itt: pictures of dinosaurs gazing haplessly at the arriving meteor

if we're lucky he gets hit by a meteor

if we're lucky we all do

red mars is terrific in so many ways. sometimes kinda sucks on women and people of color. and yet it has so many interesting and really pressing things on its mind, really delves into terraforming as not only a question of how but of why and for whom. but yes: endless stuff on martian canyons and meteorite ejecta and the weight of ice affecting the regolith and the difficulties of navigating cross-cutting crater systems. some of it kinda washed over me cause i was more interested in the political struggle over what mars would be, and, in the sequels, what kind of values people would have if they actually born into a physically different kind of humanity on another planet. but it's really cool imho.

i found red mars really frustrating, mainly because keeping character continuity over the lonnnng timespan of terraforming mars meant handwaving a magical life-extension potion into existence, which rubbed really awkwardly against the determinedly hard-science approach of the rest of it

i sorrrrrt of agree but i also think it's of a piece with other things that happen in the series, making it less of a deus ex machina and more an exhibit towards a (debateable!) claim about how history and innovation work. some things are really slow and percolate around as people share the kernel of the idea and it rubs here, rubs there, and then two books later it finally comes to fruition. very STS. other ideas seem to congeal all of a sudden, like the conventional history of the edison bulb, and promulgate very rapid change. in this column you could put the gerontological treatments in book 1, the pusher-plate spacecraft in book 3, and probably something in book 2 that i'm forgetting. given the shift back and forth between human and geological time scales i think this is all deliberate though it may not be a given reader's cup of tea. and of course there are several semi-miraculous technologies that we have to accept from the get-go - mainly the reliable and easily programmed robot factories for manufacturing materials and equipment. so it goes.

anyway, imho he really does want to take on the life extension as a theme and a subject: how do people think about life when they could live that long, what kind of political issues would it raise, would it change your individual way of thinking about your actions, change the way you externalize problems onto "future generations," change the way you make sense of your own lifetime as a comprehensible biography as opposed to things so distant they could have been different people, etc.? i think the one bit of connective tissue necessary would be to really play up the idea that the labs are focused on the tumor problem because of radiation levels on the voyage and on mars, and that this specifically leads them into genetic repair. as written it feels like they just kinda picked this project out of a hat. the other thing that now seems incredibly goofy is that sea-level rise on earth turns out to not be a long-term result of greenhouse gases, but one of the quick abrupt changes, caused by a volcano erupting underneath antarctica. but there again i think he's trying to make parallels between earth and mars, similar to the kind of crazy "asteroid hitting the yucatan" type events that reshape everything in the blink of an eye. on a cosmic time scale, compressed into a few pages summarizing the geological history of mars, such events are extremely frequent. but we take for granted a somewhat stable planet because humans have been around for such a short time.

woah dude that's my twitter

PS Kim Stanley Robinson has a new book coming out soon called Red Moon, but afaict it's about Chinese on the Moon, rather than terraforming

Chinese on the moon, la la la la la
Chinese on the moon, la la la la la la

KSR's 2312 has much more on psychological effects of life extension, as well as gender mutability becoming standard. Iirc the main protagonist has two children, one she fathered and one she mothered (neither if whom she is in contact with or appears to gaf about lol)

good post doc c - i do need to get back to reading the mars series soon cuz i did enjoy the first one despite my reservations

lol james, also you posted an extract from that same passage further upthread

(i remember bcz i made a weedy joke abt it explaining things in terms of everyday stuff we all know and understand, like the cruising altitude of a 747)

It was here! I thought I'd put it on twitter before, bt could not find it for the life of me, so I posted it again. At least I know I am not going mad.

https://78.media.tumblr.com/6f234a82980ada06b9c82f7c82b3d3de/tumblr_pasgt4jmk91rvzucio1_400.jpg

https://i1.wp.com/dinosaurworld.ca/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/why-did-the-dinosaurs-die-dinosaurs-for-kids.jpg?fit=1280%2C720

[This academic paper](http://uahost.uantwerpen.be/funmorph/raoul/macroevolutie/robertson2004.pdf) offers some great color on how the Chicxulub impact affected life on the other side of the globe.

For several hours following the Chicxulub impact, the entire Earth was bathed with intense infrared radiation from ballistically reentering ejecta.

This was stressful enough to kill all individual nonmarine macroscopic organisms except those protected in soils, underground, under rocks, or in water, in dense aquatic vegetation, or as sequestered eggs, pupae, spores, seeds, or roots.

The normal zenith solar flux reaching Earth’s surface is 1.4 kW/sq m, (which can be) compared to the estimate by Melosh et al. of global flux of thermal radiation reaching Earth’s surface of the order of 10 kW/sq m over periods ranging from one to several hours after the impact. These power levels are comparable to those obtained in a domestic oven set at ‘broil.’ Thermal energy at the Earth’s surface would have been concentrated within 6000 km of the impact and concentrated again at its antipode. The amount of overhead thermal radiation everywhere, however, would have been sufficient to ignite terrestrial
fuel except where Earth’s surface was shielded by very dense cloud cover. Normal cloud cover would not have provided sufficient protection; such cloud cover
"is readily evaporated and may not [have provided] much protection to the forests beneath:

The air temperature at ground level at points distant from the impact (and lacking fuel for combustion-related, local temperature rise) would have been elevated by only 10 K. Vertebrates at or near the surface of the ground or water would have been able to breathe without searing their respiratory membranes. But unless they were sheltered from direct surface (skin) exposure to the IR pulse, they would have perished quickly from absorption by their surficial tissues of intense thermal radiation coming from the entire visible sky. This absorbed heat would have been transported to the nervous system with lethal results. The worldwide fire or likely subsequent reignition of dead trees by lightning would have been secondary effects.

same in dublin today tbh

the first rule of chicxulub is…

wat is the first rool of chicxulub

It was here! I thought I'd put it on twitter before, bt could not find it for the life of me, so I posted it again. At least I know I am not going mad.

