Dinosaurs Were Not on the Way Out Before Asteroid Hit, Study Claims (siliconrepublic.com) 117
New analysis has refuted the claim that dinosaurs were in decline at the time of their extinction. If an asteroid had not hit Earth 66m years ago, dinosaurs might have continued to dominate the planet, according to new research. From a report: A team from the University of Bath and the UK National History Museum has published a study to Royal Society Open Science saying that, contrary to some scientific thinking, dinosaurs were not in a state of decline prior to the mass extinction event. The team collected a set of different dinosaur family trees and used statistical modelling to assess if each of the main dinosaur groups was still able to produce new species at this time. Prior to the asteroid impact during the Late Cretaceous period, dinosaurs were globally widespread and were the dominant form of animal of most terrestrial ecosystems. "Previous studies done by others have used various methods to draw the conclusion that dinosaurs would have died out anyway, as they were in decline towards the end of the Cretaceous period," said first author of the study, Joe Bonsor. "However, we show that if you expand the dataset to include more recent dinosaur family trees and a broader set of dinosaur types, the results don't actually all point to this conclusion -- in fact, only about half of them do." Commenting on the new study, Richard Dawkins tweeted, "An impact as catastrophic as this will happen again. We don't know when. Using existing science, we could develop the technology to detect, intercept, and divert or destroy a large incoming asteroid. No other species could do it. It's our responsibility."
I blame the birds (Score:4, Funny)
Re:I blame the birds dinosaurs still amongst us? (Score:4, Interesting)
Every time a crow calls as you pass is a dinosaur is watching.you? Every time you eat chicken are you enjoying dinosaur?
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Re:I blame the birds dinosaurs still amongst us? (Score:4)
Genetically speaking, largely yes.
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if one looks at how digestion works.
humans use the same chemicals as star fish
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Seriously - that was the entire point of, for example, Neil Shubin naming his book about discovering Tiktaalik [wikipedia.org] "Your Inner Fish". You, along with your neighbouring giraffe, dolphin and jackdaw are all fish. It's not as bizarre as saying, for example, that you're all sharks.
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(I can't remember the last time I updated the .sig below. It might have been this side of the Millennium, but I don't think so.)
HumansWere Not on the Way Out Before Global Warmin (Score:3)
In 60 000 years, some ETs will study earth :
"Humans Were Not on the Way Out Before Global Warming Hit"
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If you're trying to compare the current mass extinction to the Cretaceous-Palaeocene extinction, you need your hypothetical aliens to arrive in about 60 million years. The Cretaceous-Palaeocene boundary is about 66 million years ago [stratigraphy.org], with an uncertain
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Excellent analysis, thank you!
Re: I blame the birds (Score:1)
Let it happen (Score:3, Interesting)
"Commenting on the new study, Richard Dawkins tweeted, "An impact as catastrophic as this will happen again. We don't know when. Using existing science, we could develop the technology to detect, intercept, and divert or destroy a large incoming asteroid. No other species could do it. It's our responsibility.""
Given the way we're currently handling the planet, it might just be better to let it happen and give another species a chance.
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Given the way we're currently handling the planet, it might just be better to let it happen and give another species a chance.
The earth will ultimately shrug off the human race like we were never here. In a billion years, there will be no trace left. So don't think we're "harming" the planet.
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So don't think we're "harming" the planet.
True. What we're harming is the way we need it to be.
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The popular image is that the Sun is about half way through it's lifetime, in terms of having used about half of it's fuel supply. Which isn't untrue - but it is misleading.
As helium "ash" accumulates in the Sun's core, the average particle mass increases. To maintain the balance of pressure, that means that the core temperature must rise, and fuel consumption rates increase. Another consequence is that the power em
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Second, a lot of what we are doing is not a matter of long term survival, but of short term comfort. When I was young you could have a beach house or a cabin in the woods. Now the hurricanes and fires make it not feasible. Climat
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That's the problem of getting your palaeontology from Jurassic Park (not that I've stayed awake through a whole showing of it).
That film showed lots of big, impressive dinosaurs. Which had been chosen by the designers (in-film, or in the film studio) for being, uh, big. And impressive. But they weren't chosen for being "average", "typical", or "representative". The average dinosaur through the Triassic, Jurassic, and Cretaceous was cl
Preventable Catastrophe (Score:5, Insightful)
“The dinosaurs became extinct because they didn't have a space program. And if we become extinct because we don't have a space program, it'll serve us right!”
Larry Niven
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what a laugh, that Chicxulub asteroid was 20 - 30 miles in diameter. there is nothing we could do against such a thing except die en mass.
