Scientists do not seek to impose their needs and wants on Nature, but instead humbly interrogate Nature and take seriously what they find.

Carl Sagan

The Case of S T Nikos

Nasa Experts

It was about this time that Nikos had his first visits from men in black suits, from Nasa or from Washington�the Govvy Men as he called them.

Nikos presented a paper on his views to a conference dedicated to the impact of the asteroid which supposedly terminated the life of the dinosaurs. He had to give his paper a non-committal title, Factors Predisposing Late Cretaceous Life to Extinction, to be able to get a slot on the programme. When Nikos wrote me about the experience he said he was amazed at the anger in the orthodox community of science. His presentation almost from the outset was accompanied by boos and cat-calls, heckling and abuse. He was accused of talking nonsense, being non-scientific and a disgrace to his calling, of speaking under false pretences because he did not agree with the impact theory, and being a madman.

"Fortunately," he wrote, "all of this did not take very long because three quarters of the audience left after calling me a suitable name."

He therefore made his presentation to a few who remained, most of whom were also hostile but demonstrated it by sitting in stony silence rather than raising their voices. The presentation was scheduled for twenty minutes and at the end of it his remaining audience left him in the auditorium alone except for the cleaner and a technician.

Scientifically one could not expect Nikos�s views to be popular, especially at such a gathering, but here he was also treading on political toes�the conference was sponsored by Nasa. Nikos�s speech was as follows.

"Something unusual happened at the end of the Cretaceous Period. It is marked by an oily smear in the rocks full of soot and heavy metals, including the unusual element, iridium. Many genera of all kinds died off. Any terrestrial creature weighing more than 50 pounds as an adult became extinct; sea organisms of all sizes were devastated, including many minute sea creatures like the foraminifera; many of the sea bottom filter feeders such as bivalves disappeared; only about 30 per cent of sponges remained.

"The modern explanation is a cosmic collision. But can the meteorite impact explain the mass extinction. After all many genera and individual species did survive showing that, despite darkness, dust and poison gases, conditions could be tolerated. Many species were not seriously affected�and many others, we know, had been suffering decline before the hypothetical collision. 75 per cent of marine organisms had been on the wane for two to five million years, and few species seem to have died off at exactly the same time.

"Dinosaurs were similarly on the wane. Half of the 36 genera of dinosaurs alive about ten million years before the end of the Cretaceous had died out by the time the final million years was entered. Only twelve species are estimated to remain when the supposed meteorite hit. Dinosaurs were already virtually extinct. They did not die out in a geological instant but petered out over thousands of years. They had shown themselves to be adaptable in many previous crises yet were failing to cope with this one. Plainly life had been under stress for some time. Why?

"Though the asteroid impact did not happen, many of its supposed effects sound uncomfortably close to what we see about us today, the result of high technology and too many human beings demanding too much of the earth’s resources with no thought of the consequences. Today we see these effects caused by the intelligent mammal. I have argued that the dinosaurs had the wherewithal to become intelligent. Maybe the truth was more mundane than the impact of an asteroid�the Anthroposaurs drowned themselves and their planet in their own waste, just as we are doing! Did one species of dinosaur gradually kill off the others and finally itself?

"Pollution is a symptom of increasing entropy, a scientific measure of disorder. Life forms reduce entropy in themselves and their immediate surroundings but in so doing they vastly increase entropy in the wider world. Entropy is waste. Organisms trapped in a sealed environment with plenty of food quite often poison themselves to death on their own waste. A ferment of home brew will stop working even though there is plenty of sugar and nutrient left. The yeast is poisoned by the alcohol that it makes as waste. The Anthroposaurs poisoned themselves on their waste. We are doing the same. The earth is effectively a sealed environment and if we fill it with waste products we shall die.

"Entropy is acid rain. The final Cretaceous atmosphere was acidic. The source of the acidity, we are told, was nitrogen oxides formed as the death star burned through the air. Dramatic! Reality was as stupid as it is today. Anthroposaurs pouring acid into their environment, as we are doing, would not have survived long. Greenland core analysis shows that the air today is four times more acid than it was in the 16th century. Local levels close to the source of the acidity must be much higher. Moreover a change in pH of one unit from say 6 to 5 represents an increase in acidity of ten times. Rain which has fallen in the industrial parts of the world tested to be pH 4 is a thousand times more acidic than pure water which is pH 7.

