Dinosaurs and the Gravity Problem

Dinosaurs and the Gravity Problem

by Ted Holden

Scientists delight in devising explanations for the great dinosaur extinctions.

But there are several questions which they have failed to even ask, much less tried to answer.

·      Why, for instance, in all of the time claimed to have passed since the dinosaur extinctions, has nothing ever re-evolved to the sizes of the large dinosaurs?

·      If such sizes worked for creatures which ruled the Earth for tens of millions of years, then why would not some species of elephant or rhinoceros have evolved to such a size again?

·      What kinds of problems, if any, would sauropod sizes entail in our world as it is presently constituted?

·      Could it be that some aspect of our environment might have to be massively different for such creatures to exist at all?

A careful study of the sizes of these antediluvian creatures, and what it would take to deal with such sizes in our world, has led me to believe that the super animals of Earth's past could not live in our present world at all.

A look at sauropod dinosaurs as we know them today requires that we relegate the brontosaur, once thought to be one of the largest sauropods, to welterweight or at most middleweight status. Fossils found in the 1970's now dwarf this creature.

Both the brachiosaur and the supersaur were larger than the brontosaur, and the ultrasaur appears to have dwarfed them all.¹ The ultrasaur is now estimated to have weighed 180 tons.²

A comparison of dinosaur lifting requirements to human lifting capabilities is enlightening, though there might be objections to doing so. One objection that might be raised is that animal muscle tissue was somehow "better" than that of humans. This, however, is known not to be the case.

According to Knut Schmidt-Nielson, author of Scaling: Why is Animal Size So Important?, the maximum stress or force that can be exerted by any muscle is independent of body-size and is the same for mouse or elephant muscle.³

Another objection might be that sauropods were aquatic creatures. But nobody believes that anymore; they had no adaptation for aquatic life, their teeth show wear and tear which does not come from eating soft aquatic vegetation, and trackways show them walking on land with no difficulty.

A final objection might be that dinosaurs were somehow more "efficient" than top human athletes. This, however, goes against all observed data. As creatures get bulkier, they become less efficient; the layers of thick muscle in limbs begin to get in each other's way and bind to some extent. For this reason, scaled lifts for the super-heavyweight athletes are somewhat lower than for, say, the 200-pound athletes.

By "scaled lift" I mean a lift record divided by the two-thirds power of the athlete's body weight.

As creatures get larger, weight, which is proportional to volume, goes up in proportion to the cube of the increase in dimension. Strength, on the other hand, is known to be roughly proportional to the cross-section of muscle for any particular limb and goes up in proportion to the square of the increase in dimension. This is the familiar "square-cube" problem.⁴

Consider the case of Bill Kazmaier, the king of the power lifters in the 1970s and 1980s.

Power lifters are, in my estimation, the strongest of all athletes; they concentrate on the three most difficult total-body lifts, i.e. bench press, squat, and dead-lift. They work out many hours a day and, it is fairly common knowledge, use food to flavor their anabolic steroids. No animal the same weight as one of these men could be presumed to be as strong.

Kazmaier was able to do squats and dead lifts with weights between 1,000 and 1,100 pounds on a bar, assuming he was fully warmed up.
 

 

Standing Up at 70,000 pounds

Any animal has to be able to lift its own weight off the ground, i.e. stand up, with no more difficulty than Kazmaier experiences doing a 1,000-pound squat.

Consider, however, what would happen to Mr. Kazmaier, were he to be scaled up to 70,000 pounds, the weight commonly given for the brontosaur. Kazmaier's maximum effort at standing, fully warmed up, assuming the 1,000 pound squat, was 1,340 pounds (1,000 pounds for the bar and 340 pounds for himself). The scaled maximum lift would be 47,558 pounds (the solution to: 1,340/340.667 = x/70,000.667).

Clearly, he would not be able to lift his weight off the ground!

A sauropod dinosaur had four legs you might say; so what happens if Mr. Kazmaier uses arms and legs at 70,000 pounds? The truth is that the squat uses almost every muscle in the athlete's body very nearly to the limits, but in this case, it does not even matter.

A near maximum bench press effort for Mr. Kazmaier would fall around 600 pounds. This merely changes the 1,340 pounds to 1,940 pounds in the equation above, and the answer comes out as 68,853 pounds. Even using all muscles, some more than once, the strongest man who we know anything about would not be able to lift his own weight off the ground at 70,000 pounds.

