"Jeff Hecht - Extinction Theory" - читать интересную книгу автора (Hecht Jeff)

started dropping as pollution controls started. I got to wondering if the lead
rose and fell with the use of lead in house paint, and I'd been making a few
calls trying to track that.
When I mentioned the similarities to Wasserman, his eyes lit up. Had I
run anything similar on his samples? I shook my head. Nor had I tried any of
his tests on the harbor samples.
"There must have been so many things happening at the time of an
impact," he said. "You get acid rain from the oxidation of nitrogen in the
air. You might get lots of carbon dioxide if it hit limestone rock. You'd get
huge shockwaves from the atmosphere and oceans. You'd get lots of dust. You'd
get shocked quartz and carbon particles from fires. You'd have air pollution
like you wouldn't believe." He paused, and put his chin in his hands. "You
know, there are so many things that could happen that some people doubt
anything could have survived a big enough impact."
It was then I asked the fateful question: "Did it have to be an
impact?"
He answered "of course" immediately, then lapsed into silence.
I laid the harbor results in his hands. "Just look at those," I told
him. "Swings in abundances every bit as large or larger than the ones we found
near the boundary clay. But we know where these came from. People!" I pointed
to the start of the rise in the lead curve. "Here's where they started using
lead pipes and lead paint. And here's where we figured out that lead was bad
stuff and stopped using so much of it."
He had long ago decided I was crazy. Nobody as sober as I am is
supposed to have ideas that wild. "But there weren't any people then. You know
that!"
"It didn't have to be people. It could have been some other type of
creature. Years ago somebody in Canada suggested that if the asteroid hadn't
gotten the dinosaurs, they might have evolved into something intelligent."
Wasserman remembered that. He probably had seen it in the proper
scholarly journals; I'd seen it in _Omni._ He had counterarguments of course.
"It was Dale Russell from the National Museums of Canada, and he said it would
have taken 65 million years for them to evolve any kind of intelligence.
Besides, there should be some trace in the fossil record."
"But we know the fossil record is very fragmentary," I reminded him. He
was the one who had told me how tiny a fraction of living creatures are ever
fossilized, and how it was hard to find fossils of small animals. "Homo
Sapiens evolved in only a few million years, and we don't have much record of
earlier ancestors."
"Hmmm..." Wasserman contemplated. "I will admit that land deposits are
scarce from that period. In fact, there's still debate over when the dinosaurs
finally died out, but ... no, it's just too ridiculous. Remember, there were
earlier mass extinctions, much further back in the Devonian and Ordovician.
You couldn't have had intelligent life then; you barely had anything on land
at all. What we're looking for in all this extinction business is a pattern,
and what we call 'intelligence' is too new to be part of that pattern."
"Suppose we finally blow ourselves up, like you keep saying we're going
to do one of these days..."
"We don't need to blow anything up," he muttered. "If you'd get your
nose out of your laser, you'd see people can do a damn good approximation of