"But it is not only the acidity itself that causes damage. The main danger to higher animals comes from the acid leaching out the salts of heavy metals, which then poison the ground water. Entropy is pollution by heavy metals. Each metal has a threshold level of acidity below which it remains bound in the soil but beyond which its salts dissolve into the water. Aluminium ions begin to be released from the soil into the water when the pH reaches 4.2. Aluminium is linked with Altzheimer’s disease. Did the dinosaurs suffer from premature senile dementia caused by acid rain?

"If Anthroposaurs reached an advanced society they must have added acids to the air and thence to the groundwater. It takes 5000 years for the world’s groundwater to replenish. If it became a poisonous soup of acid and heavy metal ions, it would be 5000 years before it became usable again. Even in the Cretaceous, with its higher rainfall, it could have remained polluted for 1000 years. The poisoning of the earth’s groundwater could be a very effective way of initiating a mass extinction.

"Plenty of heavy metals are associated with the death of the dinosaurs. The experts say they came from a metal bearing asteroid. But human beings have easily produced enough heavy metals to pollute the environment without having to resort to crashing asteroids. Humanity annually extracts 7.5 million tons of copper, 20 times more than leaches out naturally, and most of it will finish up as waste. The figure is increasing.

"Cores from the Arctic ice cap show that lead in the air is 500 times higher than it should be. Lead is a cumulative poison�it is accumulated in the body. Our own bodies contain more than 1000 times more lead than our recent ancestors. Lead poisons the nervous system and the brain. Young minds are particularly affected. The symptoms are distractibility, impatience, frustration, restlessness, impulsiveness, destructiveness and violence�symptoms typical of the behaviour of much of our urban youth!

"The iridium anomaly can be explained by pollution. Careful testing of it showed that the iridium concentration built up slowly over a few thousand years not just a few months as a cosmic collision demanded. The oceans were polluted with heavy metals gradually. If the decline of the dinosaurs was associated with the iridium deposits, it was certainly not a sudden event but one which matches a gradual build up of industry.

"Metals in the boundary layer besides iridium at abundances higher than normal are osmium, palladium, arsenic, chromium, cobalt, selenium, nickel and tin. These metals are not only found in extra-terrestrial sources. Terrestrial sources such as copper-nickel ores and molybdenum sulphide ores also contain many of these unusual metals. If these metal ores had been mined, smelted and processed to get at the copper, nickel or molybdenum, the flue gases would have carried off the remaining metals to pollute the environment widely.

"The concentration of the metals in the boundary layer varies from place to place just as one would expect from sites that might have been close to, or distant from, an industrial area. Furthermore ores from different sources, processed in different places, would have had different compositions so the analysis of the boundary layer in different places would be expected to vary as researchers have found. A death star would have a fixed composition and would distribute its components fairly uniformly. Death stars may be more romantic but common industrial pollution fits the description better.

"Entropy is chemical pollution. For every human being on earth, the world’s farmers apply a pound of pesticides to their crops every year. The eggshells of a species of dinosaur got thinner in more recent deposits. Pesticides like DDT and PCBs absorb into body fats and accumulate in the predator as it eats its prey. At some point in the food chain, the pesticide causes physiological damage and death. The eggs of predatory birds, like eagles, become so thin they break in the nest. Birds are living dinosaurs!

"PCBs are never found in nature but are found in the bodies of 99 per cent of Americans. The sperm count of the American male is only half its value in 1940. In the same period increasing amounts of organochlorine compounds have been found in sperm. Organochlorine chemicals kill pests so why shouldn’t they kill sperm? An expert tells us that dinosaurs died out because mammals killed and ate their young: another tells us that their young were all born the same sex. What if their young were not born at all because pesticides had sterilised all the males? Do our manufacturers and governments care if pesticides sterilise the human race? PCBs are still widely used and, though advanced countries have banned DDT, they still export it to Third World countries!

"Because of overuse of fertilisers our lakes and rivers suffer from eutrophication. Algae thriving on the excess nutrients washed out of the soil, suffocate everything as they decompose. Organic deposits forms thick layers on the bottom, eventually metamorphosed by anaerobic bacteria and then pressure to yield hydrocarbons. Our main oil deposits today were laid down in the Late Cretaceous. Oil was originally formed in shallow, stagnant lakes or seas on continental shelves. The conditions were those of eutrophication. Did the stagnant waters of the lakes and shallow seas polluted by the Anthroposaurs provide the conditions for the formation of the Cretaceous oil deposits? Our farmers and industrialists are setting up suitable conditions. Could we, in such places as the Great Lakes and the Baltic Sea be initiating the next phase of petroleum formation?