To believe then, that a brontosaur could stand at 70,000 pounds, one has to believe that a creature whose weight was mostly gut and the vast digestive mechanism involved in processing huge amounts of low-value foodstuffs was, somehow, stronger than an almost entirely muscular creature its size, far better trained and conditioned than any grazing animal.

That is not only ludicrous in the case of the brontosaur, but the calculations only become more absurd when you try to scale up to the supersaur and ultrasaur at their sizes.

How heavy can an animal get to be in our world, then? How heavy would Mr. Kazmaier be at the point at which the square-cube problem made it as difficult for him to stand up as it is for him to do 1,000-pound squats at his present weight of 340 pounds?

The answer is 20,803 pounds (the solution to: 1,340/340.667 = x/x.667). In reality, elephants do not appear to get quite to that point.

Christopher McGowan, curator of vertebrate paleontology at the Royal Ontario Museum, claims that a Toronto Zoo specimen was the largest in North America at 14,300 pounds,⁵ and Smithsonian personnel once informed me that the gigantic bush elephant specimen which appears at their Museum of Natural History weighed around 8 tons.
 

Sauropod Dinosaurs' Necks

A study of the sauropod dinosaurs' long neck further underscores the problem these creatures would have living under current gravitational conditions. Scientists who study sauropod dinosaurs now claim that they held their heads low, because they could not have gotten blood to their brains had they held them high.⁶

McGowan mentions the fact that a giraffe's blood pressure - which at 200-to-300 mm Hg (millimeters of mercury) is far higher than that of any other animal-would probably rupture the vascular system of any other animal. The giraffe's blood pressure is maintained by thick arterial walls and by a very tight skin that apparently acts like a jet pilot's pressure suit. A giraffe's head might reach to 20 feet.

How a sauropod might have gotten blood to its brain at 50 or 60 feet is the real question.

"Gravity is a pervasive force in the environment and has dramatically shaped the evolution of plants and animals," notes Harvey Lillywhite, a zoologist at the University of Florida at Gainesville.

As some land animals evolved large body sizes,

"cardiovascular specializations were needed to help them withstand the weight of blood in long vertical vessels. Perhaps nowhere in the history of life were these challenges greater than among the gigantic, long-necked sauropods"

For a Barosaurus to hold its head high, Lillywhite has calculated that its heart,

"must have generated pressures at least six times greater than those of humans and three to four times greater than those of giraffes." ⁷

Faced with the same dilemma, University of Pennsylvania geologist Peter Dodson remarked that while the Brachiosaurus was built like a giraffe and may have fed like one, most sauropods were built quite differently.

"At the base of the neck," Dodson writes, "a sauropod's vertebral spines, unlike those of a giraffe, were weak and low and did not provide leverage for the muscles required to elevate the head in a high position.

Furthermore, the blood pressure required to pump blood up to the brain, thirty or more feet in the air, would have placed extraordinary demands on the heart and would seemingly have placed the animal at severe risk of a stroke, an aneurysm, or some other circulatory disaster." ⁸

Within recorded history, Central Asians have tried to breed hunting eagles for size and strength, and have not gotten beyond 25 pounds or thereabouts. Even at that weight they are able to take off only with the greatest difficulty.

Something was vastly different in the pre-flood world.

The only way to keep the required blood pressure "reasonable," Dodson goes on to add,

is "if sauropods fed with the neck extended just a little above heart level, say from ground level up to fifteen feet..."

One problem with this solution is that the good leaves were, in all likelihood, above the 20-foot mark; an ultrasaur that could not raise its head above 20 feet would probably starve.

Dodson, it should also be noted, entirely neglects the dilemma of the brachiosaur. And there is another problem, which is worse. Try holding your arm out horizontally for even a few minutes, and then imagine your arm being 40 feet long.

Given a scale model and a weight figure for the entire dinosaur, it is possible to use volume-based techniques to estimate weight for a sauropod's neck. An ultrasaur is generally thought to be a near cousin - if not simply a very large specimen - of the brachiosaur.

The technique, then, is to measure the volume of water which the sauropod's neck (severed at the shoulders and filled with bondo or auto-body putty) displaces, versus the volume which the entire brachiosaur displaces, and simply extrapolate to the 360,000-pound figure for the ultrasaur. I did this using a Larami Corporation model of a brachiosaur, which is to scale.