― Mince Pramthwart (James Morrison), Friday, June 22, 2018 6:35 AM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

You're not going crazy. itt: pictures of dinosaurs gazing haplessly at the arriving meteor

https://scontent-iad3-1.xx.fbcdn.net/v/t1.0-9/36047705_10155884648862261_442946926493564928_n.jpg?_nc_cat=0&oh=f941383a0ff352eeda935332876e66a2&oe=5BA226B7

Day 5 of Wakarusa

https://i.imgur.com/HVA3ZuI.jpg

from sanpaku's big quote:

This was stressful enough to kill all individual nonmarine macroscopic organisms

i know it goes on to say "except" etc, but don't we know that, while it was indeed a Very Big Die-Off, it was nevertheless also Quite a Big Survive-Off. Plenty of non-bird dinosaurs (and other nonmarine macroscopic organisms) survived the meteor. Were all the survivors swimming or down a hole, or are proto-feathers a good shield against radiation?

The long incubation periods needed for bigger egg laying dinosaurs and the ability for small mammals to rapidly breed like rats didn't suit the former and paved the way for the latter, during the post Chicxulub fun era. Well this is something I remember Elizabeth Kolbert saying in the 6th Extinction. I'd imagine if you were in a zone where super-heated matter was raining down on you from orbit - big or small wouldn't make much difference to how toast you are!

what puzzles me really is the conflict between claim 1 = "asteroid as total wipeout" vs claim 2 = "asteroid tipping the balance betwen two ecological orders"

dino-world didn't vanish overnight! fossils suggest there were still largish land dinosaurs (eg hadrosaurs) around half a million years later -- which is a bit more than a blink even in geological time. claim 2 seems much the more plausible, whatever the mechanism -- but the impact is so often described as if it were entirely unsurvivable bar very good individual fortune (but claim 2 requires good *species* fortune, surely?)

I've read these 2 contradictory accounts in the past: 1 the Deccan Trap eruptions were already causing much S02 related global warming problems for these big bastards! And 2 The Deccan traps eruptions might have actually been caused by the Chicxulub impact.

the first rule of chicxulub is don't resolve the contradictory chicxulub theories

free the chicxulub 7

https://thumb9.shutterstock.com/display_pic_with_logo/996350/178928552/stock-vector-seven-cute-colorful-cartoon-dinosaurs-178928552.jpg

A couple years ago, I saw a YouTube lecture by the lead author of this paper where he talks about looking at Google Earth satellite imagery of eroded Deccan traps deposits. Topologically below the putative Chicxulub horizon, the traps are crossed by numerous huge fault lines, while above, the lava layercake has been largely unmolested.

So, all surface life spent a few hours under an oven broiler, and almost simultaneously, experienced a magnitude 9+ earthquake which liquified sediments and caused numerous surface fractures. Then, survivors faced several years of nuclear winter from all the ash injected by global forest fires into the stratosphere. Then, for a few hundred thousand years thereafter, the peak of Deccan traps volcanism caused a global hothouse and oceanic anoxic/euxinic event, with sulfur dioxide damaging the ozone layer. It was a rough time.

it's enough to make one proud of complex terrestrial life forms for managing to survive and breed under terrible conditions.

so does this lead author have a theory why any complex species *did* survive the rough time?

they just wanted it more iirc

what if chicxulub, but too much

the idea of extinction-level events being specific incidents that alter the planet such that a species’ extinction is guaranteed over time, not wiped out instantly or in a short period, is going to give me something to ponder

you could have multiple extinction-level events that occur, with each hastening the clock or not really having a noticeable effect because a larger one already occurred

there have probably already been extinction-level events for humans, it’s just on such a large timescale we can’t necessarily perceive it. the best possible conditions for the rise of a species occur once, negative conditions occur constantly

the only true indicator that you will be extinct some day is existing at all

in other news, I saw the new dinosaur movie. not really that good.

all jurassic movies are bad not good, they are like james bond with very short arms

there’s a volcano, though. that’s probably the best part, and due to all of the dinos being right next to it, extinction event

mh was talking about book club i think

b-but the first rule of book club is…

"so then i tell the guy, look, I don't care if you already replaced the compressor, the fact is – ... whoa, hold up, what's going on?"

https://i.imgur.com/16V5in2.jpg

The Toba eruption 75k years ago ya may have reduced the population of *Homo sapiens* to 3000 individuals. This sort of *near* extinction event is also a major driver of natural selection. Neurologist William Calvin wrote a handful of books in the 1990s on how the ice ages brought us from *Homo habilis* to Lascaux.

have just started reading the Brannen book this aft. He reckons on the geologic timescale humans are about as equally influential as penis worms. So we'd have to do a lot more existing to catch up with these dinosaurs!

calzino: you might enjoy The Earth After Us: What Legacy Will Humans Leave in the Rocks?, by Jan Zalasiewicz as a companion piece.

I'd accumulated some research on past extinction episodes, so as I listened to Brannen's audiobook on its day of release, there were few surprises.

^By which I mean that Brennan is presenting the current consensus. Most mass extinctions are associated with volcanism and a global warming episode.

Well, my tweeting that Brennan quote has lead to M John Harrison reading and enjoying the book, so expect some wild geological SF in a few years.

Wat is penis worm pls

"Go look in the mirror", etc

apparently they taste like clams and eaten raw in some places.

xps to Sanpaku

I have that book on my kindle, just never got round to reading it.

Oh wait, is it a candiru, the little fella with a brief but memorable cameo in Naked Lunch?