Xaq (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
xaq_the_aereon) wrote2011-10-22 11:55 pm
xaq_the_aereon) wrote2011-10-22 11:55 pm
Something that just occurred to me about the theories of dinosaur extinction.
A lot of them claim that they all got wiped out pretty much simultaneously, and pretty much everything I've seen to substantiate these claims is from the dating of the fossils from up to 65 million years ago.
Here's what I realized, though: Going back that far, you'd have to be laser precise with your dates for that to be acceptable. I'm talking a 1/1000000% margin of error or better. With even a 0.01% margin of error, which would normally be absolutely excellent, we're talking a range of roughly 6500 years...that's six and a half millenia. 2 sets of fossils in the same location could very well be separated by a length of time longer than the run of most of humanity's greatest civilizations.
Going by that kind of logic, some civilization half a billion years down the road from us could claim that everyone from Adam and Eve to Sonny and Cher all went out simultaneously. (Probably wouldn't help if they'd found footage of this season's last episode of Doctor Who and thought it to be true...)
Why am I bringing any of this up? ....Hell, I don't know. I've been feeling like crap all day (as in take-a-day-off-work-to-recover crap) and right now I'm just a bit on the loopy side.
Here's what I realized, though: Going back that far, you'd have to be laser precise with your dates for that to be acceptable. I'm talking a 1/1000000% margin of error or better. With even a 0.01% margin of error, which would normally be absolutely excellent, we're talking a range of roughly 6500 years...that's six and a half millenia. 2 sets of fossils in the same location could very well be separated by a length of time longer than the run of most of humanity's greatest civilizations.
Going by that kind of logic, some civilization half a billion years down the road from us could claim that everyone from Adam and Eve to Sonny and Cher all went out simultaneously. (Probably wouldn't help if they'd found footage of this season's last episode of Doctor Who and thought it to be true...)
Why am I bringing any of this up? ....Hell, I don't know. I've been feeling like crap all day (as in take-a-day-off-work-to-recover crap) and right now I'm just a bit on the loopy side.