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Nathan W. Lindstrom

Professor Brych

English 1A

2/24/12

Dinosaurs and Mars(Essay on “Sex, Drugs, Disasters, and the Extinction of the Dinosaurs”)

“Imagination is not enough. Knowledge is necessary.”

—Paul Scott (134)

“The planet Mars, I scarcely need remind the reader, revolves about the sun

at a mean distance of 140,000,000 miles, and the light and heat it receives

from the sun is barely half of that received by this world. It must be, if the

nebular hypothesis has any truth, older than our world; and long before this

earth ceased to be molten, life upon its surface must have begun its course.

The fact that it is scarcely one-seventh of the volume of the earth must have

accelerated its cooling to the temperature at which life could begin. It has air

and water and all that is necessary for the support of animated existence”

(Wells 1). So begins H. G. Wells’ celebrated masterpiece of science fiction,

The War of the Worlds, which he wrote in 1898. Fast forward to Christmas

Day, 2003, when the exploratory spacecraft Mars Express arrived in orbit

around the red planet and began its exploration of Mars. Discoveries about

water on Mars quickly led to the dismissal of many old theories and a

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barrage of new ones; however, in the words of writer and scientist Stephen

Jay Gould, how many of these new ideas are “useless speculation”? Much

space in magazines and books has been dedicated to the question of water

on Mars, including a recent article in The Pl a netary Report titled “Europe’s

First Trip to Mars.” The author, A. J. S. Rayl, reports on several specific

theories proposed by scientists involved in the Mars Express mission. Most,

but not all, of the scientists’ claims agree with Gould’s requirement that

speculation create a testable theory that can later be proven or disproved

(Gould 449).

To illustrate his theoretical requirements, Gould sets forth three

possible explanations of what caused the dinosaurs to become extinct in his

article “Sex, Drugs, Disasters, and the Extinction of the Dinosaurs.” The first,

falling under the heading of “sex,” is that male dinosaurs became sterile

thanks to a warming world and an innate inability to adequately regulate the

temperature of their testicles. The second theory proposes that dinosaurs

succumbed to the consumption of toxic fauna (“drugs”) thanks to their literal

inability to taste and avoid the poison. The final hypothesis concerns itself

with a mass extinction event, or “disaster,” being brought on by radical

climate changes resulting from a large meteor striking the earth. Gould sets

these theories up as straw men, so that he might demonstrate his injunction

of “useless speculation...is restrictive. It generates no testable hypothesis,

and offers no way to obtain potentially refuting evidence” (Gould 449).

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Gould considers each of the three extinction scenarios in turn, evaluating

them on the grounds of testability and expandability.

Testability means being able to validate some aspect of a theory with

real-world experiments, while expandability means being able to apply a test

to more than a single narrow subject, like say, dinosaurs on earth or water on

Mars. It was the pursuit of testability that prompted the European Space

Agency to launch the Mars Express on June 2, 2003. The mission consisted

of two vehicles, the forenamed orbiting science platform, and a lander

christened Beagle 2 in honor of Charles Darwin’s ship. The Beagle 2

separated from the Mars Express as planned, and disappeared into the

blood-red twilight of Mars. It was never heard from again. Perhaps it fell to

its death, a mechanical Icarus streaking through the sky; or perhaps it landed

successfully, but could not find its voice to call out across the starry void.

Whatever its fate, the Mars Express was left alone, orbiting the red planet,

and using only its remote sensors to relay information back to the scientists

on earth.

Perhaps Beagle 2 perished due to the high temperatures of an

uncontrolled plunge through Mars’ atmosphere. So too might high

temperatures have been the catalyst behind the demise of the dinosaurs

here on earth, but for reasons of reproduction rather than gravity. Gould

cites a theory published in the Bulleti n of the American Museum of Natural

History where the authors posit how “a worldwide rise in temperature at the

close of the Cretaceous period caused the testes of dinosaurs to stop

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functioning and led to their extinction by sterilization of males” (Gould 450).

The authors, Colbert, Cowles, and Bogert, attempted to draw conclusions

about dinosaurs by studying alligators and how they are influenced by

temperature changes. Unfortunately, there is simply no way to test the

conditions at the time of the dinosaurs’ extinction, so Gould dismisses their

idea as “only an intriguing speculation leading nowhere” (453).

Testing conditions and observing phenomena is the whole purpose

sensors carried by spacecraft, including one such sensor named “OMEGA”

aboard the Mars Express. Having sent a great deal of mineralogical data

back to earth, the OMEGA readings prompted scientist Jean-Pierre Bibring to

announce the “discovery of evidence of past water on Mars’ surface in

deposits of...surface minerals that contain water in their crystalline

structures” (Rayl 9). Bibring went on to hypothesize that “any large bodies

of standing water were gone within half a billion years of the planet’s

formation; they either disappeared from the surface by seeping underground

or were lost into space” (9). Is this theory testable, according to Gould’s

guidelines? Provided Beagle 2 had succeeded in its mission, the idea of the

water having disappeared underground could have been tested. As for the

loss of water to the vacuum of space, the OMEGA sensor does not provide a

means to verify that idea. However, Gould would not dismiss it as pointless

speculation since the theory may be expanded to apply to the earth, where

observation shows it to be valid. “The earth is continuously, but extremely

slowly, losing it’s [sic] atmosphere to space, including water vapor,” says one

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scientist, who works for the U.S. Department of Energy (qtd. in

“Environmental Earth Science Archive”).

