Dinosaurs and the arms race that is evolution
As one of the characters in "WWW:Watch" by Robert J. Sawyer pointed out, something most people don't consider is that if dinosaurs were transplanted to the modern era from their own times, they would fucking die in short order.
First, some scientists think that flowering plants are what really killed the dinosaurs. But second, evolution is a continuous, never-ending, cut-throat arms race, and dinosaurs would be lagging 65 million years behind everything else. The character also said that bears and lions and cougars and even wolves would be able to take down even a T-Rex without much fuss, but it occurred to me that there's a less obvious source of dinos being doomed: bacteria and viruses. Like the Martians in War of the Worlds, transplanted dinosaurs would be utterly unprepared for modern day bacteria and viruses. They might rampage through human cities a little, but assuming they didn't get killed by cars or trucks, it wouldn't take long for Barney the dinosaur to get the sniffles and fall down dead as a doornail in a few days.
While I'm on this topic, War of the Worlds kind of flipped the script on this whole colonization thing. If that book had been true to the pattern actually extant in history, it would have been Martian germs that wiped out most of humanity. The invaders would have won, and if we were lucky they'd let us live on reservations in like, the most inhospitable parts of the earth like the Sahara or the Gobi desert.
Hmm... maybe when I'm done with "WWW:Wonder," I should go on to The Massacre of Mankind by Stephen Baxter.
This was cross-posted from https://fayanora.dreamwidth.org/1417486.html
You can comment either here or there.
First, some scientists think that flowering plants are what really killed the dinosaurs. But second, evolution is a continuous, never-ending, cut-throat arms race, and dinosaurs would be lagging 65 million years behind everything else. The character also said that bears and lions and cougars and even wolves would be able to take down even a T-Rex without much fuss, but it occurred to me that there's a less obvious source of dinos being doomed: bacteria and viruses. Like the Martians in War of the Worlds, transplanted dinosaurs would be utterly unprepared for modern day bacteria and viruses. They might rampage through human cities a little, but assuming they didn't get killed by cars or trucks, it wouldn't take long for Barney the dinosaur to get the sniffles and fall down dead as a doornail in a few days.
While I'm on this topic, War of the Worlds kind of flipped the script on this whole colonization thing. If that book had been true to the pattern actually extant in history, it would have been Martian germs that wiped out most of humanity. The invaders would have won, and if we were lucky they'd let us live on reservations in like, the most inhospitable parts of the earth like the Sahara or the Gobi desert.
Hmm... maybe when I'm done with "WWW:Wonder," I should go on to The Massacre of Mankind by Stephen Baxter.
This was cross-posted from https://fayanora.dreamwidth.org/1417486.html
You can comment either here or there.