TOSH ,DARK MATTER AND DINOSAURS

Look here now! There’s no really easy way to say this . If you are a creature associated in any way whatsoever with something called the “Caleb Foundation”, that bastion of Norneverland Creationism, you simply have to go right back and start your life all over again. Yes…I’m afraid , you’ll have to re-run everything from the start, beginning with the day of your birth and admit to yourself that somehow, somewhere you’ve been handed the wrong end of the stick and that the stuff dripping off your fingers isn’t peanut butter.
What you’ve been handed is something that is the worst version…the most -out- of -kilter rendering of reality you could possibly be conjured up with all the libraries of knowledge available… and there’s a distinct possibility that you might even be totally and unawarely ,totally insane.Like that old television advertisment from long, long ago at the beginning of time ,somewhere around the middle of the twentieth century,when people suddenly began having enough spending cash to fill their homes full to the brim with something other than foodstuffs and decided they also wanted everyone around them to smell nice too….
“B.O…even your best friends won’t tell you….”
Sad…I know , but there it is….the cold , clear light of day and all that .
Of course, you could choose not to take any advice and look away now ….It may well be a painless condition like alapecia or Tourette’s syndrome, after all. But still…..
People believe in some awful tosheroony. As we sit , I can almost guarantee that there is a conspiracy theorist sitting in a dimly -lit basement busily cobbling up a whole new version of reality.In this version David Bowie is actually still alive and has joined the late James Marshall Hendrix , the late Paul McCartney and Jim Morrison of the Doors ,in Area 51 in Nevada. There they will have joined with the bug-eyed aliens who landed in their Flying Saucers in the late 1940’s . Bowie has very obviously faked his own demise, of course and filmed it. His wife Iman and his fifteen -year old daughter ,who no-one has ever really seen,except in blurry photographs, will have been replaced by clones some years back and will have joined him by now, in self-imposed exile, well-away from prying humanity . Paul McCartney has been replaced long-ago in any case . He was thought to have been killed in a road accident in 1967 , long before the “other one” met Linda and was actually replaced some four years before the Beatles broke up in 1970, but he has been in Area 51 ever since.
All the clues are out there in the Beatles’ recordings and especially in the cover artwork of their records.There’s that bass guitar wreath on the cover of “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” .I mean he was the bass-player in the band, wasn’t he? .Much has already been written about how the “real” Paul’s death was covered up by a government who thought that to release such tragic news to a Beatles- besotted world would cause the breakdown of society and result in industry and commerce grinding to a halt in a overflowing of tears and emotion. In these past fifty years. Jimi Hendrix has been issuing “posthumous” music for many years now and has issued at least a dozen albums and possibly many more recordings since the “Cry Of Love” in 1971 , a year after his “death”, to “Valleys of Neptune” and “People, Hell and Angels” in 2010 and 2013 respectively, so his creative well hasn’t yet run dry..Doubtless Bowie will have a similar career trajectory and financial strategy in place…
You might think all of the above is far-fetched and a very cynical take on our fellow human -beings(and some of it undoubtedly is…but look what happened when Princess Diana died. That story is still rolling.)…Some of it might even be true, but simply type “Paul Is Dead” into your Google search engine …nothing else…and see what actually pops up.You will find it very enlightening.
The flip -side or polar -opposite of this kind of “reasoning” is someone like the scientist and theoretical physicist at Harvard University, Lisa Randall. Again, any Creationists in the audience who believe that our earth is only 6000 years old might want to look away again, because she believes in some seriously outlandish stuff ,too.In her world, based on the entire scientific knowledge accumulated and available to this 21st century, there is the possibility that not only are there the three known dimensions, but that there are possibly many more besides… and that these might be observable using that Hadron Particle Collider at Cern.
As if that was not enough, she is now studying the solar system and is currently having some really deep thoughts about the effect that “dark matter” has on our universe. Now to an old comics fan like myself , who was reading about “negative space” , “micro-worlds”, or “anti-matter” over fifty years ago , this isn’t much of a stretch for me, but there may be some who might have a little difficulty with these odd concepts.
In a nutshell(!) she gathers together what we know from biology, paleontology, meteorology and mathematics and explains how a disc of the earth’s dark matter has probably propelled a comet across space as our solar system travelled through a part of the Milky Way from a distant part of the galaxy known as the Oort Cloud. These comets are periodically shot across space in a predictable, measurable pattern every few billion years and she postulates that one hit our earth at Chicxulub on Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula where a huge crater was discovered in 1980. This projectile, which apparently would have been the size of New York city , struck the earth with such force that it had the power of many nuclear bombs .It created devastation and tsunamis which engulfed the planet and destroyed all the vegetation that the dinosaur food-chain relied upon. Most of the land -living ones simply disappeared in one fell swoop.
Many scientists over the past three hundred years have had thoughts like this and each has built new ideas on the information that preceeded and indeed there have been a plethora of science-fiction stories and films based on similar ideas. Little is known about “Dark Matter” except that about 68% of the universe is made up of dark energy and dark matter makes up about 27%.The rest , which means everything we have here on Earth and everything else ever observed with all of our scientific instruments, adds up to less than 5% of the known Universe.Einstein knew that “empty” space wasn’t empty at all . There is 95% of it full of some kind of “stuff”.
For all of that enquiry, what we really know is that dinosaurs went extinct about 65 million years ago, give or take a year or two (at the end of the Cretaceous Period), after living on Earth for about 165 million years. They know exactly that ,almost to the year it happened. Not only that, but many other life-forms suddenly went away at the exact same time, like some magical cosmic disappearing act. A geologist called Walter Alvarez , during the 1970’s,identified a strange layer of clay in a part of Italy . This layer contained a high concentration of an extremely rare earth element called iridium.This was thirty times more irridium than he, or anyone else ,expected to find in the earth’s crust in that particular spot or any other spot.It was rare on earth, alright, but it was already known to be expected and observable in great abundance in meteorites and asteroids out in space . The layer of iridium exactly separated the point between the Cretaceous and Tertiary periods which geologists have dated as 65.5 million years ago.They call this the “K/T boundary” or sometimes the “Cretaceous–Paleogene” (K–Pg) boundary”.That’s when our dinosaurs made their exit.
That means all those big monsterous sea- lizards like the mosasaurs, the plesiosaurs and those big flying dragons, the pterosaurs were wiped out overnight. After that point in time they simply ceased to exist and none of their bones are found at any later measurable date. It all stacks up as we say. It doesn’t mean that it is exactly what happened 65 million years ago because there was no thinking creature around to record any of it and see it actually happen, but it makes a certain amount of sense, given the available evidence we can now gather and reason with.You can’t feel it in your bones but you can certainly “see” it in the earth surrounding the bones.
The next thing you’ll know is that old hippy crackpot Einstein and his Theory of Relativity will be proven true…
“On 11 February 2016, researchers in the US announced the first direct detection of gravitational waves – ripples in space-time that are the final unconfirmed prediction of Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity.In 1905, Albert Einstein compared the universe’s shape to a single fabric, hewn from space and time. According to his theory of general relativity, the force of gravity is the result of curvature in this space-time, and gravitational waves are ripples in it, produced when massive objects like black holes collide.”
Ach sure what’s that got to do with the price of eggs, anyway?