| The Ordovician 485 - 443 mya |
The Twitter Age Ordovician problem
The Ordovician is Waterworld. There is no life on land either of plants or animals. Therefore, in order to
discuss extinction we must go scuba diving in the seas. The rulers for part of the period are gigantic
nautiloids and eurypterids, but in numbers they are dwarfed by the trilobites. It doesn't seem like it's
these monsters made it to the Late Ordovician Extinction, although they certainly disappear from the
rock layer near the end of the period.
The record is a bit sketchy, but what seems to have disappeared according to stratigraphic analysis were
many of the trilobites, brachiopods, bryozoans, conodonts and graptolites, perhaps up to 50% of all faunal
genera and 85% of marine species. These animals do not appear in the Silurian Period that follows. Some
authors infer that arachnids may have climbed onto land by the end of the Ordovician.
The Shocking Bow Theory
And just when you thought you had heard it all, the paleo mathemagicians give you more outer space stuff.
A rival group, also seeking funds from NASA, proposes the Bow Shock Theory. The poor Ordovician animals
were hit by cosmic rays from left and right. If they survived the supernova, they would nevertheless be hit by
cosmic rays generated by the movement of the Solar System through space. Our Sun, so the story goes,
travels up and down across the plane of the Milky Way as our galaxy rotates, pretty much like a horsy moving
up and down on the carousel. Every 64 million years or so the entire Solar System goes beyond the protective
cover of the galactic disk. The Earth is no longer protected by the Milky Way's magnetic field during this
interval. Cosmic rays can now seep in and destroy the plants and animals on the surface of the Earth.
Who says that the mathemagicians haven't taken over Paleontology?
Actually, what they end up doing is blind-siding the masses and the congressmen with respect to the true
causes of extinction.
The Ordovician Extinction for the Twitter Generation |
1. Nearby hypernova pummels Earth with powerful,
lighthouse gamma ray. Knocks the wind out of the
Earth much like knocking all feathers from a bird
with one punch.
2. Ozone floats like ghostly halo next to Earth until
planet recovers from low blow. UV galore penetrate
the unprotected surface.
3. All plants and animals die.
4. God creates new Garden, calls it Devonian and
says it is Good.
Bow Shocked!
The shocking bow theory In its orbit around the galaxy, the Sun moves above and below the equator of the Milky Way. When it is outside this plane, the Earth is unprotected from and gets zapped by cosmic rays that destroy its atmosphere. The Bow Shock Theory of Extinction is sure to push aside all others. You cannot come up with a more idiotic one than this. I dare you! |
The amusing mechanism proposed by the NASA funded experts for what happened to the Earth in the Ordivician... |
Foghorn is Foghorn loses all his Foghorn
zapped..... feathers momentarily... recovers his feathers.
zapped..... feathers momentarily... recovers his feathers.
.
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| The History of Life on Earth |
As always among the paleo-mathemagicians the cause of the extinction is some kind of catastrophe that
triggers rapid environmental change to which the animals cannot adapt. What else can they think of if they
continue to brainwash each other in college from generation to generation? There will never be a new idea
coming out of academia in great measure because the peer reviewers will not allow it to be published.
One deluded paleo mathemagician was able to convince his peers to publish his article by including
everything that he could think of.
- "The rapid onset of the continental glaciation on Gondwana determined by its position
in the South Pole area; the cooling; the hydrodynamic changes through the entire
water column in the World Ocean; and the corresponding sea level fall...
...Similar to other mass extinction events, these processes were accompanied by
volcanism, impact events, a corresponding reduction of the photosynthesis and
bioproductivity, the destruction of food chains, and anoxia..."
- It is actually amusing that he put his entire brainstorm into his manuscript in order to cover every base. I
mean, if you can't kill the animals with volcanism coupled by an ET impact plus lack of photosynthesis and
the ray guns that the LGM used during their poaching safari here on Earth, then nothing will. It just shows
how desperate these 'scientists' are in figuring out extinction. Yet they always mention the same agents
over and over.