"At the beginning of the last five to ten million years of the Cretaceous vegetation was prolific and typically tropical or sub-tropical: towards the end of the period the climate had become typically temperate with cool woodlands. This is just what atmospheric pollution might cause by cutting out sunlight, cooling the earth. Dinosaurs thrived in the warmer climate but in the cooler one mammals had the advantage.

"If the atmosphere in the late Cretaceous were gradually polluted its effects should show up in the fossil record as an adaptation of species to the pollution. Poisonous fumes or particles of dust in the air would induce the development of unusual nasal arrangements to attempt to prevent the pollutants from penetrating to the lungs.

"Ankylosaurs were armoured dinosaurs living at the end of the Cretaceous. They were related to a similar group called the nodosaurs which lived principally in the middle of the Cretaceous period. The earlier group had nasal passages consisting of a simple paired tube leading from the nostrils to the back of the throat. The ankylosaurs however had nasal passages stretched out into the shape of a letter S on either side of which there were additional passages forming almost a honeycomb. Their purpose was to filter and moisten the air before it entered the lungs. Yet why should elaborate filtering systems have been necessary at the end of the Cretaceous but not apparently beforehand, even in closely related species, unless something was happening to the air? Other species from distant parts were equally affected.

"Crested and non-crested hadrosaurs were contemporaneous about 75 million years ago. By the end of the dinosaurs’ reign 65 million years ago the crested hadrosaurs were particularly successful. The crests were either enormous plates or long projections having no ostensible use. The odd thing about the crests however was that they consisted of enormously extended nasal passages protected by the bone of the skull. There must have been evolutionary pressure to extend the nasal passages, and the skull had solved the problem of where to accommodate the resulting labyrinth by developing the crests. The evolutionary pressure was pollution.

"The external shape of the crest did not always match the internal convolutions of the nasal passages suggesting that the external appearance was as important as the elaborate nasal extensions. Were they also visual signalling devices for courtship and mating? Hadrosaurs had acute vision judging by their well developed eye sockets and the presence of a bony ring (the sclerotic ring) to support the large eye. Several species of hadrosaurs seemed to inhabit the same territory and the visual signals could have served to distinguish them. They could have served to signal their position in the social hierarchy and probably the sex of the animal. But why did the nasal passages extend to serve these purposes unless some other cause had stimulated their development? Having started to develop a feature for one reason it is characteristic of sexual selection to make a virtue of necessity and use it for another.

"The cavities could have also acted as resonance chambers for audible displays or communication. Other hadrosaurs without crests probably had inflatable sacs over their nostrils which served the same purpose and could have also served as a visual display. And such sacs would have developed as a protection against pollution in the air. Thus two distinct groups of hadrosaurs had different solutions to the same problem but one solution left obvious fossil records whereas the other has to be inferred. The development of nasal flaps and convoluted nasal passages is best explained as an evolutionary response to increasing atmospheric pollution. Once the protective measures had began to evolve these dinosaurs found that they had other uses too. That is typical of the way evolution works.

"I have tried to convince you that an intelligent dinosaur could have destroyed much of the life on earth at the end of the Cretaceous. Many facts support the hypothesis. Moreover we can see the intelligent species with which we are familiar�ourselves�creating conditions that seem to mirror those that were so destructive then. Needless to say, experts often find it hard to see.

"Experts on the biosphere of the earth, sound like public relations executives for the polluters. They insist they do not wish to ridicule legitimate concern about the state of the terrestrial environment, but simply to place in perspective the puny attempts of industrialists and farmers in polluting the environment. They compare them with what nature has done in the past through glaciations, volcanic eruptions and meteoric collisions. Despite all of these natural disasters, whose scale dwarfs the attempts of man, life continues. There is no need to worry about human pollution�the earth has been able to cope with far worse. All species modify their environment just by being alive. Mankind is no different and cannot degrade his surroundings to the point of extinction. They reassure us that our power to destroy the world, or even ourselves, is quite imaginary, a product of our vainglory.

"Yet elsewhere these friends of the earth argue that the earth�s control systems would break down if the human population were to reach ten billion. Mankind would then desperately have to artificially maintain what formerly were self regulatory feedback systems. We would no longer have a natural environment that sustained life but a �spaceship earth� with life support systems provided by the occupants. Unless, that is, we succumb to gigadeath, in which case mankind will have done�simply through procreating�what these same experts claimed was quite imaginary, a product of our vainglory. And why chose ten billion as the danger level? What if they have overlooked some factor and the figure is five billion? Then the threshold has already been crossed and we are passengers of spaceship earth without realising it. Experts have unquestioning faith in their own pronouncements no matter how arbitrary they may be. Yet we accept them.