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Nothing that we could do . . . today . Do you think that, contrary to every other technology known, the ability to do things in space has somehow reached its apogee and will never proceed forward? If so, then you're ridiculously wrong.
Conservative thought is what has kept our species limited to the surface of a single planet for the last half century. If it continues then we go the way of the Neanderthals and Denesovians, just another evolutionary experiment that failed. If we divert just 10% of the gr
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What, the laws that say if you perturb the orbit by 0.0001% today (and there are several ways this could be done even with current technology) then in 20 years it's going to be passing through some other point in space rather than the one that Earth is occupying? Those laws? Apparently we have a much better handle on them than you do. It might play havoc with the orbits of geostationary satellites as it goes by, but a near miss is still a miss and that is all that is required.
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We can't perturb the orbit 0.0001% today, that's the point. Doom and death is the answer. We don't even know if there are such large beasts that will hit the earth soon, cataloging isn't complete nor will it ever be 100% complete in next decade.
Re:Preventable Catastrophe (Score:5, Interesting)
what a laugh, that Chicxulub asteroid was 20 - 30 miles in diameter. there is nothing we could do against such a thing except die en mass.
Nonsense. If there were a twin of the KT impactor with an orbit that could lead to an Earth impact in the next ten thousand years we would already know about it. The asteroid would have been seen many times in crossing close to Earth's orbit, and we would be able to project a dangerously close approach millenia in advance. With the kind of advance notice extremely small adjustments to its orbit would keep it is a safe orbit that never gets too close to Earth ("too close" is defined by tracking and projection precision). Low cost measures like painting part of it white would suffice to deflect it (the Yarkovsky effect and radiation pressure effects generally).
Significant late velocity changes can be created also by very large nuclear explosions that cause surface ablation. Multiple explosion in the 100 megaton range could be implemented with just a few years notice. Only about a megaton of kinetic energy needs to be imparted on an object the size of the KT impactor to create a 1 m/s change. May not sound like much but that could change a collision in a decade into a 300,000 km miss.
If it was a comet though, we would get only a couple of years warning.
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hahaha, you pile misconception upon misconception. NASA has goal of identifying 90% of 140 meter asteroids by 2028... there could be more than one of the 25 km range ones lurking that we won't see, and warning time could be nearly zero!
Then you think 100% of energy of 100MT (which we don't have in deployable missile weapon, Tsar bomba was pushed out of plane on parachute for a reason) cratering explosion on a hypothetical 100 trillion ton asteroid would be channeled to cause delta v of 1 m/s... NO, most
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On the other hand, the catalogue of inner solar system 10km and bigger bodies is pretty much complete. "Asteroids" (in the sense of "has an orbit of years you can count without taking your shoes off") aren't a problem : we know where the dangerous ones
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most energy is wasted as the ejecta energies mostly cancel out going in all directions around crater.
Huh?
The ejecta won't go off in "all directions" since the bulk of
the asteroid will be in the way of roughly half of it.
That half will impact the mass of the asteroid, creating
a reaction force.
Whether that will be enough to nudge it into a safer orbit
remains to be seen.
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If such an asteroid (25 miles in diameter) was going to hit Earth in the next 10,000 years we would already know about it, and with plenty of time to work on changing it's path, which could be done with pretty small thrusters.
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FALSE! We DON'T know all asteroid of 140m in diameter and bigger, goal is to get 90% of them cataloged by 2028... but it's an asymptotic curve of always having unknown huge beasts possible. we might get near zero warning.
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We know all asteroids 25 MILES in diameter, even if we don't know all asteroids 140 meters in diameter.
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No we don't, only the ones that hang out inside Neptune's orbit. There could be an asteroid or similar with a comet type orbit, perhaps due to a close encounter with Jupiter or even an interstellar traveler. The odds are very small of one falling into the inner solar system and hitting the Earth but greater then zero.
There are a lot of other things that are more worrying, such as volcano-ism.
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A sixth of the diameter translates to less than 1% of the mass, and (approximately) 1% of the difficulty of deflecting. (1/216th the mass, if you care to do the maths).
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there is nothing we could do against such a thing except die en mass.
Except blow it up before it gets past the outer planets.
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I think a space program would have to have near light speed capability for us to colonise the stars.
Raises questions like: Is near-light speed travel safe or are the chances of the space ship being ripped apart by a pea sized object too big. If space debris makes fast travel too dangerous then would we be able to keep a ship powered for long enough to reach other planets.
Would it return, or could we send kind of high-powered signal back at the speed of light?
