Impact

There is a possibility that the mass extinction and dinosaur fossil burial following the meteorite impact with the earth was not due to the cold and darkness hypothesized in the “Cosmic Night” concept. An alternative explanation might be found in the world wide flooding due to sea floor rise predicted by the Lithologic Cycle Hypothesis.

Last night, February 16, 2000, I watched the TV special “Three Minutes To Impact” on the Discovery Channel.. It evoked several questions. Do they intentionally give the impression that scientists know all the stuff that they present as fact? How do they know that it was darkness and cold that killed the dinosaurs? The impression was given that that is based on the observation that dust in the atmosphere from one volcano caused a decrease in temperature of the air of one degree. A logical extension of that idea is that if a thousand volcanoes erupted then the atmospheric temperature would drop a thousand degrees. Of course everyone realizes that that makes as much sense as saying if it takes one man a thousand days to build a large building then a thousand men should be able to build it in one day. Therefore they say that if a thousand volcanoes erupted simultaneously then we would be reasonable and expect the temperature to drop only a hundred or so degrees. Then they proceed to build a great story based on that assumption.

This is how hypotheses are formed. Not how facts are established. Hypotheses are good. Passing them off as known fact is bad. Why is this done? It appears like there is great pressure for science to be an authority who gives answers to this kind of questions. Wouldn’t it be much better to let future students of science know there is yet a lot to be learned so they would get excited about going into the field of science?

To me, there is a lot of unanswered questions. It seems to me almost impossible for such a scenario to be fact. For one thing, in my observations, nights with clear skies are cold, and nights with cloudy skies are warmer. That is because the heat from the earth can radiate out through clear skies much better than through cloudy skies. True, it is cooler in a shadow than in the direct sun, but the heat is absorbed by the tree that is casting the shadow. Therefore, the heat of the sun would seemingly be very likely absorbed by the black dust in the atmosphere casting the shadow on the earth. Wouldn’t it seem reasonable then that the total heat absorbed by the earth, including the black dust be greater than that absorbed by a white cloud covered earth? If you ever heard of the greenhouse effect? That is where radiation from the sun penetrates into the atmosphere and is converted to heat that cannot escape back out through the cloudy atmosphere. That would cause the general warming of the earth from pole to pole. The polar regions would be about the same temperature as the equatorial regions. The earth would be covered by a great canopy shielding the escape of heat. The internal temperature of the earth is very great and is cool enough for us to live on the surface only because heat can escape through the clear atmosphere.

As I was writing this a gardener came into the room and asked what I was doing. So I asked him a few questions. First I asked why or how the dinosaurs died. He said because of the cold when the cloud of dust shut out the sunlight for years after a comet or something hit the earth. I asked then, “Which is colder, a night with a clear sky or a cloudy night? He said a clear night. I ask “Why?” “Because the heat cannot get out through the clouds.” “Why then do you think it would be a colder earth with a black cloud of dust?” “Because the suns heat couldn’t get in.? “Which is hotter inside, a closed car parked in the sun that is black, or one that is white?” “The black one.” “Why?” “Because black absorbs the sunlight and turns it to heat.” “Then which would be hotter, an earth covered with a white cloud or an earth covered with a black cloud?” Then the Gardner made the conclusion. ”They might have died from the heat!”

If a gardener can see the flaws, why then do scientists so readily accept the freezing cold of the “Cosmic Night” hypothesis of mass extinction?

The real answer is that is the accepted hypothesis because no one has thought of the real answer. There is much need of people to become scientists and think of the right answers.

This program presented an impact to earth of a comet or asteroid as a possible eminent threat to the survival of mankind. The thought of this a few short decades ago was incomprehensible to scientists. The idea of catastrophism was two akin to religion for scientists to swallow. Now it seems to be generally accepted. Before I retired in 1994, one of my co-workers was attempting to propose a defense against exactly this scenario and was turned down flat for such a preposterous idea.

There lurks on the horizon an even more preposterous concept.

The process of science seems to be, not as they claim, the scientific method; rather, acceptance of a scenario is determined by an acceptable mechanism being available for the scenario to be in touch with reality before it would even be considered. Restated, any scenario that does not have as a basis a mechanism for rational explanation, will not even be considered. Let me try saying that again; Unless a scenario is based on an accepted mechanism, it will not even be considered by scientists. Even if such a scenario were recorded in history, It would be ignored if there were no known and accepted scientifically credible mechanism to explain it. No search for a mechanism would even be entertained. Examples of such scenarios are Creationism as an explanation for the origin of the species which we know exist by observation, or Noah’s flood as an explanation for mass extinctions recorded in geologic history. Several pseudoscientific mechanisms have been proposed to explain the flood scenario, however, none have been credible when put to the test of the laws of physics. As far as I am aware, there have been no serious attempts to find a scientifically credible explanation of any assumed mechanism of Creationism. Therefore anyone who would even think of searching for an explainable mechanism is criticized as being a religious fanatic. On the other hand, scientists will go to extreme lengths to find a mechanism to explain their theory of evolution because the only available alternative is a theory with even less scientific level mechanism,

Now that the scientists are primed to accept an event that is catastrophic rather than uniformitarian, the stage has been set for someone to come in with a mechanism that would explain how the ocean level could suddenly be changed relative to the continents such that sea level would be at, near, or over the mountain tops. How then could science ignore the historical evidence that there may be credibility in the hypothesis that mass extinctions have been due to massive world wide floodings? Evidence is such things as the buried remains of something as big as a dinosaur being completely covered by mud before the bones decay when sedimentation in the absence of a flood is at the rate of a few centimeters per total decay time of even the most resistant bone.

The Lithologic Cycle Hypothesis has a phase that contains a mechanism for a temporary rise of sea level relative to the continents. This rise in sea level is due to the movement and level change of the rocks making up the ocean floor. This temporary rise in sea level is accompanied by massive rainstorms which cause worldwide flooding, erosion, and mass extinction. It also cleans the atmosphere of dust and debris allowing the renewal of life.

Why don’t scientists look at the Lithologic cycle which contains a phase just preceeding a mountain building episode where the ocean floor rapidly slides sideways towards the continent as it sinks down into the depths of the earth under the continents. Why? Because they haven’t thought of it. They do not even know there is a lithologic cycle. (New ideas are hard to get accepted by scientific community, and I do not have enough time left in my lifetime to take my ideas through the conventionally accepted process.) But there is a cycle with a mechanism that gathers the thin layer of less dense sialic rock into clumps called continents rather than being spread uniformly over the surface of the earth under the water layer. We know this because we live on those clumps of less dense rock.

To read more of the Lithologic Cycle Hypothesis go to http;//www.earthscience.us

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