Lindstrom 1 Nathan W.

Lindstrom Professor Brych English 1A 2/24/12

Dinosaurs and Mars (Essay on Sex, Drugs, Disasters, and the Extinction of the Dinosaurs)

Imagination is not enough. Knowledge is necessary. Paul Scott (134)

The planet Mars, I scarcely need remind the reader, revolves about the sun at a mean distance of 140,000,000 miles, and the light and heat it receives from the sun is barely half of that received by this world. It must be, if the nebular hypothesis has any truth, older than our world; and long before this earth ceased to be molten, life upon its surface must have begun its course. The fact that it is scarcely one-seventh of the volume of the earth must have accelerated its cooling to the temperature at which life could begin. It has air and water and all that is necessary for the support of animated existence (Wells 1). So begins H. G. Wells celebrated masterpiece of science fiction, The War of the Worlds, which he wrote in 1898. Fast forward to Christmas Day, 2003, when the exploratory spacecraft Mars Express arrived in orbit around the red planet and began its exploration of Mars. Discoveries about water on Mars quickly led to the dismissal of many old theories and a

Lindstrom 2 barrage of new ones; however, in the words of writer and scientist Stephen Jay Gould, how many of these new ideas are useless speculation? Much space in magazines and books has been dedicated to the question of water on Mars, including a recent article in The Planetary Report titled Europes First Trip to Mars. The author, A. J. S. Rayl, reports on several specific

theories proposed by scientists involved in the Mars Express mission. Most, but not all, of the scientists claims agree with Goulds requirement that speculation create a testable theory that can later be proven or disproved (Gould 449). To illustrate his theoretical requirements, Gould sets forth three possible explanations of what caused the dinosaurs to become extinct in his article Sex, Drugs, Disasters, and the Extinction of the Dinosaurs. The first, falling under the heading of sex, is that male dinosaurs became sterile thanks to a warming world and an innate inability to adequately regulate the temperature of their testicles. The second theory proposes that dinosaurs succumbed to the consumption of toxic fauna (drugs) thanks to their literal inability to taste and avoid the poison. The final hypothesis concerns itself with a mass extinction event, or disaster, being brought on by radical climate changes resulting from a large meteor striking the earth. Gould sets these theories up as straw men, so that he might demonstrate his injunction of useless speculation...is restrictive. It generates no testable hypothesis, and offers no way to obtain potentially refuting evidence (Gould 449).

Lindstrom 3 Gould considers each of the three extinction scenarios in turn, evaluating them on the grounds of testability and expandability. Testability means being able to validate some aspect of a theory with real-world experiments, while expandability means being able to apply a test to more than a single narrow subject, like say, dinosaurs on earth or water on Mars. It was the pursuit of testability that prompted the European Space

Agency to launch the Mars Express on June 2, 2003. The mission consisted of two vehicles, the forenamed orbiting science platform, and a lander christened Beagle 2 in honor of Charles Darwins ship. The Beagle 2

separated from the Mars Express as planned, and disappeared into the blood-red twilight of Mars. It was never heard from again. Perhaps it fell to its death, a mechanical Icarus streaking through the sky; or perhaps it landed successfully, but could not find its voice to call out across the starry void. Whatever its fate, the Mars Express was left alone, orbiting the red planet, and using only its remote sensors to relay information back to the scientists on earth. Perhaps Beagle 2 perished due to the high temperatures of an uncontrolled plunge through Mars atmosphere. So too might high

temperatures have been the catalyst behind the demise of the dinosaurs here on earth, but for reasons of reproduction rather than gravity. Gould

cites a theory published in the Bulletin of the American Museum of Natural History where the authors posit how a worldwide rise in temperature at the close of the Cretaceous period caused the testes of dinosaurs to stop

Lindstrom 4 functioning and led to their extinction by sterilization of males (Gould 450). The authors, Colbert, Cowles, and Bogert, attempted to draw conclusions about dinosaurs by studying alligators and how they are influenced by temperature changes. Unfortunately, there is simply no way to test the

conditions at the time of the dinosaurs extinction, so Gould dismisses their idea as only an intriguing speculation leading nowhere (453). Testing conditions and observing phenomena is the whole purpose sensors carried by spacecraft, including one such sensor named OMEGA aboard the Mars Express. Having sent a great deal of mineralogical data

back to earth, the OMEGA readings prompted scientist Jean-Pierre Bibring to announce the discovery of evidence of past water on Mars surface in deposits of...surface minerals that contain water in their crystalline

structures (Rayl 9). Bibring went on to hypothesize that any large bodies of standing water were gone within half a billion years of the planets formation; they either disappeared from the surface by seeping underground or were lost into space (9). Is this theory testable, according to Goulds

guidelines? Provided Beagle 2 had succeeded in its mission, the idea of the water having disappeared underground could have been tested. As for the loss of water to the vacuum of space, the OMEGA sensor does not provide a means to verify that idea. However, Gould would not dismiss it as pointless speculation since the theory may be expanded to apply to the earth, where observation shows it to be valid. The earth is continuously, but extremely slowly, losing its [sic] atmosphere to space, including water vapor, says one