To make a long story short, the neck weighs 28,656 pounds, and the center of gravity of that neck is 15 feet from the shoulders, the neck itself being 38 feet long.

This equates to 429,850 foot-pounds of torque.

If we assume the sauropod could lift its head at least as easily as a human with an 18-inch neck can move his head against a neck-exercise machine set to 130 pounds, then the sauropod would require the muscular strength of a neck 17.4 feet in diameter.

With a more reasonable assumption of effort, equivalent to the human using a 50-pound setting, the sauropod would require a neck of over 20 feet in diameter. But the sauropod's neck, at its widest, apparently measured about ten feet by seven feet where it joined the shoulders, then narrowed rapidly to about six or seven feet in diameter over the remainder of its length.

McGowan and others claim that the head and neck were supported by a dorsal ligament and not muscles, but we know of no living creature using ligaments to support a body structure which its available musculature cannot sustain.

In all likelihood, sauropods, in our gravity at least, could neither hold their heads up nor out.
 

Antediluvian Flying Creatures

The large flying creatures of the past would also have had difficulties in our present-day gravity.

In the antediluvian world, 350-pound flying creatures soared in skies which no longer permit flying creatures above 30 pounds or so. Modern birds of prey, like the Argentinian teratorn, weighing 170 to 200 pounds, with 30-foot wingspans, also flew. Within recorded history, Central Asians have been trying to breed hunting eagles for size and strength, and have not gotten them beyond 25 pounds or thereabouts. Even at that weight they are able to take off only with the greatest difficulty.

Something was vastly different in the pre-flood world.

Nothing much larger than 30 pounds or so flies anymore, and those creatures, albatrosses and a few of the largest condors and eagles, are marginal. Albatrosses, notably, are called "goonie birds" by sailors because of the extreme difficulty they experience taking off and landing, their landings being badly controlled crashes, and this despite long wings made for maximum lift.

In remote times, the felt effect of the force of gravity on Earth must have been much less for such giant creatures to be able to fly. No flying creature has since re-evolved into anything of such size, and the one or two birds that have retained this size have forfeited flight, their wings becoming vestigial.

Adrian Desmond, in his book The Hot-Blooded Dinosaurs, has a good deal to say about some of the problems the Pteranodon faced at just 40-to-50 pounds. Scientists once thought this pterosaur was the largest creature that ever flew.

The bird's great size and negligible weight must have made for a rather fragile creature.

"It is easy to imagine that the paper-thin tubular bones supporting the gigantic wings would have made landing dangerous," writes Desmond.

"How could the creature have alighted without shattering all of its bones? How could it have taken off in the first place? It was obviously unable to flap 12-foot wings strung between straw-thin tubes. Many larger birds have to achieve a certain speed by running and flapping before they can take off and others have to produce a wing beat speed approaching hovering in order to rise.

To achieve hovering with a 23-foot wingspread, Pteranodon would have required 220 pounds of flight muscles as efficient as those in humming birds. But it had reduced its musculature to about 8 pounds, so it is inconceivable that Pteranodon could have taken off actively." ⁹

Since the Pteranodon could not flap its wings, the only flying it could ever do, Desmond concludes, was as a glider.

It was, he says,

"the most advanced glider the animal kingdom has produced."¹⁰

Desmond notes a fairly reasonably modus operandi for the Pteranodon.

Not only did the bird have a throat pouch like a pelican but its remains were found with fish fossils, which seems to suggest a pelican-like existence, soaring over the waves and snapping up fish without landing.

If so, then the Pteranodon should have been practically immune from the great extinctions of past ages. Large animals would have the greatest difficulty getting to high ground and other safe havens at times of floods and other global catastrophes. But high places safe from flooding were always there, oceans were always there, and fish were always there.

The Pteranodon's way of life should have been impervious to all mishap.

There is one other problem. The Pteranodon was not the largest bird.

The giant Teratorn finds of Argentina were not known when Desmond's book was written. News of this bird's existence first appeared in the 1980s. The Terotorn was a 160-to-200 pound eagle with a 27-foot wingspan, a modern bird whose existence involved, among other things, flapping wings and aerial maneuvers.

But how so? How could it even have flown?

How large can an animal be and still fly?

