Or is this just another secular doomsday with science trappings? The reader who sent us this tip was likely chortling when he hit the Send key:
The paleontologist Pincelli Hull has nailed down the timing and speed of the extinction that killed off the dinosaurs — details that carry ominous warnings for today…
She didn’t think that for long. Hull went on to lead a global collaboration that, early this year, published a definitive timeline of how the mayhem played out in small ocean fossils. The team tracked changes in global temperature over time. The planet did warm up before the impact, Hull found, but then cooled back down before the asteroid arrived. And while that warming event didn’t seem to correlate to marine extinctions, over 90% of plankton species abruptly vanished after the impact. The study suggests that the major influence of the Deccan Traps was to guide the post-apocalyptic evolution of surviving species — not to drive the extinction itself…
And on long timescales, the cheerful note is that, as Stephen Jay Gould said, not once since life evolved has it ever gone completely extinct. Life as a whole is pretty tough. But the species that are dominant before a mass extinction, effectively, are almost never the dominant ones afterward. And so that’s extremely sobering. If you’re grumpy at humanity, then you can think, well, somebody else is going to get a chance. I’m fairly hopeful that life goes on, and when life goes on, it does really interesting and creative stuff. So that’s good. But as a human, I care about us, so that’s depressing.
Joshua Sokal, “A Rapid End Strikes the Dinosaur Extinction Debate” at Quanta
The trouble is, the COVID-19 stuff is enough sermonizing for now. We bet the dinosaur debate continues and so does humanity.
Also, Millennials eventually grow up.