If we could accelerate to near light speed then w
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Not necessarily. If you outfit a ship with engines which can get you to a decent amount of C, but instead of people you put in frozen sperm and eggs, you can send it out now and not worry about it. As the ship approaches a possibly habitable planet, it thaws out a few batches, combines them, then nourishes the embryo to fruition.
By the time ship arrives at the planet, the previously frozen bits an
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As the ship approaches a possibly habitable planet, it thaws out a few batches, combines them, then nourishes the embryo to fruition.
There is that small matter of raising them to adulthood, socializing and educating them. I guess AI robots are supposed to do that?
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Yes. See Clarke's The Songs of Distant Earth.
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Such robots (and also methods of replacing pregnancy) sound much more likely to be developed than any kind of propulsion to get live people to another star in a lifetime.
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Over several generations, yes. It doesn't matter how fucked-up the first generations are, as long as they can produce some sort of improvement for the next generation. Allegedly, the basics are covered by "instinct", so once the first generation of insane humanoid organisms are bred from, the nurturing instincts will kick in and the robots can concentrate on trying to teach the second generation to speak. Probably in Mandarin.
Brutal. But true.
Every few days one he
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I tend to favor the theory of generation ships where the first passengers board knowing they'll live the rest of their lives on this ship. Now, we're a long, long ways away from having ships big enough to be comfortable for a stable population over the span of several generations, but once we get some form of manufacturing capability in space, and are able to mine resources from smaller/less massive bodies out there, we'll be able to build much larger ships than anything you'd want to think about lifting o
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How many generations would have to live entire lifetimes on the ship before deciding that planets are unnecessary? Not many, I'd warrant.
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Zero generations. They would start with the knowledge that they are not a "ship" but a self-sustaining space-based colony that would have the opportunity to make close up investigation of another star system in X generations.
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I would imagine you'd see both scenarios play out in various ways. Most likely a self-sustaining colony ship could offload excess population on inhabitable planets. And you know that in any given population there would be either thrill seekers or those with a mind for exploration that would happily volunteer to be set down on a planet.
I would think after the first full generation you'd have a majority that would want to remain in their comfort zone, but so long as the ship continues to explore and offload
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It is going to be a *requirement* that they think planets are unnecessary, since they will have no guarantee of the place they are going having a habitable planet. It might be better if there is a planet they can use, but it better not be "necessary".
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Disagreements would be inevitable.
Disagreements lead to conflict.
Conflict leads to violence.
Violence leads to death.
Also:where do you store enough food,etc. to last the
thousands of years it would take to get there?
A ship full of frozen embryos would need no food, no water, no oxygen,
no energy for heating and could probably be built sometime in the next century.
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We only need near light speed travel if our life span continues to be limited to a handful of decades. I seriously doubt that will be the case much longer.
Of course that becomes irrelevant if we decide that the gravity well around a star is unnecessary, there is a frack of a lot of material just floating around including entire planets. IIRC there is more material in our own Kuiper Belt and Oort Cloud than there is in the inner solar system, that alone should keep us occupied for a couple of centuries. O
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If we manage to extend life expectancy a lot then we'd have an even bigger population problem than we have now. Seems to me that humans think with their reproductive organs rather than their brains when it comes to controlling population. Our current way of life is not sustainable and I don't just mean global warming. If people don't stop thinking so selfishly then the human race won't last long.
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The populations with the longest average lifespan are also the ones with the lowest reproductive rate, a trend that has only been evident the last few decades. Already most of the advanced countries are reproducing at a rate below replacement level and require immigration to maintain their economies. Once religion loses power over a population the majority of women embrace birth control and later childbearing. If the twin scourges of Islam and Christianity can be brought under control (for the most part
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Yeah but if you look closer you see that nearly every country in the world with declining native population seems to more than make up for it with immigration whilst the other countries still have exploding populations. And I'm not a fan of religion but they don't seem to be going anywhere because there are too many people that don't want to think for themselves, they want someone else to do the thinking for them. Politicians love these kind of people because they are so gullible and believe any amount of e
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The populations with the longest average lifespan are also the ones with the lowest reproductive rate, a trend that has only been evident the last few decades.
A lot of that has to do with survivabilty and economic stability. Families in poorer states tend to have more children because their children are more likely to die young, they are needed to help sustain the family by farming/bringing in income/etc, and because the parents will have to rely on the children for support when they are elderly (this has both an economic and cultural impetus). Whereas in a wealthier, more developed state you can have children because you want to, you have a retirement or safet
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Absolutely no one says, "I'm going to want another farmhand in about fifteen years, we'd better have a kid." I really loathe this meme, but it's very common.
