I recently attended a lecture at Powell’s Bookstore by renowned paleontologist Peter Ward about the end of life. I thought some of my post-apocalyptic readers might find him to be an interesting guy. He’s written a few books, including the Medea Hypothesis, which is what his lecture was about at Powell’s and what I hope to explain here in this post. He made Animal Armaggedon, a mini-series on Animal Planet about animal mass extinctions. He doesn’t believe that humans are an infection on the planet but that we are a part of nature and nature has cycles where mass extinction happens. As humans we can prolong the current life-expectancy of all animal and plant life on earth if we get smart.

He talked about mass-extinctions and how many people now think that they have been caused by meteors hitting the earth. He showed us the Manicouagan Crater, which is 1,000 kilometers wide but caused no species extinction whatsoever (click on picture above for larger picture). Apparently there are many cases of meteors hitting the planet without causing extinctions. He goes on to show that out of fifteen mass extinctions, fourteen of them were NOT caused by meteors. They were caused by living things – by the coming and going of carbon dioxide and the natural production of hydrogen sulfide.

Ward said that overall there is a disappearing of carbon dioxide which, when it disappears enough, will snuff out life on earth altogether. That is the overall trend that has been happening over large amounts of time. But within our own short history co2 levels are rising fast enough (global warming) to melt off our polar ice caps. When that poles disappear there will be more of an equillibrium of temperature around the globe and there won’t be enough temperature difference to move the tradewinds. As wind movement stops and water becomes stagnant, a larger production of hydrogen sulfide starts, as was the case on the coast of Namibia. Hydrogen sulfide kills off the life around it. Life itself, or living things, cause the rise and fall of co2 levels and sets the production of hydrogen sulfide in motion. Mass extinctions are caused by life itself, so life has brought itself to the precipace of extinction numerous times in the past.

That’s all I have for you. I thought it was interesting and I just wanted to share it with you. I hope this was interesting for my readers, especially my post-apocalyptic readers. I don’t necessarily believe everything I hear but I think it’s good to be thinking about energy production, where it comes from and what you should do about it. It’s all part of making the world you want to live in. I doubt I’ll be posting very many articles related to this so if you are more interested, here is a wonderful conversation chain that Peter Ward has been a part of.

The talk was a little hard for me to follow as I’m not a scientist or paleontologist, so there might be holes in this. Also, I don’t know if this information is old news, if people have known about this for a long time, or if this is fresh off the press.