This ongoing loss of water could be a contributer to the fact that the

earth is a great deal less humid than it once was, as borne out by the fossil

record left behind by the riot of plant life that evolved shortly before the

death of the dinosaurs. Sufficient new forms of plant life arose during the

late Cretaceous period that a psychiatrist at UCLA, Ronald K. Siegel, put

forward the idea that dinosaurs poisoned themselves on new and toxic

plants, causing a world-wide reptilian Jonestown massacre. Siegel told

members of the American Psychological Association that “I’m not suggesting

that all dinosaurs [overdosed] on plant drugs, but it certainly was a factor”

(Gould 452). Gould laughs off Siegel’s theory as a “gratuitous, attention-

grabbing guess” (453). There is no way, Gould points out, that Siegel’s

theory can account for the extinction of diatoms, ammonites, and other

ocean-dwelling animals, since they did not eat plants on land. In other

words, Siegel’s theory is not expandable, as it only works on land, and does

not cover the oceans.

It is doubtful that oceans ever covered our neighbor planet, Mars,

although its color strongly suggests the past presence of water on its

surface. That Mars is red is thanks to large amounts of ferric oxide — rust —

left behind when the water disappeared, or so scientist Jean-Pierre Bibring

contends. The earth, on the other hand, is blue because we still have our

water. Bibring and his colleagues hypothesize that Mars has undergone

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several distinct geological eras, and that “surface conditions may not always

have been cold and dry” (Rayl 9). He offers no evidence to support his

claim, and no avenues to investigate it further, thereby condemning it to be

something that Gould would dismiss as “useless speculation” (Gould 449).

Perhaps we may never truly know much water Mars was covered with,

but thanks to another sensor aboard the Mars Express, we do know exactly

how the solar wind that tears at Mars’ thin atmosphere could have

contributed to the disappearance of Mars’ water. The “ASPERA-3” sensor

shows “how the solar wind (the stream of ions and electrons racing outward

from the Sun) interacts with the Martian upper atmosphere” (Rayl 10). Since

Mars lacks the global magnetic field that the earth uses to largely deflect the

Solar wind, scientists discovered that Mars’ atmosphere is being efficiently

stripped away by the deluge of charged particles flowing from the Sun (10).

Given that the same process is at work on the earth, albeit at a reduced rate

thanks to our strong planetary magnetic field, Gould would likely point to the

conclusions drawn by the ASPERA-3 researchers as “good science.”

Another idea which Gould calls “good science” is the theory that the

extinction of the dinosaurs was caused by radical climate changes directly

arising from a meteor striking the earth (De Laubenfels 14). Known as the

“Alvarez Theory,” and named for the father-son team of Luis and Walter

Alvarez who first developed this theory of meteor extinction in 1980, their

idea “can be tested, extended, refined, and, if wrong, disproved” according

to Gould (454). Even after more than two decades, it remains one of the

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most popular ideas for explaining the death of the dinosaurs. Gould calls it

“exciting, fruitful science because it generates tests, provides us with things

to do, and expands outward” (455).

So too, are the missions to Mars exciting and fruitful scientific efforts.

Enough data has been created by the Mars Express mission alone that it will

take scientists years of study to extract its full meaning. While the Beagle 2

came to an unexpected and unfortunate end, more missions are planned,

some with the specific aim of looking for that elusive liquid water that Mars

Express’ sensors have hinted at. While Gould would undoubtedly have

disagreed with some of the claims made in the wake of the Mars Express

mission, he would be an enthusiastic supporter of our pursuit of Martian

knowledge. As more and better equipment is ferried across the vast

distance between the planets, theories and hypotheses are increasingly

testable, and therefore subject to revision and improvement. Of all the

planets, Mars bears the closest resemblance to the earth. Natural processes

at work there are often at work here; therefore, knowledge gained about the

red planet is expandable in its application to our own world. Its past may

very well hold the keys to understanding our planet’s future. As the famous

science fiction author, Larry Niven, once quipped, “the dinosaurs became

extinct because they didn’t have a space program” (Dreifus 2).

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Works Cited

De Laubenfels, M. W. “Dinosaur Extinction: One More Hypothesis.”

Journal of Paleontology Vol. 30, No. 1 (1956): 207-218

Dreifus, Claudia. “A Conversation with Arthur C. Clarke.” The New York

Times.

26 Oct. 1999.

<http://query.nytimes.com/.../DC1438F935A153C1A96F958260>

“Environmental Earth Science Archive: Water Loss.” U.S. Department of

Energy.

1 Dec. 1999.

<http://www.newton.dep.anl.gov/askasci/env99/env097.htm>

Gould, Stephen Jay. “Sex, Drugs, Disasters, and the Extinction of Dinosaurs.”

← The Write r’s Presence . Ed. Donald McQuade and Robert Atwan.

← Boston: Bedford, 2006.

Rayl, A. J. S. “Europe Goes to Mars.”

The Planetary Report Volume XXVII, Number 2 (2007): 8-15

Scott, Paul. “Paul Scott.”

Oxford Concise Dictionary of Literary Quotations. Ed. Peter Kemp.

New York: Oxford UP, 2004.

Wells, H. G. “The War of the Worlds.” Project Gutenberg.

1 Oct. 2004 <http://www.gutenberg.org/files/36/36.txt>