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Author Topic: The real cause of the death of the dinosaurs.  (Read 870 times)

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Offline Yuri Bezmenov

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Re: The real cause of the death of the dinosaurs.
« Reply #30 on: September 02, 2014, 12:57:43 PM »
Wouldn't surprise me.

There is a huge problem with plastic crap either on a macroscale with discarded bags entering the oceans and being mistaken, fatally, for jellyfish by turtles, and apparently even deep down the tiny particles resulting from degraded plastic items is being found in the bodies and gills of fish and other sea creatures.

Since there's already nylonase bacteria, I'd imagine that other life forms will evolve to either digest plastics or at least have defenses agains plastic contamination. Life is fairly difficult to wipe out entirely.

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Re: The real cause of the death of the dinosaurs.
« Reply #31 on: May 15, 2016, 06:27:12 PM »

Offline Lestat

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Re: The real cause of the death of the dinosaurs.
« Reply #32 on: May 21, 2016, 10:13:28 AM »
Well yes, and we already have engineered bacteria in use for breaking up oil spills at sea.


But evolution amongst viruses, prokaryotes and archaea is VERY different to that in eukaryotic life,  due to the sheer speed of replication, allowing many many countless hordes of generations to be iterated through in the time it takes a single multicellular life to run from birth to death. Especially amongst viruses with their (for the most part, not talking about those giant viruses that infest amoebae like megavirus, mimivirus and co. (they really are fucking HUGE, one of them is over a micrometer in diameter iirc, big enough to be visualized under a high powered optical microscope, which for a virus, whos size is usually measured in the multiple tens to a couple of hundred nanometers, is way beyond morbidly obese, so to speak but as far as I know the analogy still holds, afaik they still hijack the RNA/DNA polymerases and transcriptases of the host for their own end, and they are still both parasitic and lethal to the host. But those things are SO different to conventional viruses and viroids (viroids are replication deficient, stripped-down viruses possibly, or potentially genetic leftover survivors from a pre-DNA 'RNA-world' before DNA and proteins evolved, or even possibly, before the first proto-cellular life making them almost-abiological, hovering right on the borderline between life and non-life, long strands of parasitic cyclic genetic material, kind of 'parasitic plasmid'-like, almost in that sense that they undergo rolling circular replication like a plasmid, although some viroids can selfreplicate via ribozyme-type activity [a ribozyme is a length of RNA capable of acting upon itself in an autocatalytic manner, like a self-targeting enzyme, catalyzing its own replication], most of them aren't human pathogens, but affect primarily, plants, with the notable exception of hepatitis D, which may not be a typical viroid, and be a true devolved virus, if the pre-biogenesis hypothesis is true of viroids sensu stricto. Hep-D requires coinfection with another hepatitis virus to cause an infection, without coinfecting the same cell as its required  viral partner it can't hijack some of its needed co-factors by way of replication enzymes. I guess you could almost call it a viral infection of viruses, in a loose manner of speaking.


I find the ORIGINS of life far, far  more interesting than the extinction of it. THATs easy enough to achieve by any number of natural means, and truth told its a bit of a misnomer to speak of 'the' extinction of the dinosaurs, there were several mass extinction events. And presumably with different causes, such as in one case at least, oxygen enrichment reaching levels in the atmosphere the organisms present already could no longer tolerate. More or less, they choked to death on their own shit. Which we now enjoy continually breathing. What a delightful thought.


The big event at the end of the cretaceous era that massacred most or all the dinosaurs is pretty much certain to be an impact event, and by a BIG bastard, one that would probably wipe our, and most other species out, the size of a reasonable-sized landmass, like a US state.  Not quite sure HOW big of a blast that would result in, but you'd want to stick your fingers in your ears, and quite possibly someone else's fingers too thats for sure. Bigger than anything we have the current capacity to create by orders of magnitude anyway. The reason its more or less certain to be an impact from space, is the K-T boundary, a widespread layer of iridium, along with things that require massive forces to create, that are usually found at ground zero of a nuclear explosion, or after impacts like whatever the hell it actually was that fell down on Tunguska, siberia. Ir is very rare on earth. Well, no more so afaik than it is elsewhere in space, only its inaccessible, along with most of the content of other really, really heavy, dense elements like osmium and iridium, some of the other platinum group metals, they were dense enough to sink down to the earths core, especially as they are somewhat often associated with iron geologically speaking. So they were, so to speak, dragged down to hell with it, when that iron formed the earths core. And as well as the iridium (in some places the relative abundance of the element is over a hundred times the quantity found elsewhere in most of the world. It is, though, common in meteorites, as there it never has had a chance to sink down to a planet's molten core while sitting around floating through space.) there are also rich deposits of tiny beads of melted glass, which must have been created during the impact, some but not all, thrown up high into the air, to be redistributed around the planet.

