Natalia.
His hypothesis is plausible and interesting. He writes well. Harry ****************************** Harry Pollard Henry George School of Los Angeles Box 655 Tujunga CA 91042 (818) 352-4141 ****************************** From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Darryl or Natalia Sent: Thursday, February 28, 2008 6:30 PM To: Ed Weick Cc: futurework; [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: [Futurework] Where do we go from wherever we are? I read an interesting theory by an ex-NASA scientist on the disappearance of the dinosaurs, the correlation of earth and moon rotation, the missing continents, Pangea remnants, why it took so long for life to appear on land, and a very intriguing bit about angular momentum. and thought the guy raised good points. Though many may not concur, here's an interesting read: http://www.brojon.org/frontpage/WHAT_REALLY_KILLED_THE_DINOS AURS.html Enjoy! Natalia Ed Weick wrote: Hello All, I haven't been very active on the list recently because I was immersed in a discussion of the origins of life with a friend. He had sent me a paper by Stephen Jay Gould, the American paleontologist, and I found one of the things the paper said rather mind-bending: "... the subsequent history of animal life amounts to little more than variations on anatomical themes established during the Cambrian explosion within five million years. Three billion years of unicellularity, followed by five million years of intense creativity and then capped by more than 500 million years of variation on set anatomical themes can scarcely be read as a predictable, inexorable or continuous trend toward progress or increasing complexity." I recall reading somewhere else that the Earth is five billion years old and that during its first billion years or so there was no life, though something inanimate was crunching away at the Earth's iron-oxide rocks, thereby releasing oxygen and creating an atmosphere. We have reason to be grateful to whatever it was. What Gould says suggests that the initial billion years was then followed by three and a half billion years of single celled creatures swimming about in what I picture as stygian seas. Then, some five hundred million years ago, there was an explosion of multi-cellular life which lasted some five million years. All of the animal life that followed was based on the prototypes developed during that brief period. So far so good, but not everything was pleasant after that initial surge. In fact, things were most uncertain. Mass extinctions occurred, as during the Permian, some 260 million years ago, the End Cretaceous period, some 70 million years ago (end of the dinosaurs), and the Holocene, the period in which we live. There have also been many "minor" extinctions. One of the most recent occurred only about eleven thousand years ago and extinguished large mammals such as saber-toothed cats, mastodons, wooly mammoths, huge ground sloths, short-faced bears, and dire wolves. Our species, Homo Sapiens, contributed to this extinction via deforestation, agricultural practices, overhunting, and other activities, all of which grown to a much grander scale since then. All of this has made me feel more than a little uncertain. While, except in the form of birds, I'd rather not have dinosaurs around, they probably felt as smug about their world as we do about ours. They were kings of the world, just as we are. While the conventional wisdom is that they were extinguished because a huge meteor hit the Earth, I've read that they were already well on their way out before that event. It's at least possible that their voracity had greatly diminished their resource base, and perhaps they were continually battling each other over territory. We aren't like that though, thank God, so there's some hope. Ed _____ _______________________________________________ Futurework mailing list Futurework@fes.uwaterloo.ca http://fes.uwaterloo.ca/mailman/listinfo/futurework _____ --- avast! Antivirus: Inbound message clean. Virus Database (VPS): 080227-0, 02/27/2008 Tested on: 2/28/2008 5:56:24 PM avast! - copyright (c) 1988-2008 ALWIL Software. http://www.avast.com _____ avast! Antivirus <http://www.avast.com> : Outbound message clean. Virus Database (VPS): 080228-0, 02/28/2008 Tested on: 2/28/2008 6:30:07 PM avast! - copyright (c) 1988-2008 ALWIL Software.
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