Friday, March 11, 2005
We're about 5 million years overdue
"With surprising and mysterious regularity, life on Earth has flourished and vanished in cycles of mass extinction every 62 million years, say two UC Berkeley scientists who discovered the pattern after a painstaking computer study of fossil records going back for more than 500 million years...Seeing that the dinosaurs found themselves on the ash heap of (pre)history some 67 million years ago, for the past 5 million years we have been living on borrowed time.
"[The report's authors] Muller and Rohde conceded that they have puzzled through every conceivable phenomenon in nature in search of an explanation: 'We've had to think about solar system dynamics, about the causes of comet showers, about how the galaxy works, and how volcanoes work, but nothing explains what we've discovered,' Muller said."
It's only a matter of time before the next Great Dying takes place. The first prize ("Get out of extinction" card) will go the a reader who is best able to work Halliburton, Chimpy Bushhitler and neo-ziocons into a convincing theory.
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