Fuck I bet that thing went off with one hell of a bang (hey, at least, y'all can give me and lit both the benefit of the doubt on that one!) Think I'm paying for a chemical order that large oonly to blow it all to hades? not with so many other interesting natural phenomena there are to intrigue me. Stuff like shooting conkers out of trees with improvised artillery was fun all right, but someone could do a lot worse with for instance an EMP, if they were that way inclined, and its possible to turn chemical energy into EMP output by using timed explosive shaped charges to compress a thin metal coil in such a way that a massive capacitative load from something like a spark gap voltage increase circuit like a mark generator, or maybe cockroft-walton,  that it  the shaped charge shorts the wire, while the pulse is still contained within the coil section of the pulse circuit, the result is a brief, fairly wideband iirc and high amplitude EMP. its called an explosively pumped magnetic flux compression generator. Never built one, but the output can be big, would make a hell of a mess by virtue of modern dependence upon technology.  The correct situation in which such an EMP took place and it might even  turn out worse, at least in a non-tribal type of society. Or something like a virtual cathode oscillator, some vacuum knowhow and glass fabrication needed, but microwave output up to a terawatt, in brief or possibly chirped pulses, depending on your available power supply and the depth of your pockets or ability to fabricate large cap banks, do what you like with it, so to speak. Although I wouldn't recommend TV dinners...

Something tells me rated that high its going to be a one shot event, and the grid would burn out the moment the load is put through, unless its extremely brief.
« Last Edit: May 21, 2016, 10:32:51 AM by Lestat »
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Offline "couldbecousin"

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Re: The real cause of the death of the dinosaurs.
« Reply #33 on: May 21, 2016, 08:50:09 PM »
  All I could understand from that was  "Although I wouldn't recommend TV dinners."
  And I don't even understand that.  I like TV dinners.  It's been a long day.  Brain powering down.  :P
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Offline Lestat

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Re: The real cause of the death of the dinosaurs.
« Reply #34 on: May 22, 2016, 12:50:31 PM »
I was referring, jokingly to cooking a microwave dinner using a vircator pulse.  The result wouldn't even survive to be fine TV dinner mist, it would most likely detonate with a helluva bang, hit something LIVING with a microwave pulse with a terawatt of output, and you won't be IDing them from dental records, your down, possibly, to scraping up the surrounding molten glass,if there is quite thatmuch left of the target. and using something like induction-coupled plasma mass spec to try and determine roughly if all of it was native to the country your in via isotope signatures.

Main effect though really isn't the potential for thermal damage, but by coupling on the EMP to power lines, spreading throughout the range of the device, frying stuff as it goes, electronics, particularly semiconductors and wiring. Making it more of a nonconventional weapon targeted mainly at vehicles and infrastructure. Communucations systems are particularly susceptible without being hardened. At least with the explosively pumped flux-compression type devices, a vircator coupled to a waveguide and some shielding of appropriate parts, and you got youself more or less a directed energy weapon, the frequency the vircator is tuned to at design time as different materials absorb  more/less MW.

My MW oven is rated at 900W for comparison, the lab one is a bit more, not much. And the one used to do food will burn a dinner to a crisp in short order, that much juice output in a brief pulse (they are capable of nanosecond chirped output iirc, brief but very, very very high power output., call it 1 kilowatt, for math ease sake, a terawatt is that amplfied a thousand times a thousand times a thousand times a thousand (prefixes go kilo-1000, mega-1k thousand, giga-thousand mega-whatever unit of interest, tera-thousand gig. E.g a terabyte of data is a thousand gigabytes nominally speaking, same goes for wattage.) in other words, a gigantic fucking mess at ground zero, and spreading out long distance as it couples to electrical power cables and powerlines, blowing them out as it does (I.e, blowing to bits quite probably, dump a big capacitative load into say, a thin wire, or foil and see what happens with a large load. It doesn't get hot, it detonates violently with a loud crack, especially if the caps are rigged in a voltage amplifying circuit like a marx generator,    And  the metal can go off carrying mighty big quantities of force, for its used in tech like exploding bridgewire detonators, which can deonate modern insensitive plastic explosives, explosive foams etc. Dunno if ammonium nitrate/gasoline or diesel would go off. Maybe sensitized with nitromethane and micron fine aluminium powder,  because while itl give  a pretty hefty blast radius and total energy yield, its what tim mcveigh 8n the US, ANFO  don't know I bet  making ANFO with  nitrobenzene as the hydroccarbon, the added nitro as a fundamental part of the basic principle, although nitrobenzene is is really poisonous, smells  a bit like marzipan/cyanide (not everyone can smell hydrogen cyanide, smells like bitter almond, benzaldehyde, marzipan, the odor that develops in a short time after crushing up a leaf from a cherry laurel bush, the smell is prussic acid, as hydrocyanic acid, hydrogen cyanide in solution. Actually I think nitromethane and nitroethane reallly remind me of it. Or synthetic almond essence for cooking , thats benzaldehyde usually. I love that smell, and marzipan but my dad hates it.

One time it did get too much though was when i was a lot younger and didn't live where I do now, very first TNT attempt, I had no nitric acid, and didn't want to go to the inconvenience of handling boiling conc. sulfuric with a nitrate and distilling HNO3 , but tried an in situ nitration improvised on the spot, on toluene using ammonium nitrate and fuming sulfuric in the cold at first, for safety's sake to see how it behaved. Tame enough and didn't get TNT but rather a mixture of a yellow oil and an overpowering smell of marzipan/HCN, not sure
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Offline "couldbecousin"

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Re: The real cause of the death of the dinosaurs.
« Reply #35 on: May 22, 2016, 09:19:05 PM »
  How the hell do you keep all that stuff straight?  I can't even pronounce it.  :GA:


   Seriously, watch  Breaking Bad.  I think you'd like it. :heisenberg:
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People forget.
--- The Who, "Eminence Front"