FWD: Extinction and education (Re: Traffic...)

[Chuck Vaughn]

I'm usually a lurker on this list but this one was just too much.

>>Seven out of 10 biologists believe the world is now in the midst
>>of the fastest mass extinction of living things in the 4.5
>>billion-year history of the planet, according to a poll conducted
>>by the American Museum of Natural History and the Louis Harris
>>survey research firm.
>>
>>That makes it faster even than the crash which occurred when the
>>dinosaurs died some 65 million years ago.

Really! How did they come to that conclusion? Being somewhat up on
astronomy and having read the various scenarios on comet and asteroid
impacts I can't see how such a statement can be made. There seems to be
a conscensus that a large impact would put so much dust into the 
atmosphere that sunlight would be blocked for months and probably
years. Photosynthesis would stop. Also the majority of the biomass
would burn due to a raining of hot material around the globe ejected
into the stratosphere by the impact. A mass extinction would certainly
occur in a very short time. A large impact is a terrifying picture.

>>Unlike that and other
>>mass extinctions of the pre-human past, the current one is the
>>result of human activity, and not natural phenomena, say the
>>scientists.

This is a completely ridiculus statement. Humans are unnatural. Everything
humans do is unnatural. Wrong! Unless we were dropped off from a spaceship
we are as natural as any other creature that evolved here. Only our
morality places the labels of right or wrong on things we do. We may take
a lot of species with us in the process of making our species extinct but
you can't call it unnatural.

Chuck Vaughn <aa6g at aa6g.org>