"With each increase in size, and therefore also weight," writes Desmond, "a flying animal needs a concomitant increase in power (to beat the wings in a flapper and to hold and maneuver them in a glider), but power is supplied by muscles which themselves add still more weight to the structure.

The larger a flyer becomes the disproportionately weightier it grows by the addition of its own power supply. There comes a point when the weight is just too great to permit the machine to remain airborne. Calculations bearing on size and power suggested that the maximum weight that a flying vertebrate can attain is about 50 pounds..."

It is for this reason that scientists believed Pteranodon and its slightly larger but lesser known Jordanian ally Titanopteryx were the largest flying animals of all time.

The experience from our present world coincides well with this and, in fact, don't go quite that high. The biggest flying creatures which we actually see are albatrosses, geese, and the like, at 30 to 35 pounds.

The Pteranodon's reign as the largest flying creature of all time actually fell in the early 1970s when Douglas Lawson of the University of California found partial skeletons of three ultra-large pterosaurs in Big Bend National Park in Texas. This discovery forced scientists to rethink their ideas on the maximum size permissible in flying vertebrates.

The immense size of the Big Bend pterosaurs may be gauged by noting that the humerus or upper arm bones of these creatures is fully twice the length of Pteranodon's. Lawson estimated the wingspan for this living glider at over fifty feet.

The Big Bend pterosaurs were not fishers. Their remains were found in rocks that were formed some 250 miles inland and nowhere near any lake deposits. This led Lawson to suggest that these birds were carrion feeders, gorging themselves on rotting mounds of dismembered dinosaur flesh.

But this hypothesis raised numerous questions in author Desmond's mind.

"How they could have taken to the air after gorging themselves is something of a puzzle," he wonders.

"Wings of such an extraordinary size could not have been flapped when the animal was grounded. Since the pterosaurs were unable to run in order to launch themselves they must have taken off vertically.

Pigeons are only able to take-off vertically by reclining their bodies and clapping the wings in front of them; as flappers, the Texas pterosaurs would have needed very tall stilt-like legs to raise the body enough to allow the 24-foot wings to clear the ground.

The main objection, however, still rests in the lack of adequate musculature for such an operation."¹²

The only solution seems to be that they lifted passively off the ground by the wind. But this situation, notes Desmond, would leave these ungainly Brobdignagian pterosaurs vulnerable to attack when grounded.

While Desmond mentions a number of ancillary problems here, any of which would throw doubt on the pterosaur's ability to exist as mentioned, he neglects the biggest question of all: the calculations that say 50 pounds are the maximum weight have not been shown to be in error; we have simply discovered larger creatures. Much larger.

This is what is called a dilemma.

Those who had estimated a large wingspan for the Big Bend bird were immediately attacked by aeronautical engineers.

"Such dimensions broke all the rules of flight engineering," wrote Colorado paleontologist Robert T. Bakker, in The Dinosaur Heresies, "a creature that large would have broken its arm bones if it tried to fly..."¹³

Subsequently, the proponents of a large wingspan were forced to back off somewhat, since the complete wing bones had not been discovered.

But Bakker believes these pterosaurs really did have wingspans of over 60 feet and that they simply flew despite our not comprehending how. The problem is ours, he says, and he proposes no solution.

So much for the idea of anything re-evolving into the sizes of the flying creatures of the antediluvian world. What about the possibility of man breeding something like a Teratorn? Could man actively breed even a 50-pound eagle?

Berkuts are the biggest of eagles.

And Atlanta, an eagle that Sam Barnes, one of England's top falconers in the 1970s, brought back to Wales from Kirghiz, Russia, is, at 26 pounds in flying trim, as large as they ever get.¹⁴ These eagles have been bred specifically for size and ferocity for many centuries. They are the most prized of all possessions amongst nomads, and are the imperial hunting bird of the Turko-Mongol peoples.

The only reason Barnes was allowed to bring her back is that Atlanta had a disease for which no cure was available in Kirghiz and was near to death. A Berkut of Atlanta's size, Barnes was told, would normally be worth more than a dozen of the most beautiful women in Kirghiz.

Elephants are simply too heavy to run in our world. The best they can manage is a kind of a fast walk. Mammoths were as big and bigger than the largest elephants, however, and Pleistocene art clearly shows them galloping.
 

