Neil deGrasse Tyson was on NPR today, talking about the universe and Earth and stuff. And somewhere in his monologue about how Earth is made up of about equal proportions of what everything else in the universe is (Yes, they have gone out and secretly tested everything in the universe, compiled all the materials and the percentages thereof, and then tested the whole entire Earth, and that's how they know!), he went off on this little tangent about dinosaurs, where he said: "68 Million years ago, when the dinosaurs roamed the Earth*, ready to go extinct..." And that's right about where I had to call foul.
Really? The dinosaurs were ready to go extinct? Are you sure? How do you know? Have paleontologists found fossilized dinosaur diaries saying stuff like: "I can't go on. Everything seems so futile. All I ever do is wander around, attacking and murdering, and then eating other dinosaurs. My conscience can't handle this immorality any longer! Surely there must be more to existence than this? Goodbye cruel world..." Or maybe there are dinosaur libraries full of morbid, nihilistic dinosaur philosophical texts on microfiche, written in the years immediately preceding the mass extinction, leading us to an understanding of their desperation approaching this jurassic fin de siecle? Or is there newly unearthed evidence of massive dinosaur apocalypse parties, along with lots of dinosaur church services where they were all repenting? Because if not, then how do we know that the dinosaurs weren't taken completely by surprise, kicking and screaming, and fighting for their every last breath?
Yeah, it's stuff like this that makes me wonder why anyone trusts scientists at all. They exaggerate what they really know on a heroic scale, they make giant monsters with their atomic experiments (just check any 1950s "science fiction" movie for proof of this: they say it's fiction, but it's all true!), and now they're probably cloning dinosaurs like in that documentary I saw about a Jurassic theme park. And we trust these guys? How do we know they're not making their cloned dinosaurs drink Dr. Jekyll's Mr. Hyde formula, turning them into super sadistic dinomaniacs? And Neil deGrasse Tyson is obviously saying dinosaurs wanted to go extinct so that he can use that as a way to ameliorate our panicked concerns when we find out about their evil military dinosaur weapons program, like scientists did in that movie Alien! (They always want to turn everything into a weapon: Oh, the humanity!)
Oh, but maybe I'm being unfair to deGrasse Tyson here. Perhaps the good doctor isn't trying to clone dinosaurs for genetic military applications, so much as he's trying to save the world from another threat. Yes, you see, if people got the impression that the dinosaurs were all killed, and that's why we're here now, then animal rights activists will surely protest all of humanity, claiming we all have the blood of innocent dinosaurs on our hands, and that we're all dancing on the graves of millions of murdered dinosaurs. Then the only way we will be able to redeem ourselves would be to clone dinosaurs and feed ourselves to them as penance. And that's probably why he said the dinosaurs were "ready to go extinct": to save humanity. (Unless he only did that to trick us into thinking he wants to save humanity, so he can then destroy us all later with his current dinosaur weapons project, and we won't suspect until it's too late! Well, don't say I didn't try to warn you when it happens...)
* (BTW: If they were ready to go extinct, maybe this is why dinosaurs "roamed the Earth", rather than intentionally traveling to specific places with a sense of purpose? Perhaps they roamed as in meandered randomly, without any feelings of meaning or joy in their lives.)
