- The tough questions
Of course, whenever a new theory comes along it raises many questions.
- 1. How can you be so sure or how do you know that Man's extinction is imminent?
2. When will extinction happen?"
3. How exactly will the ecological pyramid overturn? By what chronological process?
4. Why have you included homosexuality as a factor in the extinction of Man?
5. Won't lost tribes and nomadic peoples which are not part of the civilized system
survive?
6. Why won't Man recover after the collapse and restart the race? After all, we have
recovered from population crashes (e.g., 14th Century plague) and economic
disasters (e.g., The Great Depression) in the past.
Other concerns are at an even more fundamental level...
- 7. How did the Universe begin? Did it begin in a Big Bang as the Math experts at
Harvard and Cambridge tell you?
Continental Drift or Expanding Earth?
8. Did the Earth form from rocks swirling around and colliding and being clumped by
gravity as orthodoxy holds or is there another explanation?
- 10. And where did life come from, anyway? Did life immigrate into the Solar System
from a distant star as the panspermians wish you to believe or did life begin in
our little old neighborhood?
11. And what do we mean by life anyways? Is there a scientific definition of the bread
and butter of Biology?
12. Is there life on other planets? Or are we alone in the Universe?
13. Will we ever colonize another planet? Will robots replace us here on Earth before
we go as futurologists tell you? Will humans morph into posthumans and extropists
and androids? Or will they evolve?
We will argue here that humans will soon be rudely awakened into reality from their dreams of extraterrestrial
colonization and from nightmares of morphing into androids and posthumanists. We will neither evolve nor
transform, not only because such processes rely on technology that is circumscribed to science fiction, but
because our time is up. Humanity is on the verge of the precipice, seconds from extinction and there is nothing
we can do about it. Our species will not wither away gradually in a background extinction like the Neanderthal.
We are destined to disappear like the last dinosaurs, in a mass extinction. A mass extinction is always violent.
The casual reader would do well to review the History of Extinctions to come up to speed on the issues and
understand where the paleontologists stand today. What are the experts investigating these days? How is it
that the members of the guild arrived at their irrational conclusions?
| How did space and time come into being? |
9. Which theory is rational...
Huh? Solution? I just finished saying that there is no solution. There is nothing we can do. |
| A nebulous hypothesis |
The mathemagicians claim that particles
collided and clumped together through
hit and miss to form the early Earth.
So why are the outer planets gaseous?
Why are their moons rocky? Why are all
the rocky celestial objects differentiated
and so round?
What if we assume that the Earth and all
the moons and planets used to be stars?
collided and clumped together through
hit and miss to form the early Earth.
So why are the outer planets gaseous?
Why are their moons rocky? Why are all
the rocky celestial objects differentiated
and so round?
What if we assume that the Earth and all
the moons and planets used to be stars?
"So, what is the solution? What do we need to do to avoid extinction?" |
| The imminent extinction of Man We are the last humans on Earth |
The cause of a mass extinction
Ask just about any person on the street and they will tell you that the dinosaurs disappeared because an
asteroid struck the Earth some 65 million years ago. Most people have no idea where this theory came
from, how the proponents proved it, or why it is the only theory allowed for discussion today. They simply
have read somewhere or watched a documentary and regurgitate what they heard. Few people investigate
the matter further. Of the few who do, even fewer have the sense to question the theory. They are simply
swayed by authority.
If you ask about the Permian Extinction – the greatest extinction of all time and second most popular – the
pool of connoisseurs shrinks exponentially. The few who have taken interest and looked into the subject of
extinction to this level vote for the volcano theory, again because of evidence and authority and consensus.
People are simply recruited by the Democracy Argument (majority vote) and come to believe the theories
that the establishment comes up with.
The gamma ray Ordovician Extinction is even less popular yet more or less in the same boat. It is to note
that NASA funds and favors 'research' that points to extraterrestrial agents and mechanisms of extinction
to create yet more flow of funds to its space projects.
It turns out that the asteroid, the volcano, and the gamma ray are not stand-alone theories. They can't be
because an extrinsic agent has no chance of explaining selectivity. Asteroids and volcanoes cannot do the
job all by themselves. Catastrophic theories have to have help from secondary effects in order to accomplish
the task of wiping out an entire generation of animals. Whether asteroid, volcano, earthquake, gamma rays,
sudden climate change, or new disease, there is a sequence of events that theorists invoke to account for
the disappearance of animals on land as well as those in the seas. Indeed, it is the subsequent developments
which end up killing the animals.
The curious thing is that all mass extinction theories proposed so far have one mechanism in common, one
agent that none of them can do without. That agent is food and the mechanism is starvation. There is not a
single extinction theory that doesn’t invoke hunger or mention the collapse of a food chain. Examples...
"The entire base of the food chain is wiped out"
"With vegetation, the foundation of the food chain, starvation now runs rampant."
- "Photosynthesizing organisms, including phytoplankton and land plants, formed
the foundation of the food chain in the late Cretaceous as they do today. Evidence
suggests that herbivorous animals died out when the plants they depended on for
food became scarce. Consequently, top predators such as Tyrannosaurus rex also
perished."
"Major destruction of the vegetation, the burning over broad areas of the continent
would have destroyed the food sources for many of these animals and we suggest
that is why the larger animals preferentially became extinct."
In other words, the animals (in ANY of these theories) do NOT die because of the agent that the
paleontologists claim triggered the catastrophe. They die when the entire ecological pyramid disintegrates.
A mass extinction is not the result of extraterrestrial impacts, earthly catastrophes, diseases, or climate
change. By their own admission, a mass extinction results when the last members of a long dynasty starve
to death.
Man cannot avoid his own extinction
It turnsout that we don't need a gargantuan catastrophe to create an environment of starvation. Mother
Nature can and does produce widespread hunger without the need of extraterrestrial impacts, earthquakes
or hurricanes. This process occurs naturally when the plants on which herbivores depend and with which
they have developed a vital relation over millions of years disappear. Had we been standing at the start of
the Cambrian Age 550 million years ago, we could have predicted that primitive ferns which disseminate by
spores would inevitably be displaced by conifers and these by yet more advanced flowering and seed plants.
I propose two rational mechanisms, one to explain background extinctions and another to explain mass
extinctions. I argue that background extinctions occur when the Population Pyramid overturns. Mass
extinctions happen when the Ecological Pyramid overturns. These theories lead us to conclude that our
very own human species is seconds away from its own extinction, inches from the precipice, and that
there is nothing we can do about it. Neither intelligence nor technology is an antidote to extinction. NOTHING
can be done to counter the agents and mechanisms that cause extinction. Man is no exception to this 'law'
of life. There is no hope, no solution. And if Man with all his intelligence and technology can't do anything
about food and starvation, neither could any other species have been able to in any period of the history of
life on Earth. This in turn confirms that we have zeroed in on the causes of extinction.
For those who opine that this a very pessimistic position, I reply that it is not pessimistic, but realistic.
.
| To comment on any of the pages in this website go to: Rational Scientific Method |
| The History of Life on Earth |
We are the Last Generation of Humans on Earth Paper presented at the Apocalypse Conference Oxford University May 8, 2016, Prague, Czech Republic |
Billy Little vainly warning the skeptical crowds of impending doom... |