The killing powers of a big eagle are out of proportion to its size. Berkuts are normally flown at wolves, deer, and other large prey. Barnes witnessed Atlanta killing a deer in Kirghiz, and was told that she had killed a black wolf a season earlier. Mongols and other nomads raise sheep and goats, and obviously have no love for wolves.

A wolf might be little more than a day at the office for Atlanta with her 11-inch talons, however, a wolf is a big deal for an average-sized Berkut at 15-to-20 pounds. Obviously, there would be an advantage to having the birds be bigger, i.e. to having the average Berkut weigh 25 pounds, and for a large one to weigh 40-to-50 pounds. It has never been done, however, despite all the efforts and funds poured into the enterprise since the days of Genghis Khan.

The breeding of Berkuts has continued apace from that day to this, but the Berkuts have still not gotten any bigger than 25 pounds or so.¹⁵

It is worth recalling here the difficulty which increasingly larger birds experience in getting airborne from flat ground. Atlanta was powerful enough in flight, but she was not easily able to take off from flat ground. This could spell disaster in the wild. A bird of prey will often land with prey, and if take-off from flat ground to avoid trouble is not possible, the bird's life becomes imperiled.

A bird bigger than Atlanta with her 10-foot wingspan, like a Teratorn with a 27-foot wingspan and weighing 170 pounds, would simply not Survive.
 

Assorted Other Evidence

There are other categories of evidence, derived from a careful analysis of antediluvian predators, to show that gravitational conditions in the distant past were not the same as they are today.

It is well known, for example, that elephant-sized animals cannot sustain falls, and that elephants spend their entire lives avoiding them.

For an elephant, the slightest tumble can break bones and/or destroy enough tissue to prove fatal. Predators, however, live by tackling and tumbling with prey. One might think that this consideration would preclude the existence of any predator too large to sustain falls. Weight estimates for the tyrannosaurs, however, include specimens heavier than any elephant.

That appears to be a contradiction.

Moreover, elephants are simply too heavy to run in our world. As is well known, they manage a kind of a fast walk. They cannot jump, and anything resembling a gully stops them cold. Mammoths were as big and bigger than the largest elephants, however, and Pleistocene art clearly shows them galloping.

Finally, there is the Utahraptor. Recently found in Utah, this creature is a 20-foot, 1,500-pound version of a Velociraptor.¹⁶

The creature apparently ran on the balls of its two hind feet, on two toes in fact, the third toe carrying a 12-inch claw for disemboweling prey. This suggests a very active lifestyle. Very few predators appear to be built for attacking prey notably larger than themselves; the Utahraptor appears to be such a case.

In our world, of course, 1,500-pound toe dancers do not exist. The only example we have of a 1,500-pound land predator is the Kodiak bear, the lumbering gait and mannerisms of which are familiar to us all.

And so, over and over again, this same kind of dilemma-things which cannot happen in our world having been the norm in the antediluvian world.

From http://www.bibliotecapleyades.net/ciencia/ciencia_dinosaurs01.htm

From Reality Sandwich @ http://www.realitysandwich.com/mushroom_gnosis where there is more!

New Illuminati comments: The authors posit one explanation at the above site. However, Expanding Earth theory seems to provide a more pertinent device for lower gravity in earlier epochs.

Xtra Images – http://www.bearfabrique.org/Catastrophism/sauropods/bookimage.jpg

http://dinosaurtheory.com/brachiosaurus.gif 

http://www.bautforum.com/attachment.php?attachmentid=13099&d=1299606629 

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Extinction of Humankind?

Extinction of Humankind?

 

“At this point 29 percent of fish and seafood species have collapsed — that is, their catch has declined by 90 percent. It is a very clear trend, and it is accelerating. If the long-term trend continues, all fish and seafood species are projected to collapse within my lifetime — by 2048.”

~ Dr. Boris Worm of Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, reported at discovery.com - Giant jellyfish have already replaced the Japanese fishery.

This is not a particularly cheerful essay. It is about the probability of man’s long term survival. Just how much longer will man be around on planet earth? Man is a relative newcomer to the planet, but gives all signs he will be a bust, and will soon be gone.

 

Our Heritage

Reading about our ancestors, you have to marvel at how they persisted through extreme hardships. Man is an adaptable animal that managed to survive from the arctic to the equator, in deserts and on the oceans. We have even survived ice ages.
We lived in small groups where everyone knew each other, and where your loyalty was to the group. There was no need ever to plan more than a year ahead.
Yet, even before we invented technology, we stripped the forests of Greece bare and denuded her soils. The fabled Cedars of Lebanon were gone long before the chainsaw was invented.

