The Grim Poetry of Science

September 2, 2022 SVadmin

I’m only passing this on to you because the hands on the Doomsday Clock are just 100 seconds to midnight and our current president seems more recklessly confrontational with our nuclear foes than any other president in my lifetime. In the following short TED Talk (titled “I’ve studied nuclear war for 35 years — you should be worried“) atmospheric scientist Brian Toon achieves a kind of terrible dark poetry of science. I’ve transcribed (below) the first couple of minutes of his talk, in hopes of getting you to read at least this far. [Don]

“66 million years ago a mountain-sized asteroid traveling ten times faster than a bullet from an assault rifle, slammed into the shallow seas covering what is now the Yucatan Peninsula of Mexico. The immense energy of that impact hurled rocks as far north as Canada, and it vaporized the asteroid, part of Mexico and part of the shallow sea. This fireball of vaporized rock and water rose far above the Earth’s atmosphere and spread over the planet. As it cooled, molten drops of rock about the size of a grain of sand solidified into an immense storm of shooting stars. The shooting stars re-entered the Earth’s atmosphere and heated the upper atmosphere to a thousand degrees Fahrenheit. Standing at the ground, the dinosaurs saw the blue sky become a sheet of red-hot lava. The dinosaurs “broiled to death under the glowing skies.” Then energy in the sky was like that in the glow bar in an electric oven. The glowing skies started everything on fire. Great clouds of smoke rose into the upper atmosphere and blocked the sun, so that no sunlight reached the ground. It became cold and dark. Photosynthesis stopped, and plants and animals in the ocean or on the land, either starved or froze to death. Unfortunately, in our lifetimes, we may experience the same fate as the dinosaurs. But I’m not talking about another asteroid collision, I’m talking about nuclear war.”