Wednesday, July 11, 2007

Dinosaurs and Whales

My basic proposition is that gravity is not a property of matter but rather the dynamic result of what matter is doing, cooling, and as it cools, it emits an electromagnetic emission field that produces the effect on the components of the nuclei of atoms that cause those atoms to move back toward the source of emissions.
My other basic proposition is that the Earth is cooling. As planets seemed to be formed hot and as they occupy the zero temperature of space, and as heat flows to cold, I find it ludicrous to believe the planet is not getting colder. Under my scheme of things all planets, and that includes moons, started out as emitters, miniature suns, and as they crusted over and cooled, their elements began to break down, with the lighter elements becoming the gas held to the cooling planet by the emission field. At some point in the cooling process, the hydrogen and oxygen atoms begin to combine and precipitate out to become the waters that cover the crust.
The moon is an example of a small planet that has run its course, barely emitting any heat and captured in the Earth’s emission field with one side forever facing it. Mars is a good way along in the evolution of a planet toward death, while Jupiter, with its immense size, is just starting to precipitate out its water. Just as the occupants of Mars are long gone, or perhaps even gone here, we are well on our way to having an uninhabitable planet as a result of cooling. Perhaps we will end up colonizing Jupiter. After all, under this set of conditions, Jupiter will eventually cool, and as it does so, its gravity will lessen, making it more accommodating to our form.
Of course, to science, gravity is fixed and unchangeable. To get rid of gravity, we have to get rid of matter. There’s no two ways about it.
However, many rational people, even practicing scientists, are coming to realize that since the dinosaurs couldn’t have fed or supported themselves, it’s a physical impossibility given their supposed bulk, heart size, mouth and throat size and so forth, that gravity must have somehow changed from the time of the dinosaurs until now.
Reviewing briefly the history of the discovery of dinosaurs, when the first bones were brought to scientists in the 19th century, the unfortunate discoverers were labeled what science always labels something it doesn’t understand, frauds. However, the sheer volume of the discovery of the bones led science to recognize the existence of these huge creatures. Then, of course, as soon as science took over, the fun really began, fun meaning obfuscation to the point of absurdity.
The first task was to determine what the creatures looked like. This, to science, was a fairly simple task. All that need be done is to measure the amount of meat the bones would hold and then to place that amount of meat on the bones. Unfortunately, the amount of meat these massive bones could hold, in today’s weight, was too much for the creatures to carry. Therefore, science hypothesized that the creatures spent their lives primarily submerged in water. Artists' conceptions of dinosaurs, before the necessity of movies required them to move about, were simply vast steamy swamps filled with huge dinosaurs.
With the advent of motion pictures, dinosaurs were pared down so that they were at least in some sort of fighting trim. However, this didn’t jibe with the calculations for the amount of flesh that the bones could hold. The divergence between the public vision and the scientific view prevailed until the early 60s when the cold v. hot-blooded dispute broke out among dinosaur scientists. This led to a melding of the public and scientific perception in Jurassic Park, where dinosaurs are presented as a mixture of the slow, oversized behemoths, and the smaller, more agile, meat eaters, with the former being cold-blooded and the later hot-blooded.
None of this really answered anything about the dinosaur’s size because, as the years have gone by, finds of larger and larger bones able to hold more and more meat produced dinosaurs so large that they were physically incapable of existing. This is when the accretion theories began to pop up, theories that said over the eons, the Earth collects meteorites and space dust that add to its mass increasing its gravity. There are several other maverick theories around which, while wilder, result in the same thing, an increase in the Earth’s mass and a resulting increase in its gravity.
The whole notion involved with this line of thinking is that, when the Earth had less mass and less gravity, the bones could support the greater amount of meat, which was lighter then than it is now.
I first ran into this backward thinking decades ago when I ventured to posit in a letter to an alternate science magazine that the reason the dinosaurs could grow so large was because the gravity was greater than it is now. The Editor very kindly published my letter and followed it up with a two-page letter railing against the absurdity of my claim and positing that the only way the dinosaurs could have existed was if there had been a black hole circling the Earth that lessened the Earth’s gravity. (I really like that one!)
Before getting into my reasoning, let’s just take a look at reality. What’s the biggest creating on Earth today? That’s simple, the whale. One reason the whale grows so large is that its displacement in water lessens the effect of gravity on its structure. We don’t have the saying for helplessness, beached whale, for nothing. Here we actually have a huge creature that evolved in a lessened gravitational environment. If the people who claim that gravity had to be less for the dinosaurs to grow so large are correct, then the whale’s bones should be just as massive as the dinosaurs.
But they aren’t. While substantial, they are nowhere near as massive, as pictures of whale skeletons illustrate.