 

Our Predicament

Mankind faces a series of unprecedented threats. He is not capable of dealing with them because they overwhelm his here and now focus. They require thinking of the world as a whole. They require considering the effects on generations to come, not just the next quarter bottom line. I will consider only four of dozens of major problems threatening mankind: oil depletion, germ warfare, global warming and nuclear war.

 

Oil Depletion

Mankind today depends on technology and oil for the green revolution to feed her teeming billions. Oil is used to make fertilizers, pesticides and fuels for farm machinery and food processing. Without that, the population of the earth will have collapse back to under a billion — what it was before these things were invented. According to Scientific American, by 2020 the flow of oil will have reduced to half what it was in 2000. The price will far more than double, effectively cutting off the poorer half of the world from having any. There is hope some new technology will help fill the oil-gap, but so far it is just a trickle. However disruptive oil depletion may be, it is not extinction.

 

Germ Warfare

Mankind has discovered how to create life, molecule by molecule. Even an undergraduate geneticist can cook up a new form of AIDS or polio. The very first thing man did with this new found knowledge was to create super bugs for germ warfare — e.g. innoculation-resistant smallpox. If these pathogens are ever let loose in error, by terrorists or by armies, they may kill billions, but that is still not extinction. However, as understanding of human physiology increases, it is only a matter of time until we learn to create pathogens completely lethal to everyone. That is extinction. Humans, genetically, are almost clones. We are much more susceptible than other species to this sort of attack.
The USA and Russia foolishly did the research to make it easy for every two-bit terrorist to destroy a city.

 

Global Warming

Mankind is embarking on a strange ecological experiment. Over a couple of centuries, man is burning the carbon accumulated over millions of years by plants. The CO₂ levels are now at the level of the Permian extinction. There have been two mass extinctions in earth history, the Permian, 230 million years ago, was the worst. 70% of all species were lost. It was caused by natural global warming when volcanoes released greenhouse gases. (The other more familiar to most people was the more recent KT Cretaceous-Tertiary Mass Extinction event, 65 million years ago. It was caused when an asteroid plunged into the earth at Chicxulub Mexico wiping out the dinosaurs and half of earth’s species.)
We are re-experiencing the same global warming conditions that triggered the more devastating Permian extinction, only this time it is man made. When it gets too hot, plants die. When it gets too hot and dry, massive fires ravage huge areas. When plants die, insects and herbivores die. When insects die, even heat-resistant plant’s don’t get pollinated and die. Birds die without insects to eat. Carnivores die without herbivores to eat, all triggered by what seems so innocuous — heat. Similarly, in the oceans, when they get just a few degrees too warm, corals expel their symbiotic algae and die soon thereafter. When coral reefs die, the fish that live on them die, triggering extinction chains. Satellites can chart the loss of vegetation over the planet.
We are losing 4 species per hour, a rate on the same scale as the Permian and KT extinction events. Man has no ability to live without the support of other species. We are committing suicide and killing the family of life on earth along with us. The question is, will we wipe ourselves out along with the rest of the planet’s ecology? Man is very adaptable. He will destroy his food supply on land and in the oceans as a result, but some people will survive. That is not complete extinction.

 

Nuclear War

Mankind has discovered how to harness the atom. The first thing he did with that knowledge was vaporize two Japanese cities. Now he has stockpiles of weapons capable of killing everyone on earth many times over. Extinction becomes a distinct possibility. All it takes in one person in the next 500 years with access to trigger a war, and it is all over. Perhaps a handful of humans might survive in some remote Amazon jungle, but man will have put himself back to the stone age level of culture. Everything we have achieved will be lost.
John Kennedy estimated that the odds were between one in three, and one in two, that he would start a nuclear war during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Except on Star Trek, you can’t repeatedly do things that dangerous and live to tell about them. The odds eventually catch up with you.
Even after nuclear war, some life will survive. We humans may all die, but some species would survive, and evolution would continue its slow pace, eventually bringing a new crop of creatures to earth.