Lindstrom 5 scientist, who works for the U.S. Department of Energy (qtd. in

Environmental Earth Science Archive). This ongoing loss of water could be a contributer to the fact that the earth is a great deal less humid than it once was, as borne out by the fossil record left behind by the riot of plant life that evolved shortly before the death of the dinosaurs. Sufficient new forms of plant life arose during the late Cretaceous period that a psychiatrist at UCLA, Ronald K. Siegel, put forward the idea that dinosaurs poisoned themselves on new and toxic plants, causing a world-wide reptilian Jonestown massacre. Siegel told

members of the American Psychological Association that Im not suggesting that all dinosaurs [overdosed] on plant drugs, but it certainly was a factor (Gould 452). Gould laughs off Siegels theory as a gratuitous, attentionThere is no way, Gould points out, that Siegels

grabbing guess (453).

theory can account for the extinction of diatoms, ammonites, and other ocean-dwelling animals, since they did not eat plants on land. In other

words, Siegels theory is not expandable, as it only works on land, and does not cover the oceans. It is doubtful that oceans ever covered our neighbor planet, Mars, although its color strongly suggests the past presence of water on its surface. That Mars is red is thanks to large amounts of ferric oxide rust left behind when the water disappeared, or so scientist Jean-Pierre Bibring contends. The earth, on the other hand, is blue because we still have our water. Bibring and his colleagues hypothesize that Mars has undergone

Lindstrom 6 several distinct geological eras, and that surface conditions may not always have been cold and dry (Rayl 9). He offers no evidence to support his

claim, and no avenues to investigate it further, thereby condemning it to be something that Gould would dismiss as useless speculation (Gould 449). Perhaps we may never truly know much water Mars was covered with, but thanks to another sensor aboard the Mars Express, we do know exactly how the solar wind that tears at Mars thin atmosphere could have contributed to the disappearance of Mars water. The ASPERA-3 sensor

shows how the solar wind (the stream of ions and electrons racing outward from the Sun) interacts with the Martian upper atmosphere (Rayl 10). Since Mars lacks the global magnetic field that the earth uses to largely deflect the Solar wind, scientists discovered that Mars atmosphere is being efficiently stripped away by the deluge of charged particles flowing from the Sun (10). Given that the same process is at work on the earth, albeit at a reduced rate thanks to our strong planetary magnetic field, Gould would likely point to the conclusions drawn by the ASPERA-3 researchers as good science. Another idea which Gould calls good science is the theory that the extinction of the dinosaurs was caused by radical climate changes directly arising from a meteor striking the earth (De Laubenfels 14). Known as the Alvarez Theory, and named for the father-son team of Luis and Walter Alvarez who first developed this theory of meteor extinction in 1980, their idea can be tested, extended, refined, and, if wrong, disproved according to Gould (454). Even after more than two decades, it remains one of the

Lindstrom 7 most popular ideas for explaining the death of the dinosaurs. Gould calls it exciting, fruitful science because it generates tests, provides us with things to do, and expands outward (455). So too, are the missions to Mars exciting and fruitful scientific efforts. Enough data has been created by the Mars Express mission alone that it will take scientists years of study to extract its full meaning. While the Beagle 2 came to an unexpected and unfortunate end, more missions are planned, some with the specific aim of looking for that elusive liquid water that Mars Express sensors have hinted at. While Gould would undoubtedly have

disagreed with some of the claims made in the wake of the Mars Express mission, he would be an enthusiastic supporter of our pursuit of Martian knowledge. As more and better equipment is ferried across the vast

distance between the planets, theories and hypotheses are increasingly testable, and therefore subject to revision and improvement. Of all the

planets, Mars bears the closest resemblance to the earth. Natural processes at work there are often at work here; therefore, knowledge gained about the red planet is expandable in its application to our own world. Its past may very well hold the keys to understanding our planets future. As the famous science fiction author, Larry Niven, once quipped, the dinosaurs became extinct because they didnt have a space program (Dreifus 2).

Lindstrom 8 Works Cited

De Laubenfels, M. W. Dinosaur Extinction: One More Hypothesis. Journal of Paleontology Vol. 30, No. 1 (1956): 207-218 Dreifus, Claudia. Times. 26 Oct. 1999. A Conversation with Arthur C. Clarke. The New York

<http://query.nytimes.com/.../DC1438F935A153C1A96F958260> Environmental Earth Science Archive: Water Loss. Energy. 1 Dec. 1999. U.S. Department of

<http://www.newton.dep.anl.gov/askasci/env99/env097.htm> Gould, Stephen Jay. Sex, Drugs, Disasters, and the Extinction of Dinosaurs. The Writers Presence. Ed. Donald McQuade and Robert Atwan. Boston: Bedford, 2006. Rayl, A. J. S. Europe Goes to Mars. The Planetary Report Volume XXVII, Number 2 (2007): 8-15 Scott, Paul. Paul Scott. Oxford Concise Dictionary of Literary Quotations. Ed. Peter Kemp. New York: Oxford UP, 2004. Wells, H. G. The War of the Worlds. Project Gutenberg. 1 Oct. 2004 <http://www.gutenberg.org/files/36/36.txt>