The real problem with climate change is that it's too slow... not as a mechanism to explain the extinction of
so many animals, mind you, but to put on the big screen! People have short attention spans these days.
We are in the Twitter, one-liner world of Smartphones. Viewers have no time or patience to watch how the
climate evolves over 20 minutes of film. It's too boring, too pathetic! They start yawning and changing
channels. Climate change should be circumscribed to politicians, UN observers, the handful of people who
read the journals, and militant environmentalists! In order to keep the viewers' attention you need flashy
theories, something that gives work not to paleontologists, but to Hollywood directors and script writers
and special effects specialists. Only then will the producers of documentaries give you a call.
This reinforces to the experts that they must come up with spectacular mechanisms whether these make
any sense or not. The viewers want to be entertained, not educated. They want a Roman Circus, not a
bunch of boring paleontologists discussing complex chemical reactions, greenhouses and photosynthesis.
The producers absolutely need to find a way to prevent the masses from losing interest in the subject
matter or the documentaries go extinct.
A star is dead
That's when a couple of slick entrepreneurs decided to get into the business. They opened up shop and
proposed an alternative theory that guaranteed that they would get their names in light and the funds rolling.
They were looking for a money grabber, something catchy, something spectacular, something that would
make money for the documentaries and at the same time make them famous. If they could come up with a
mechanism no one had thought about they would be celebrities in the guild. Other paleo-math peers would
envy them. And what if in addition they got some big institution to fund their research? Then you have the
best of all possible worlds.
These paleo-whiz kids needed to invent an explanation that would generate oohs and aahs especially
among the new breed of teenagers who just want to be dazzled and have something to be proud of that
their generation discovered. And after a marketing study, the 'reseachers' finally came up with a winner:
gamma ray burst. It was instantly identified as a vehicle that was guaranteed to put their names in light.
They uncorked the champagne bottles because they knew this was going to be a big hit... in their careers.
It turns out that the Ordovician Extinction did not happen because the level of the seas fell or because the
climate changed too swiftly. It happened because a supernova or hypernova exploded nearby some 450
million years ago. The invisible gamma rays generated by the explosion traveled to Earth and burned the
ozone layer to a pulp. The rays fried the phytoplankton and zooplankton, especially those entities living
near the surface of the waters, and the entire primary production disappeared. Or maybe the rays froze
them... or broke up the air molecules... Who knows? It doesn't matter? The point is that the herbivores
that depended on this source of food died and right behind followed the carnivores. God later realized His
error and recreated the animals all over again from scratch in the Devonian.
As always, the gamma ray is the trigger. The demise of the plants and animals is caused by secondary
effects:
- "A lethal gamma ray burst slammed into Earth tearing apart our blanket of smog,
blotting out the sun, resulting in plummeting temperatures across the globe...
150,000 years after the disaster... Year by year the planet is getting colder and
colder... the birth of a new ice age."
"A gamma ray burst... ripped apart nitrogen and oxygen producing a gaseous
smog of NO2..." ...which blocked the sunlight and set off... an ice age.
- You might ask, where did these 'intellectuals' get the gamma ray idea? What was the reasoning behind it?
The justification goes something like this:
"We can't explain the Ordovician Extinction. We have no clue. However, gamma rays
routinely hit the Earth. Some of these originate in nearby supernovas. A gigantic
supernova or hypernova explosion likely happens once every billion or half billion years.
Ergo, the unexplained Ordovician is the ideal candidate because it happened 500 mya!"
It's now been decided and there can be no future argument! A supernova exploded half a billion years ago
and wiped out the trilobites, nautiluses and erypterids. Watch out because the statistics would indicate that
we're due for another one soon! We now have the theory that is gradually going to push aside the official,
but dull climate change nonsense. The task is not to question the rationality of either of these two proposals.
The task now is to find evidence and convince more and more people to come to see it their way. He who
convinces more people gets more funds and has a chance of getting his theory proved by experts. That's
how 'science' works these days.
NASA funding the past?
The clincher was when the entrepreneurs convinced NASA to fund the ridiculous research. NASA dug into
its treasure chest (your pockets) and gave them the money.
