Alarming SciFi Tale

[Michael_Boyle]

Disease has been with us from the beginning.
Today it's SARS, AIDS, cancer, and malaria.
Who knows about tomorrow? Or the distant past?

What if the dinosaurs were wiped out in a global pandemic?
And what if the organism that killed them survived?
A new SciFi novel explores this premise.
Read about it at:
http://www.geocities.com/jeanboyle2/Index.html

[Krakatau]

Sounds like an interesting book idea. I just have a few problems with the science in the book.

1) carbon-14 dating can't be used to date fossils from 65 million years ago. The reason is that carbon-14 has a half life of 5,730+- 30 years, so carbon-14 has an effective dating range of 100-70,000 years. To date rocks around 65 million years old you could use Potassium-Argon dating (effective dating range of 50,000 to 4.6 billion years) allong with the principle of stratigraphic superposition (in any sequence of sedimentary strata, the order in which the strata were deposited is from bottom (older) to top (younger)). K-Ar dating is very effective with volcanic ash so if you have a fossil that was deposited after a volcanic eruption and before another you can guess the age of the fossil.

2) It is true that when you throw a baseball into the air that it will fall back to earth and probebly break someone's windshield. The reason that it falls to the earth is because of the force of gravity. But there is another acting on the ball which is air friction, this force is the reason that skydivers hit a top speed when falling to the ground which is their terminal velocity. If the skydiver was in a vacume he would continue to accelerate by 9.8 meters per second squared, there would be no terminal velocity. The reason I went throught this lenghy explanation is to talk about how ash from a metero impact could stay in the air for hundreds of years. The ash from the impact would become suspended in the atmosphere and flow allong with the jet streams. The ash can stay up in the high atmosphere because it's terminal velocity is nearly zero.

3) When the poles of the earth switch (north becomes south and vice versa) there is little effect shown in the geologic record of climates changing or of species going extinct. These reversals are quite frequent on the time scale of the Earth and im sure that life on earth had to deal with this annoyance more than a few times.

4) And last but not least. If a solar flare was to briefly incinerate the earth the first thing that would incinerated would be the atmosphere which due to the high content of oxygen is quite flamable. Without an atmosphere our oceans would boil off into space.

Im not trying to bust anyones balls with this reply and I hope that this is of some use to the wrighter.

Krakatau

[EmilyH]

This is the reason why I like writing fantasy over sci-fi. In fantasy, magic defeats physics, even if you have to remember to keep your own magical rules straight.

[Michael_Boyle]

I am aware that we don't use the carbon dating method for ancient reptilian fossils, but the methods that we do use have an error rate of about 1%, which is inline with what I suggested. More importantly, most people are familiar with carbon dating, even if they don't really understand it. Most people are also familiar with the Einstein equation E=mc2, even though that equation was first published in 1887, when Big Al was still in grade school. My apologies, I digress.
I watched a show on Discovery two years ago called "What killed the dinosaurs?" Upshot of the story was, they're not really sure. A lot of physicists choke on the meteor hypothesis, because they don't buy the 'centuries of darkness' concept. All I did was suppose that a disease caused the extinction, and proceeded from that premise. Anyway, the dinosaurs all die in the prologue. It's a pretty fast paced book. Of course, it has to be to decimate the land dwelling population of the planet in 280 pages.