In fact, using the logic of how much meat the bones would hold today, if we had nothing but whale skeletons littering dry land to go on, we’d have to conclude that whales couldn’t hold enough meat on their bones to survive.
There are certain commonsense rules in any field of science that are often overlooked. In the case of dinosaurs, the basic rule of life on Earth applies. That rule is, life that is not sustainable does not evolve. It’s as simple as that. The dinosaurs had to be normal life forms or they wouldn’t have evolved in the first place. That means that a healthy dinosaur would in all likelihood be as sleek and capable of both movement and obtaining ample food supply, as well as getting it down its throat, as you or I. I realize that elephants still roam around, so long as there isn’t a crack they have to jump, but while I believe they are a hangover from a prior era, they have evolved that marvelous trunk to take care of all of their needs. Hippos, seemingly large and ungainly, speak for themselves by being the largest killers of humans in the world.
So our starting assumption has to be, the dinosaurs had only so much meat on their bones. They were not these behemoths that could barely move, their neck substituting for an elephant trunk, and they weren’t creatures with hearts that could sustain normal weight but somehow beat for five times that weight. They were normal animals, although oversized.
Why would they be oversized?
Because in a field where the gravity is stronger, they would need stronger bones to move around. Not only would the bones have to be stronger and bigger, they would be heavier, which means, the substance necessary to carry the bones and any flesh they carried against the greater gravitational field would have to be much sturdier. This is exactly what we find when we look at dinosaur bones, large sturdy structures designed to hold a lot of weight.
But what weight?
Their own weight and the weight of the flesh that was the animate dinosaur. I have no idea what the strength of gravity was when the dinosaurs evolved, although it would be an interesting problem, probably solvable, for any scientist with an open enough mind. But for the sake of example (and going by the amount of flesh artists put on the bones), let’s say it was today’s gravity times three, three times as great as it is today. That means that when the normal amount of flesh was added to the bones, the bones would end up being designed to hold themselves and about four times their weight. (Our skeletons support 80% of our weight, elephants’ skeletons support about 84% while cattle skeletons support 90%).
Let’s then say that if we took all the meat off a dinosaur and put it in a package, it would amount to two cubic yards (I have no idea, but this is just for purposes of comparison from the dinosaurs time till our time).
Present day arrives, and we find the dinosaur bones (or bits and pieces, whole dinosaur skeletons are rare). We don’t, of course, find the two cubic yards of meat and muscle. Gravity is one third what it was in the dinosaur’s time, but being the captive of Newton’s gravity as a property of matter, we know that because gravity is constant, the weight of the dinosaur then is the same as its weight today.
So we weigh the bones. We then put them under a stress test to see how much they’d hold. We conclude that the bones would hold, not two cubic yards of meat, but six cubic yards of meat. While the bones weigh less today than they did when formed, their strength is the same as when they formed, and they formed to hold six cubic yards of meat at today’s gravity, although they would only hold two cubic yards of meat in the gravitational field in which they evolved.
Our scientists, knowing all their facts are absolutely correct (and not even thinking that gravity might be variable and therefore a factor in their calculations) proceed to put three times as much meat on the dinosaurs as they carried when the dinosaur was alive and moving easily though its environment, consuming enough to feed itself and generally having a ball.
The dinosaurs were cold-blooded simply because they lived in a hotter environment, the heat coming predominantly from the Earth. There was no need for animate matter to regulate its body temperature under these conditions. Characteristics don’t evolve that aren’t necessary.
However, as the Earth cooled, mammals evolved and dinosaurs slowly died out, unable to survive the alternating cycles of hot and cold as the environment because more dependent on the sun for its heat. The mammals, with the ability to regulate internal body temperature, fell heir to the Earth in a process that hopefully would lead to the development of sentience and the ability to develop tools that would allow animate matter to manipulate the environment in order to extend its own survival, build house as protection against the cold, and then, in the ultimate extension of itself, build space vehicles that would allow it to escape the ever cooling Earth as it spiraled into first the condition of Mars and then the moon.
And, I suspect we were well on our way until an unfortunate physical occurrence turned us into a bunch of mystical, mindless, blatherers. That occurrence was the result of the simple fact that all planets, including the Earth’s moon, evolve the same way. That means the Earth’s moon was once also warm and also precipitated out water, in short had oceans. As the moon cooled and its gravity lessened, it lost the ability to keep those oceans, and they were eventually lost to its closest companion, the Earth, resulting in the destruction of what was up till then a normally evolving civilization. The water damped the Earth, cooling it fast, leaving the survivor with little arable land on which to live, land that, as the population recovered, could only be fought over for food.
But none of this actually happened or could happen because gravity is a property of matter and therefore unchangeable.

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