Now how did that happen? I mean, you would think that NASA has better things to spend its hard earned
money on. Isn't NASA supposed to be developing rockets and spacecraft for space exploration? What
business does it have providing funds to research the extinction of the fish of the Ordovician millions of
years ago? Isn't their business the future? What's it doing investigating the past?
Actually, it was a very crafty move on the part of NASA. It had to do with PR and investing in propaganda.
This funding had a lot to do NOT with building fuel tanks for space shuttles and skylabs, but with getting
the public to pay closer attention to Houston's space projects. The way NASA purse controllers figured, if
they could convince the gullible masses that extinction comes from outer space then more funds could be
syphoned off from Washington. It would make easier on the congressional 'science' committee to justify
funds for NASA on the basis that research into extraterrestrial sources of extinction are worth investigating.
And who else but NASA could save humanity from the next asteroid or gamma ray burst? As
Dewey McLean documented in his debate with Luis Alvarez in 1981:
- "I would learn later that in June 1980, the same month of publication of the Alvarez theory,
NASA (the National Aeronautics and Space Administration) had chosen it to be the basis
of a new program known as Project Spacewatch. At that time, President Ronald Reagan
was putting the budgetary axe to the space agencies. The Alvarez impact theory which
evoked death from the heavens -- imminent, unavoidable, catastrophic, horrifying mass
extinctions of life on earth -- was just what the space agencies needed to rejuvenate them
via new funding and career opportunities."
- Therefore, NASA had to get people to stop looking at the layers of rock down here on Earth and instead
look upwards toward the night sky. Since people have little interest in NASA and its decades-long space
programs for the far future, NASA tries to generate interest by entering the extinction market and getting
people to think about extraterrestrial causes.
That's the way the money goes
What is revealing is that the money was not given to the Paleontology Departments. Ever since Alvarez,
the mathemagicians took over Paleontology and now the funds go to prop up the Physics Departments.
The Paleontology Departments collect cobwebs because they are not dashing enough, not creative enough
in their ideas. They come up with dull theories -- climate change and volcanic eruptions -- all of which
take up too much film time and give NASA no credit. Most of all, the paleontologists don't know Math.
This summarily excludes them from 'explaining' the size, speed and weight of asteroids or the brightness
of a gamma ray or the distance of the supernova.
As a result, extinction is slipping ever more out of the hands of Paleontology. The paleontologists will soon
become extinct. NASA is zapping them with gamma rays and pummeling them with asteroid debris. It will
be the proponents of black holes, dark matter and many copies of you who will soon take over the guild.
The mathemagicians have the critical tool on their side: Mathemagics. They have a powerful ally on their
side: NASA. And now they have their own celebrities, people like Neil Tyson, Larry Krauss, and Alex
Filippenko -- who can't figure out how this universe works -- telling the crowds how extinction works. What
and who do the degreed paleontologists have on their side? Rotten bones? Fossils? Chisels and brushes?
Volcanoes and climate change? Autistic nerds such as Peter Ward and Paul Wignall? Don't make me laugh!
Of course if you are NASA, who would you give your surplus cash to? A deranged paleontologist who
swears on his mother's grave that the climate changed or to a deranged autist from your club who
calculates that an ET source caused the mass extinction? It's no contest!
Keep in mind that the funds don't stop there. Now you have to look for evidence to prove your theory to
the public through an intense lobbying campaign. And since you already have NASA on board funding your
investigation, it is also much easier to convince college grant-givers to fund an operation that has the
potential to put the university's name in lights. Everybody wins! Well, almost everybody... Extinction is big
business... except that less and less of it will be delegated to paleontologists.
My advice?
If you want to be a paleontologist, take 'physics' and muscle in on the unsuspecting paleontologists with
some extravagant ET theory. You will have NOVA, the History Channel, the BBC and Discover at your
doorstep faster than you can say "Carl Sagan" or "Billions" three times.
Nautiloid |
Eurypterid |
Typical Ordovician trilobite |
The largest conodont ever Promissum might have disappeared in the mass extinction at the end of the Ordovician. |