 

Nanites

To err is human, but to really foul things up requires a computer.
~ Farmer’s Almanac , 1978

This may sound like science fiction, but in the not too distant future we will be creating microscopic robots called nanites by the bucketful. Eventually we will create self-replicating nanites, ones that build more copies of themselves all on their own. It is not hard too imagine a runaway overpopulation process, much like Mickey Mouse in the Sorcerer’s Apprentice. If anybody ever slips up in “birth control” for these critters they could bury us all alive in great grey goo as they turned everything on the surface of the planet into still more nanites.
This is not my private paranoid fantasy. It is shared by distinguished futurists such as Raymond Kurzweil.

Lesser Assaults

"If builders built buildings the way programmers write programs, then the first woodpecker that came along would destroy civilization."
~ Weinberg’s Second Law (born: 1933 age: 77)

Technological societies are so finely tuned that they can collapse at the tiniest provocation. There are only three days worth of food in the supermarkets. Terrorists can blow up high voltage transmission lines, subways or freeways. A single accident on the Mississippi river fouled up gasoline production in the USA for a month.

Modern farming exposes the soil to erosion. We have lost more soil in the last century than took hundreds of thousands of years to build up. You can’t grow crops without soil. Every year Kansas loses 2 to 8 tons of soil per acre of farmland. Yet, we refuse to address the problem.
Global warming will cause a dust bowl in the corn belt of the USA, ending its agricultural abundance.

 

Corporate Capitalism

Man is naturally greedy and short-sighted, but the invention of corporate capitalism (as compared with free-market capitalism) has magnified that tendency. We have created powerful institutions who bribe government officials to do things that help the short term profit of companies, but which hurt the health, safety of citizens and long term profit of corporations.
Corporations are pseudo people with psychotic personalities, required by law to be devoid of conscience. They are not permitted to be concerned with the interest of the stakeholders: the employees, the customers, the people living where the corporation does business. By law they must consider only profit for the shareholders.
They will do things like bribe the government to allow them to dump pollutants such as pig manure into the water, then fob the cost of cleaning them up on the public, rather than building them into the cost of the product, the way you would in a true free-market economy. Lack of care of the soil is good for short term profit, but soil loss is disastrous for the crops of future generations.
The problem is, these corporations are actively working as hard as they can against the public interest. For example:

• They are trying to increase oil consumption.
• They are trying to increase research into ever more lethal germ warfare.
• They are trying to increase the amount of greenhouse gasses released into the air.
• They are trying to increase the sales of nuclear weapons and home and abroad.
• They are trying to discourage space exploration in favour of military spending where there is no clear deliverable.

Even without these corporate enemies of planet earth, our planet has little chance of success. Yet their power grows daily through phony free trade agreements like NAFTA and WTO.

Jehovism

In the Jehovist (extended Judeo-Christian) family of religions I include, Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Mormonism, Christian Science and Jehovah’s Witnesses. I might exclude the Quakers. The Jehovists are weak in preserving life on planet earth. This anti-life, anti-earth attitude has several roots:

• In Genesis is the source of the belief that man is a special animal with dominion over all other species to do with as he pleases. Jehovists are so vain as to imagine the creator of the universe prefers habitually take the shape of a primate on an obscure planet in a remote corner of the Milky Way, named Homo Sapiens. They pretend not to notice the other intelligent more peaceful species on earth, the elephants, dolphins and whales.
• The emphasis on the unimportance of the physical world as unreal, just a test for the afterlife, a temporary world until Christ returns, a source of temptation from the spiritual life and the domain of Satan.
• Jehovists distinguish themselves from other religions that honour the earth, trees, rivers etc. Jehovists are proud of the fact they do not honour the environment. They consider that sacrilegious.
• The precise rules for various mandatory blood animal sacrifices consume most of Leviticus.
• The stance that non-believers are inferior beings whose life has no value. Even people in slightly variant sects treat each other as enemies.
• Jehovah himself is depicted as violent, bloodthirsty, arbitrary and unjust. How can you expect his followers to behave any better?

In contrast, the Jains and Buddhists foster a reverence for all life. They are supposed to avoid hurting even insects. So what does this have to do with extinction? As science creates more and more ways for even one man to wipe out the entire planet, you need extreme taboos to stop people from doing that. Jehovists don’t have anywhere near enough inhibition.
From my point of view, they are like Vikings who have accepted violence and destruction as perfectly normal. They don’t even notice what they are doing. Everywhere they have spread they have stripped the planet bare, polluted its waters, overpopulated, made war, enslaved others, exuded greenhouse gasses with abandon, squandered the resources of earth in conspicuous consumption, exterminated species after species and generally behaved like the proverbial savages they claim everyone else to be. They are far too vengeful to be entrusted with dangerous tools like the atom and biotechnology. Too bad. They already have them…

Do We Deserve To Live?