Poor people mostly have lots of kids for three reasons. 1) Their culture expects them to, 2) they don't have the resources (access to family planning, religious freedom) to not have them, and 3) sex is fun and free. Of course some people have lots of kids because they like having a ton of rug rats around, but they've always been a minority which is w
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.. still breathing.
The human species is dead until it has proved that it can control it's numbers without the use of malnutrition and disease (and a minor contribution from warfare and murder).
I don't see any sign of that happening.
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Same, even with this amazing internet, most people can't see the world as it is. If they could we wouldn't have a constant stream of greedy idiots and sly bastards gaining power.
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The orbital dynamicists are still TTBOMK arguing it out, but they're trying to get a handle on that from the sort of orbital interactions that also lead to the "Planet 9" proposal from Brown & Batygin a few years ago [arxiv.org]. Opinions vary, but figures for the Kuiper Belt of a few Earth masses at most are bandied around.
Which doesn't sound like much. Just a few hundreds of times the mass of the asteroid b
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AltHistories I now want to watch: Dinosaur Space Program.
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In my head I'm writing a novella where the Inca go to space.
I read a short story some years ago about a time-dilated exploration spaceship full of dinosaurs returning to Earth and finding that the mammalian vermin they loathed had conquered the planet in their absence. I think they left again in disgust.
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AltHistories I now want to watch: Dinosaur Space Program.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
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Of course I am curious on why some made it (Score:4, Interesting)
I can see the large dinosaurs and pterosaurs being killed off, but why did many of the smaller dinosaurs and pterosaurs die out too. While Birds (a branch of the Dinosaur family line), Lizards, Snakes, Mammals made it.
I liked the Dinosaur was already in decline model as it seems to make more sense, where it was a dying breed in diversity, and the asteroid just put them over the edge, while the other Families where just more diverse and stronger.
Either way it begs the question will Humans Die out or Evolve further? Being that only Homo sapiens are the only species of the Genius Homo, are we diverse enough to survive a major disaster?
Re:Of course I am curious on why some made it (Score:5, Insightful)
Probably just the luck of the draw. Maybe no dinosaurs lived in burrows like small mammals that protected them from the impact and the only ones the escaped effects quickly were birds that could fly away across water. Just guessing.
"are we diverse enough to survive a major disaster?"
Diversity is irrelevant - we're far too reliant on agriculture and technology to survive any significant impact in any great numbers if at all. Very few humans on this planet can survive in the wild with no technological support - maybe some SAS types and a few remote tribes in africa and brazil and thats about it.
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Without technology a lot of humans will die out. But not to a point of extinction, but to a point where the ecosystem can handle our population. I expect a population of 7 billion going down to a population of 100 million people.
However I don't see a technology collapse being too much of an issue, as even with a large percentage of people getting killed off, there still will be people who know how to Farm, Mine, rebuild or build new machines, Including advanced things like computers. We would probably be
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there would be enough storage type food(canned food, etc) and tools (hammer, nails, pots, pans, guns/ammo) to help keep that ~10% of the reminding population along with a little knowledge of agricultural/livestock/hunting for many a decades.
My house along prob has enough water for over a month and food for 6+ months. And most people with guns, have plenty of ammo. (target practice and messing around is what uses up 99.99% of ammo, excluding wars)
We'd have a mix of techs that worked, and settlements would sp
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Fun exercise.
Well lots would be hard to do without tools, others to fill in knowledge gaps or even the biggest would be help.
Sure you understand how steam engine works, but could you build one that works and is useful? Need help. And a lot.But if with help you made something, and then applied it to a boat. Well you would really be advancing things.
Knowledge of a hotair balloon could prove helpful, but without a dense source of fuel like natural gas not likely to happen. Airplane would be harder to do.
knowle
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"We would probably be set back perhaps a hundred years or so"
A 100 years? So we'll be riding around on steam trains? Make that 10K years where people don't even have the facilities to grow crops or smelt metal or even make pottery. And if there's complete enviromental collapse all bets are off.
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There was no "away" to fly to. It is in the nature of global catastrophes that there is no "away". If you don't deal with it "here" and "now", then you are dead.
It's like that myth which had people building tall chimneys to send the pollution "away".
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Smaller dinosaurs were unable to adapt rapidly to the cooler conditions that prevailed, and their food chain (large herbivores) died off en masse as the vegetation died off.
Mammals survived as they tended to burrow and had furry coverings that enabled them to survive in the cooled conditions, and had more options for regulating body temperature than the cold blooded dinosaurs.
