Since the Space Age started after World War II, enthusiasts have set their eyes on travel to the stars. It didn't take long for paleontologists to speculate that the sudden mass extinctions of the ancient past could also have had extraterrestrial causes, especially the famous one that did away with the dinosaurs. With NASA providing funds behind the scenes, the ET extinctions took off. Authors started submitting papers to the specialized journals about asteroids, supernova gamma rays and solar system bow shocks. The most successful, of course, is the asteroid theory of Nobel Luis Alvarez. He had such success that every graduate coming out of the university Paleontology Department hopes to emulate him. Therefore, no one is looking at the causes of extinction. Everyone is just looking at how he can make a buck and be famous. And if you can convince NASA to give you the money... well, why not? So what is the problem with asteroids? As stated in the paper I submitted to the Oxford-sponsored Apocalypse Conference (soon to be posted), there are several insurmountable problems.
asteroid is just the trigger of the catastrophe. 2. The mechanism requires secondary effects, to wit: tsunamis, fire and brimstone, clouds of dust, impact winter, acid rain. The only reason for these subsequent agents is to elude the only thing an extinction theory has to answer: selectivity. If we can kill the sea reptiles with a knife, the land dinos with a spear and the flying reptiles with a machine gun... well anyone can do extinction like that. The trick is to kill them all with ONE mechanism/agent! 3. The asteroid mechanism ends up killing ALL plants. EVERYTHING dies! Proponents admit as much. However, there is not a single plant time line on the Internet that shows that ALL plan life disappeared in any of the extinctions.
NASA propaganda. The people in Houston want you to pay close attention to the night sky. They do so because they want you to support space programs. They urge you to think about the future (space colonization), not about the past (extinction). If control room managers can convince you that asteroids could wipe us out and that Houston has the wherewithal to spot them and the technology to neutralize them, you will be more willing to part with your tax dollars. Actually, the asteroid theory has no merit whatsoever because it cannot explain the only thing an extinction theory has to explain: selectivity. The Holocene megafauna Some deluded asteroid catastrophists have proposed that the Pleistocene megafauna was also wiped out by the ever menacing extraterrestrial bolide. They hoped to get NASA's attention. However, a rival gang of censors with some clout denied them the glory and NASA thought it prudent to step away from the squabble. Houston is sensitive to the fact that many paleo-mathemagicians still continue to insist to their dying gasps that all extinctions in the last 6 million years were caused by Man and not by fortuitous extraterrestrial agents. You don't want to trample on fundamentalist religion. |
| Asteroid? |
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| The History of Life on Earth |
