Posted on December 4, 2008 - by dirtymitten
Giant Flying Dinosaur
Today, Yahoo!news reports that a new species of flying dinosaur has been discovered, and it’s body is bigger than a car.
I would find this amazing, maybe, if I didn’t have such a skewed world view on the topic of giant animals from our past.
Call me psychotic if you like, but I have a theory about these so-called giant dinosaurs. The theory is a sort of macro-theory of the evolution of our planet, solar system, galaxy, and universe. Hear me out – or don’t.
Few will argue with me when I state that the universe is expanding. When you observe the expansion of any material, you’ll see the same amount of material spread over more space. The very definition of expansion is a materialistic increase of volume. However, all of the material is still there. It’s just spread apart more.
Our Earth, being subject to all of the laws of the universe, also expanded over time. Imagine, if you will, all of Earth’s continents not clumped together in some Pangaea floating alone in the middle of a vast water ocean, but as a complete crust around the Earth. Now image a balloon, under-inflated, dipped in plaster, and allowed to dry. Blowing into the balloon, you’ll see that the plaster breaks apart in the fashion that I wish to describe, with platelets of plaster clinging to the surface of the balloon, but also the latex itself poking through, exposed now to the observer.
If you can visualize that, awesome. If not, I’m a descriptive failure. So, now, using your undoubtedly superior intellect, imagine a bird-sized dinosaur, or even a dog-sized dinosaur, flitting through the air, snatching fishy-type dinos out of the water, and pooping on Fred Flintstones’ newly washed whip. The tiny dino dies, lands in some mud, and is enveloped for eleventy-million years. All the while, the universe expands, the galaxy expands, so too does the solar-system, the sun, and the Earth. So, too, does the little dog- or bird-sized dinosaur, wrapped up in the massive universe, who’s body was perfectly adapted to the word in which it lived. Now, in a less dense environment, our bodies and the bodies of the animals we know and love and/or eat, are adapted to the Earth as it is – same great gravity, larger form-factor.
A curious fellow comes in to Brazil and finds A GIANT BONE!!! Oh my fucking god, can it be? Yes it is! However, because of our smaller form factor, due to essentially the same gravity of the Earth and relatively similar muscle structure require to live upon it, it’s not that the bone is really that big – it’s relatively big! The bone has been scaled up to our perspective, though, it’s hollow core now filled with heavy rock from millions of years of fossilization. So, in fact in my deranged head, these bones are concievably remains of a perfectly normal-sized fish-eaters, maybe as big as a pelican.
Take that, science!
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December 5, 2008
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Let me see if I understand…
1) The Earth used to be SMALLER (same-ish mass, less volume). Obviously, the balloon metaphor (is good) needs a little help here because introducing more air increases the mass of the system. Maybe change that to a balloon moving through different pressures (higher condensing the balloon).
b) The crust of the earth has remained at constant mass and constant volume.
iii) (very) Old dead fossils have expanded relatively with the expansion of Earth, making them larger than the original bones creating them (gazillions of years ago).
It’s not a BAD theory, but it seems that creatures on a denser Earth would actually be tiny (if seen through a time-machine) because that is the perfect adaptation to their Earth. Thus, today, the fossils would expand to what we would conceive as “normal sized” like a velocoraptor. The human scale, if living in the same time, would be tiny compared to our current form. Which further means that the huge fossils we find today were actually huge in their own time, relatively to the size of the hypothetical ancient human.
Then there’s the problem with the crust expanding at a different rate than the core/mantle/etc of the Earth. I would have to talk to a geologist of that, but it doesn’t jive with me at the moment.
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December 11, 2008
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I don’t know… perhaps life-forces need a specific density, similar to water – or surface tension, or a level of buoyancy in water – and the density of the mass of heavier elements scaled relative their currently observable, lower in density. So, while the “pressure” of the Universe is becomes relatively less, the particular and sensitive life-forces are constant to whatever water takes. Water as the one of untold (and maybe un-knowable) examples.