"The Nasa experts seem genuinely full of concern when they say that each time we significantly alter part of some natural process of regulation or introduce some new source of energy or information, we are increasing the probability that one of these changes will weaken the stability of the entire system, by cutting down the variety of response. Bravo! They admit it! Urgent action must be merited to make sure we do not increase the probability that some danger point is exceeded. Then what do the Nasa experts recommend? They tell us there is no need to panic. There is ample time and every inclination on the part of scientists to investigate and prove or disprove allegations, and then leave it to the law-makers to decide rationally what should be done. They want to involve a cabal of experts. Not only are the scientific experts to mull and ponder over the diagnosis but the political experts are then to debate it in the legislature and legal experts are to test it in courtrooms. Too bad if the patient is in terminal decline.

"Others are less sanguine, saying: we do not have time to develop our skills. We are presented with a curriculum which includes primary and secondary school, university courses and graduate studies simultaneously. We are staring into a murky crystal ball and cannot clearly foresee the future; if we waited five years hoping the ball would clear, the vision awaiting us would be all the more horrific. Their message is evident. We have no time to study, no time to understand the cybernetics of our environment. There is no time to decide what we can safely do. Deterioration continues daily. We must call a halt to the damage now. But we may already be too late!

"None of this vainglory about our powers of destruction worries men from Nasa and the Pentagon but something else does. They tell us: The credible threats must come from outside the earth and the impact of a large planetismal is the most immediate of them. We have a moral obligation to take such modest, inexpensive steps as we can to avert them. An asteroid impact that occurs perhaps once every 26 million years, if their interpretation of the fossil record is correct (and the next is not due for some 13 million years), is far more worrying than the destruction being wreaked every second by mankind!

The impact of a large planetismal which might threaten us, they hope, will be on the President�s nerves and his response will be in dollars. They have their own lunatic agenda of keeping themselves in sinecures while the real work is left neglected and decaying. Was it like that before�for the Anthroposaurs? Can you picture Professor Expertosaur and Professor Nasasaur, 65 million years ago, saying exactly the same thing? And worse, convincing their compatriots that they should examine the skies and muse on the best ways of saving life on earth by deflecting planetismals while everything died about them. The meteor never came but the Anthroposaurs fooled observers 65 million years later into believing it had, by simulating all its symptoms."

Nikos said that he arrived at his office in his faculty one morning to find a well dressed man waiting for him. He was polite, claiming he came from The Office of Public Relations at Nasa. He said he had read his speech to the ecological pressure group and wondered whether he had got his perspectives right. Nasa had only the best interests of the US as a whole at it heart, and the Department of Public Relations felt it was not doing its duty properly when respected men gave uninformed speeches to gullible campaigners. He said it would be in the best interests of all concerned if Nikos took a fresh tack and sailed with the wind instead of into it. He would be only too happy to introduce Nikos to some of the Nasa family, which was not monolithic�some in it would readily agree with him�to prove they were ultimately all pulling together. Nikos thanked him, saying he would think about it, and led him out.

The visit from the Govvy Man did not seem sinister to me, and, although I thought that Nikos was being unwise in pursuing his campaign, it did not worry me unduly. I was convinced that mostly he was regarded as a one off and not to be taken too seriously.

But this was the point at which Nikos asked me to arrange for the publication of a monograph for him. He wanted it publishing inconspicuously, because he feared what might happen to everyone concerned if he made a large splash�but he had an idea for rapidly building awareness once the book was in print. In this way he hoped to bypass the attentions of the powerful groups that might aim to prevent publication, or to harass anyone concerned with the book. He knew that the Govvy Men would not be concerned as long as the book attracted no attention, which was why he considered it vital that it should initially be published with no fanfares.

He sent me the manuscript and I arranged for publication by a tiny nondescript British publisher, AskWhy! Publications Selwyn. Nikos intended coming to Britain a few weeks later to visit the British Museum. He promised he would check the proofs at the same time and leave the rest with me. He called the book Who Lies Sleeping? a double reference to the Anthroposaurs and the human race.

Michaela Magi Griffiths, Bloomsbury, September, 1993
© Copyright AskWhy! Publications 1997. Quote by all means but credit this source.