how, with Africa breaking away from the pack over a period of hundreds of thousands of years, that the dinosaurs will, for the most part, leave Africa alone so that shrews can eventually evolve into humans. With its rich, fecund environment, one would think the area to become Africa would be Dino Heaven and the last place we'd evolve.
George, you're correct. Anything with enough power to carve out the curve in the Gulf would have completely obliterated Mexico.
Birdie, don't be silly. The Bible's a book of morals, not a history book. Taking it as the former, rather than the latter, does not diminish God in the slightest. More for you below.
Dawnfire: Yes, spam of a sort. The exact same article appears to be posted all over the place. Should be removed.
_____________________________________
A few quibbles, TH, and, uh, I'm willing to acknowledge that this isn't your chosen field. :)
"...on this Earth for 165,000,000 years...But their fate was sealed from the beginning."
Well, uh, yeah -- if one believes in Destiny, Kismet, The Fates, and a few other furball theories. :)
"and made the Gulf of Mexico."
(shaking head sadly)
"The resulting cataclysm destroyed the ecology and food web of the entire planet, and all the large species died."
Just curious, TH, but if the entire planet's food web (whatever that is) was "destroyed," how did the smaller animals survive? By eating each other?
Quibble, quibble, quibble. :)
"With the dinosaurs still around, who really thinks that large primates would have evolved as they did?"
We were small shrew-type critters during the age of dinosaurs, not apes. They were still millions of years away.
Because of bandwidth considerations, I'm only going to leave this semi-lengthy video clip up for a few days, but here's the wonderful "history of life" segment from Carl Sagan's "Cosmos".
(It's a WMV file, not set up for streaming, so your browser might want you to download it first. It's only 11 megs, no biggie.)
You listening, Birdie? You complained about the fossil record, and you're correct -- there are huge gaps in the fossil record.
But fossils aren't the only records we have.
You probably noted that he said the dinosaurs "mysteriously" perished 65 million years ago. "Cosmos" was filmed before the iridium layer was found.
"Has humanity's fate also been sealed in the blink of an eye?"
Yes. I read on the NASA site this morning that two asteroids in the Asteroid Belt just collided with each other and, just like the last time this happened, there's a 90% chance that one of them will hit us in approximately 35 million years. There's a plus-or-minus factor of 2 million years due to the difficulty of predicting orbital mechanics, but the estimate's supposed to be close. I suggest you plan ahead.
As far as the article goes, the whole thing's a pile of computer-generated rubbish, no different than the Kyoto models. Here's how the conversation probably went:
"Okay, computer, we've got an asteroid six miles wide. Is there any chance two asteroids in the Asteroid Belt could collide with each other and form such an asteroid?"
"Yes."
"We've done it! Alert the media!"
Since it was discovered, people have always assumed that the most likely origin of the Cretaceous-Tertiary Extinction Event was the Asteroid Belt, and now some article comes out and says, "Hey, everybody, guess what? Computer models show that the asteroid might have come from the Asteroid Belt!," and it's national headlines time.
Due up tomorrow: Our sun is really just another star!
By blogagog, at
Thu Sep 06, 10:26:00 PM:
I have to quibble as well. In fact, all dinosaurs were NOT destroyed in that cataclysm. You would know this if you watched the documentary, 'The Land of the Lost', by Marshal, Will, and Holly.
By TigerHawk, at
Thu Sep 06, 10:35:00 PM:
You guys have no sense of poetry.
By Assistant Village Idiot, at
Thu Sep 06, 11:49:00 PM:
Taleb's The Black Swan and Fooled By Randomness offer a disquieting picture of how unstable actual events are. We prefer a picture of a nice, orderly world in which not only humanity, but ourselves personally were inevitable, or nearly so. It is not merely true that a person traveling in time who killed an ancient butterfly might disappear - never to exist, as the Arthur C. Clarke story goes. A person who killed a butterfly even a thousand years ago might cease to exist.
Our ancestors were much more familiar with the uncertainty of life. Our wealth and science have reduced unpredictability, but nowhere near as much as we imagine.
By ., at
Fri Sep 07, 12:03:00 AM:
Dr. Mercury, I'm not a scientist so I have only a layman's familiarity with evolutionary theory. Correct me if I'm wrong, but it seems that most fossil evidence of dinosaurs is not in Africa. Maybe it's yet to be discovered. But the rain forests would not seem to have been an optimum habitat for the large reptiles. Tight quarters and all that. So I say that they all moseyed off to "greener pastures" which were destined to break away from Pangea. I'm talking off the top of my head here, but Pangea's break up predated the demise of the dinosaurs and the appearance millions years later of our mammal ancestors. I therefore contend that our evolution in Africa would have moved along as it did. Then before you know it we would have exterminated the dinosaurs single handedly as we did the large mammals in Australia. Interesting subject, none the less, and TigerHauk, it's exquisite poetry.
By , at
Fri Sep 07, 12:35:00 AM:
If you listened to those evolutionsists crack-pots you would be told that dinasours did,nt die out but became the birds around us what a load of bull kaka these evolutionists crack-pots like RICHARD DAWKINS and ignorant idiots
By Dawnfire82, at
Fri Sep 07, 08:35:00 AM:
In my experience, the most vehement critics of evolution simply don't understand it. The most common point they raise is something to the effect of, "Well if humans evolved from apes, (they really usually say monkeys) why are there still apes? Shouldn't they all be humans now?"
No.
By , at
Sat Sep 08, 01:29:00 AM:
back some years ago NATIONAL GEORAPHIC nas a bit about so called DINO-BIRD discovered in CHINA it was later proven a fake
