Dinos, Stars and Other Dangers

I'm still on a cloud about our first broadcast Thursday, and in a few hours we'll have another. So where do I go? Here of course, to yammer about my favorite topic: the universe. I better turn on my alarm, just in case I miss my own show lol.

And if you want to hear us at 9 pm EST here's our site just click in and you'll hear the broadcast immediately - we put in a link directly to the radio broadcast, you might enjoy it. NOW! Back to the skies:

If a star (not ours, not Sol) lost its fuel and went supernova, the radiation would kill all life here on earth, yes? And perhaps some forms of lower life would survive, marine life perhaps, and small mammals - sound familiar? Kind of like the last extinction called the KT (that's the dino extinction name for short, the actual name is End Cretaceous-Tertiary). But it's the same thing - something killed off those impossible-sized creatures. I've looked at alot of choices, and discovered the answer for me is, it was a combination of 3 cataclismic events befalling the planet.

It may've begun with the smallest of killers: microbes. As these reptiles ate and drank from the same places, including eating each other, and as the water receded, this dangerous creature we sometimes call worms, would've laid its eggs in the body cavities of the dinos, causing havoc with their immune and digestive system. It would've weakened, sickened and eventually killed off many reptilian species.Another killer was the volcanism existing at the time, bursting magma into the air, causing an early winter, a loss of vegetation, acid rain, everything that mega-volcanoes kill. That includes life, and the largest are the most susceptible arent' they. When you're as big as a big house you have to eat constantly, move constantly, and you can't procreate that often - I'm thinking of today's equivalent, the elephant. Very similar. It's not easy being big. It's harder still when your world is dying around you.

Why would it be dying? Well we know "something" slammed into the Gulf near the Yucitan approximately 65 million years past during the cretaceous. This "thing" was most likely a stray bullet from the Ort Cloud, where asteroids hang out. It was monstrously huge, big enough to spew earth and sea into the atmosphere, causing first an immediate kill of anything living within thousands of miles. The resulting cloud resting permanently in the atmosphere would've blocked out any life-giving sun and that would dispose of the remaining reptilian life.

All three together in short order, happening within a few hundred years of each other, could've been the cause of our last extinction, the great dino kill. It would be naive of us to think just one event brought this kingdom to its knees, a dynasty of reptiles which existed for over 200 million years! In comparison? Humans havn't even existed a half million. So the age of the reptiles was a long and successful one. To a point.

My problem with the asteroid theory being the only cause of their extinction is, if this planet was crawling with mega-life, which then died out in a cosmic instant, where are all the remains? Why don't we have more dinosaur bones? In museums and collections we have a very small, limited amount of dino skeletons and we really should have thousands upon thousands, enough for every dino-fascinated 10-year old kid on the planet. But we don't, why is that?

Could it be many of the creatures were already dead?

Hundreds of years before the asteroid hit, those microbial killers could've wiped out tribes and herds of dinosaurs, it's as possible as it is today. If that were so, their remains would've decomposed and become the biomass we use today - that's only a small part of it. These remains could also be in a completely separate and much deeper layer of the earth's crust than archaeologists have always looked. We usually stop digging when we find something, don't we?

Using the sophisticated equipment we're rightfully proud of, we could detect objects deeper and further down into the earth, the only problem being we would've be able to accurately identify anything and it would cost a zillion. But I'm sure others have pondered a mass eradication of life long before the asteroid hit - long before the volcanoes choked off air making it impossible to breathe - long before those pesky worms sickened the largest of the reptilian life. Oh and there's another cause of mass weakening and death for this dynasty: insects.

We know these ancient flying killers very well, they were preserved and kept almost completely intact by being caught in tree amber, and these flies and mosquitoes carried disease that certainly helped eradicate the dinos.

The answer is anyway you approach the situation, it's whatever your personal research and understanding leads you to believe. Some people don't even believe such creatures existed, that the skeletons we've been fortunate enough to collect are man-made. We live in a diverse world.

And it's bio-diversity that keeps any world alive and thriving.

So I look to star-matter and wonder, "Is one of you about to die?" If so, and if it's close enough to this planet, we won't have to worry about the coming depression. All questions about life and death will be answered. But does it matter? We're all temporary. Once we've fulfilled this particular time, finding the answers to our eternal questions won't matter, because those questions won't be relevant to anything.

I wonder what that dinosaur thought as it watched a giant ball of fire stream through the skies of ancient earth ........