Sixty Six million years ago it would have been a pleasant day one second and the world was already over by the next, wrote Peter Brannen about the Mount Everest sized asteroid that blasted a hole in the ground, the Chicxulub Impact, releasing the equivalent of 100 million megatons of TNT creating a 20-mile deep, 110-mile hole and sterilizing the remaining 170 million square miles of the ancient continent of Pangaea, killing virtually every species on Earth.
Planet Earth Report” provides descriptive links to headline news by leading science journalists about the extraordinary discoveries, technology, people, and events changing our knowledge of Planet Earth and the future of the human species.
“So they’re kind of like dark matter,” said paleontologist David Jablonski of the University of Chicago about the sanctuaries, the “refugia” that have never been found in the fossil record, but sheltered the shell-shocked and decimated species of Earth’s past mass extinctions until they were able to repopulate the planet in ensuing eons.
The human experience on our pale blue dot “has lasted for less than 10 one-billionths of cosmic history surrounded by a vast lifeless space, yet we humans are congratulating ourselves,” says Peter Brannen author of Ends of the World about the current reign of humans recently named the Anthropocene –the period dating from the Atomic Age of the 1950s during which human activity has been the dominant influence on climate and the environment– “on an unearned geological legacy before we’ve proved ourselves capable of escaping the next century with our lives. And, besides, most of our proudest creations—whole cities and manufactured landscapes—will be destroyed by the ceaseless destruction of tectonics and erosion…many of the synthetic markers proposed to delineate the Anthropocene will not survive the insults of deep time.”
“The human brain has 100 billion neurons, each neuron connected to 10 thousand other neurons. Sitting on your shoulders is the most complicated object in the known universe,” observes physicist Michio Kaku. The neocortex, observed Carl Sagan is where “matter is transformed into consciousness.” Located deep in the brain’s center, the subcortex, the most evolutionarily ancient part of our brain, processes everything from our basic senses to long-term memories.