Mankind is like a monkey. He is clever but not wise. It is only a matter of time until he kills himself with his cleverness and lack of caution.

Man has little concern for other species on the ecological health of the planet as a whole. He ignores natural limits, simply because they are inconvenient. He imagines his economic activity can grow without limit, he can burn oil without limit, he can pollute without limit, he can extract resources from the earth without limit.
He is fiercely loyal to his country, his company, his team, his tribe, his family, no matter what evil things they have done.
Only a tiny fraction of the planet’s inhabitants see themselves as citizens of planet earth first, and of some particular country second. Only a tiny fraction of the planet’s inhabitants care about people outside their immediate families. Only a handful of the planet’s inhabitants think deeply about the effect they will have on generations to come. It seem unlikely these altruistic survival traits will spread in time. Hanging on tenaciously to the outmoded us-vs-them mentality and short-term greed seals our doom. We deserve to die.
It may be a Good Thing™ that man blows himself up before he develops the technology to destroy an entire galaxy.

The Escape

Once man has colonised several planets, one planet could go up in a nuclear conflagration without destroying the rest. The survivors would be stonily shocked into giving up such foolish weapons. Until that point, if earth goes, man goes.
Unfortunately, exploration of space has taken a back seat to military exploitation of resource-rich third world nations.
The other escape would be nuclear disarmament. Man is too stupid. He would rather see everyone die than his neighbour potentially take advantage of him. The USA wants its nukes not for defence, but to intimidate and bully the nations of the earth to bolster its economic exploitation. It won’t give up that privileged position.

 

Rays of Hope

Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful committed citizens can change the world; indeed it is the only thing that ever has.
~ Margaret Mead (born: 1901-12-16 died: 1978-11-15 at age: 76)

Young people are much clearer about man’s fragility than their elders. If we are lucky, the old farts like George W. Bush will die off from cholesterol poisoning before they have totally destroyed the planet.
Computers with the memory capacity and computing capacity of the human brain are due about 2020. They will do some things amazingly better than humans, just as now. Most likely, they will run circles around us in logical thinking. If we are very lucky, they may be very good at simulating the effects of various policies, and will be able to explain with 3D graphics exactly what the effects of the politicians’ actions will be. If they are sufficiently good salesmen, they may save earth. In the process though, we will have become obsolete ourselves.
I have one other thread of hope. Back in 1969, I was the only person on earth I knew of who felt that gays should be treated with respect. Even my fellow gays seemed to think they deserved contempt. I started my little gay lib project knowing it was completely futile. I thought, even if I did seven lectures a week and managed to change everyone’s mind in the audience, it would make only a tiny dent. Yet within three years we had the first gay rights legislation in British Columbia. Perhaps it was not just a co-incidence. I discuss this in my essay on quantum miracles. It may be your personal choice whether you live in a world where man goes extinct or in one where he prevails.

Overwhelmed

The natural reaction of someone reading this essay is to go into overwhelmed mode. This is just too much bad news to digest at once. People have their own various techniques for dealing with it. The most common is denial. Gloom and doom must automatically be false. Folks will happily ignore the hard facts of global warming, soil erosion and aquifer depletion, and glom onto any unscientific crackpot like Bjørn Lomborg or George Bush so long as he paints a rosy picture. Some will comfort themselves with wishful thinking. “God won’t let things get that bad.” totally forgetting God has been quite happy to permit even worse suffering in past. Some will simply put these issues out of mind.
The problem is this denial makes the problems worse. Not only to people fail to take action, they actively interfere with others taking action. So to be optimally effective, you must upset and worry.

Summary

It seems unlikely man will survive the next hundred years. The question then becomes, how many other species will man take down with him. Will the dolphins, elephants and whales have to die too?
Does this mean you should just give up and die right now? No. Butterflies and roses live only a day, yet they have value in the moment. If you were on a sports team playing a much stronger team. Would you give up just because the odds were against you? Of course not. Here the stakes are much higher than any sporting event, namely the survival of our species and most of the other species of our planet.
 By Roedy Green

From http://mindprod.com/environment/extinction.html

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