That's a generalisation, but covers most cases. Adaptability to conditions determined survival.
Yes, humans will evolve more. We're
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Of course then there's the thought that the 'Singularity' is near. If we make it through the next couple of decades we may well witness the evolution of Homo Sapiens into Homo Technochrisis (technology-using man).
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Currently the evidence points to (many) dinosaurs being warm blooded and feathered.
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Somewhere between half and three quarters of the Earth's production of oxygen comes from marine plankton. While they would have been negatively affected by the "nuclear winter" type ash clouds and sulphate aerosols while the skies were obscured, once the ash in particular fell out of the sky they'd have had a bloom of fertilisation and oxygen
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I can see the large dinosaurs and pterosaurs being killed off, but why did many of the smaller dinosaurs and pterosaurs die out too. While Birds (a branch of the Dinosaur family line), Lizards, Snakes, Mammals made it.
When huge meteor strike blots out the sun and kills most of the food, only small creatures that don't need much food can scrape by. It's hard to feed a 100 ton herbivore when most of the plants are unable to grow. And hard to feed a 10 ton carnivore if all the 100 ton herbivores are dead. Then the smaller dinosaurs could not compete well enough with the other smaller critters for what was left.
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That's one of the unexplained bizarrities of the event - and other mass extinctions. It gets more bizarre when you look at the effects in the largest, best mixed and most homogeneous environment on Earth - the seas. Some whole orders of marine microscopic life died out, while others living in
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No you are wrong.
Science isn't a consequence of political preference. Science is a process of looking at the Observable Universe. Now this article is pointing out evidence stating that my preferred theory may be wrong, I can except that and look at the evidence, but also part of the process is asking questions about other elements that may not fit the model, and see if that can be explained.
Climate Change science isn't climate anxiety. The Human Caused Climate change models fit best on the observable val
Dinosaurs (Score:3, Funny)
And we'll never know for sure... (Score:2)
so stop posting articles about it.
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Most of the history from 100M yrs ago has been erased. Try and reconstruct a novel with only 5% of the words, and most of the ones remaining have been smeared.
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A few years ago people declared that we would never know how fast light traveled through the ether, so it was pointless to print articles speculating about it. They were as wrong then as you are now.
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And with an attitude like that I'm sure time travel is a few years away.
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No too many variables, but I think investing in the stock market or opening a bank account is okay
An impact as catastrophic as this will happen agai (Score:2)
"An impact as catastrophic as this will happen again. We don't know when. Using existing science, we could develop the technology to detect, intercept, and divert or destroy a large incoming asteroid. No other species could do it. It's our responsibility."
Something as catastrophic is happening right now, it's called climate change, and we're doing close to nothing. Quite the contrary, actually.
Why warn -us- when -you- should do something (Score:1)
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It's almost like corrupt politicians are deciding what to fund rather than science deciding what -must- be funded.
And that is the reason for the following:
All NASA budgets since its creation combined - $650 billion
Last year's Pentagon budget w/o intel and black budgets - $750 billion
Unlikely (Score:5, Interesting)
Thats a popular sci-fi what-if trope, but lets look at the facts - dinosaurs had been around for almost 200m years before the asteroid hit and as far as we know didn't involve any significant intelligence in that period (sure, they may have been crow smart but frankly BFD). Mammals come along and 60m years later some of them have landed on the moon and sent probes into interstellar space.
Re:Unlikely (Score:4, Interesting)
How to make life look towards the stars? ... You hit it with asteroids.
Re: Unlikely (Score:2)
Exactly one species of mammal is demonstrably smarter than the smartest dinosaurs. One data point doesn't demonstrate much. Maybe mammals are more suited to develop intelligence. Or maybe one just got lucky to get just the right mutations at just the right time.
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I'll start a list...
DINOBIRDS---
Crow
Raven
Magpie
Parrot
MAMMALS
Human
Dolphin
Whale
Dog
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Thats been talked about a lot. AFAIK the consensus is structures will have long gone but chemical traces of humanity in sediments would be obvious to anyone/thing looking.
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Re: Unlikely (Score:2)
If they made it to the moon theyd have required a sophisticated industrial base. That would leave a chemical signature.
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Your figures are a bit off. Mammals have been around for at least 178 million years not just 60 million. We have no real way of knowing what another 60 million years of evolution would have done to dinosaurs though. Evolution tends to progress in spurts not at a nice linear progression.
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1) Chicxulub ...
How do you pronounce this? Chicks who lube?!?
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