J. B. Thompson

My friend M. A. Titmarsh just read the Atlantic article by executive editor Adrienne LaFrance: The Prophecies of Q, and his head was exploding. Quietly exploding, in isolation in his own home. He did not want to talk, not just yet.

For my part, the AR, I have been enjoying again Bill Bryson’s A Short History of Nearly Everything (Broadway Books, 2013). Fortunately it is about science and rational thinking (mostly), the slow progress of same, and therefore has nothing to do with Q. Not Q-ish at all, which is a relief in these dark times of conspiracy theory nutters.

The AR knew some rabbits that went bonkers. Bitten by bats or one cold winter too many, they would run around searching for carrots in the strangest places, trying to climb trees, imagining the moon was a human with a gun, frightening kits, certain a global cabal was intent on paving over every field in the land. A few would stand on hillocks, eyes glittering, and speak for hours, their ears pantomiming cryptic messages. Another few whose coats were less manged amassed a fortune in carrots by further befuddling the confused. Their doings all came to nothing, as such doings always do, but in their fervour they would hypnotize the lonely, exploit religious longings and excite young bucks who as always sought heroic battles (with them as the heroes and everyone else as the chumps, including their furry parents).

Of those who occupy their time with conspiracy theories, indulge themselves with new ways to hate, confuse, befuddle, and steal, the AR recalls Shakespeare’s Sonnet 129. It refers to sexual lust but has a wider application. “The expense of spirit in a waste of shame.”

Bryson’s book got me asking questions. For example: E=mc2. What that means is that if the energy stored in the mass of my body were released it would equal about twenty hydrogen bombs. And yet I have to buy sweaters to keep warm in winter? Is that believable? Of course not.

I have spent much of my life on the ground. Running, jumping, cavorting, diving into holes. The Bryson book’s pages on geology especially captured my attention this time. Speaking of holes. And dinosaurs. Many of our kits, years ago now, became fascinated with dinosaurs. Dinosaur books, movies, toys, acting like dinosaurs. It was all a bit much.

Admittedly that fascination was understandable. The Jurassic Park creatures of massive size or impressive teeth or wings. And the tale they told of the history our planet. A tale Bryson tells very well. The unimaginable timescale. A universe 20 billion years old. A planet 4.6 billions years old. What came before? What is beyond? A space scale: the infinite dive into the atomic, the infinite soaring into the beyond “above” us.

What happened to those dinosaurs? The accepted theory for years (after dinosaurs were acknowledged to have existed and after it was realized the earth was more than four thousand years old) was that they gradually faded away, i.e., over millions of years.

Then a geologist and his father who was a Noble-prize winning nuclear physicist got to wondering about a thin strip of red clay in Italy that lay between two layers of other earth material representing geological eras.

Turns out the clay contained massive amounts of iridium. Iridium is scarce on earth. It comes from space. The clay came from space, from an asteroid, one that had hit the earth  about 65 million years ago. The thinness of the layer represent the short but cataclysmic duration of that colossal impact on the planet, including wiping out the dinosaurs and half the world’s other species.

Asteroids are more properly called planetoids, as they are not stars but are pieces in our solar system of the same stuff that coalesced into our planet. They travel in a belt between Mars and Jupiter and cross our Earth’s orbit all the time, millions of them.

Should one hit our planet, it would be traveling very, very fast, at multiples of the speed of sound. In ancient times, one landed in Manson, Iowa. It weighed ten billion tons and produced a crater three miles deep and twenty miles across. Today no visual sign of that crater in Manson. Over 2.5 million years, it was filled with glacial till by ice sheets to a smooth fertile surface (with uniquely soft water beneath).

Did that asteroid kill the dinosaurs? People thought so at first, but the iridium layer in Italy changed their minds. Where was the crater of the real perpetrator? Bill Bryson tells us. Your Authorial Rabbit once lived for a while in Chicxulub, Yucatan, Mexico, home to the Mayan people, a charming village of fishers, astonishing land creatures, beautiful waters and tortillas. Little did the AR (ignorus leporem that he was and is) know back then — in the 1970s — that the village lay within an asteroid crater 120 miles wide and 30 miles deep, the very site of the dinosaur-killing crime, not confirmed until the 1990s. It would have produced so vast an effect, so blinding a light and then such a darkness (in silence because of the speed of sound factor), that all the nuclear weapons existing today exploding together could generate only a fraction of its destructive power. E=mc2.

Frightening. Humbling.

Useful to contemplate time and space beyond our own brief candle (there’s the Bard again) when time’s meaning has changed for most of us these days, when we are awakened, perhaps only briefly, to its mystery.

The only time we ourselves have is the present moment. The past is gone, the future is unknown. So much unknown to our small rabbit brains and it is easy and reasonable to be afraid at times.

But best not to let that fear take us down into the darkest rabbit holes. Q conspiracies are not useful, playthings that they are for the bored and cynical and greedy. On the premise that we are the first victims of our own disturbed minds, the AR suggests we respect the mystery, marvel at it, respect those who spend their lives trying to understand it — scientists, doctors, mystics.

It is healthiest for us and for the others near to us and far from us to strive to live honest, compassionate lives, skeptical, yes, but able to hold to that strange challenge that we love others as we love ourselves.