#67 destroying the world
Monday, October 27, 2008
JURASSIC PARK IS AWESOME(:
okay that's quite late reaction or something, considering I finished that book like a few weeks ago. hmm let's see... I started reading it uh, some tuesday/thursday when there wasn't school but there was thirdlang cos I remember reading it when waiting for the train to bishan with doob and she laughed at the cover D:
I find it so awesome I shall type out a whole chapter here(:
Which is very hard, since this keyboard is so stiff, it's next to stationary.
I like using 'next to's. (: insults, yet softens the insult. Brilliant or what.
I can't use my own computer cos something happened and I
think it crashed. I hope not though D:
--
"You [John Hammond] were worried about that [the dinosaurs getting free and overrunning the world]? You egomanical
idiot. Do you have any idea what you are talking about? You think you can destroy the planet? My, what intoxicating power you must have. You can't destroy this planet. You can't even come close. Well, [the planet]'s not [in trouble].
"Let me tell you about our planet. Our planet is four and a half billion years old. There has been life on this planet for nearly that long. Three point eight billion years. The first bacteria. And, later, the first multicellular animals, then the first complex creatures, in the sea, on the land. Then the great sweeping age of animals - the amphibians, the dinosaurs, the mammals, each lasting millions upon millions of years.
"Great dynasties of creatures arising, flourishing, dying away. All this happening against a background of continuous and violent upheaval, mountain ranges thrust up and eroded away, cometary impacts, volcanic eruptions, oceans rising and falling, whole continents moving...Endless constant and violent change...Even today, the greatest geographical feature on the planet comes from two great continents colliding, buckling to make the Himalayan mountain range over millions of years. The planet has survived everything, in its time. It will certainly survive us.
"Suppose there was [a radiation accident]. Let's say we had a bad one, and all the plants and animals died, and the earth was clicking hot for a hundred thousand years. Life would survive somewhere - under the soil, or perhaps frozen in Arctic ice. And after all those years, when the planet was no longer inhospitable, life would again spread over the planet. The evolutionary process would begin again. It might take a few billion years for life to regain its present variety. And of course it would be very different from what it is now. But the earth would survive our folly. Life would survive our folly. Only we think it wouldn't.
"[If the ozone layer gets thinner], there will be more ultraviolet radiation reaching the surface. So what? Ultraviolet radiation is good for life. It's powerful energy. It promotes mutation, change. Many forms of life will thrive with more UV radiation.
"You think this is the first time such a thing [many species dying out] has happened? Don't you know about oxygen?
"It is
now [necessary for life]. But oxygen is actually a metabolic poison. It's a corrosive gas, like fluorine, which is used to etch glass. And when oxygen was first produced as a waste product by certain plant cells -say, around three billion years ago- it created a crisis for all other life on our planet. Those plant cells were polluting the environment with a deadly poison. They were exhaling a lethal gas, and building up its concentration. A planet like Venus has less than one percent oxygen. On earth, the concentration of oxygen was going up rapidly - five, ten, eventually twenty-one percent! Earth had an atmosphere of pure poison! Incompatible with life!
"My point is that life on earth can take care of itself. In the thinking of a human being, a hundred years is a long time. A hundred years ago, we didn't have cars and airplanes and computers and vaccines...It was a whole different world. But to the earth, a hundred years is
nothing. A million years is
nothing. This planet lives and breathes on a much vaster scale. We can't imagine its slow and powerful rhythms, we haven't got the humility to try. We have been residents here for the blink of an eye. If we are gone tomorrow, the earth will not miss us. We might [very well be gone].
"Let's be clear. The planet is not in jeopardy.
We are in jeopardy. We haven't got the power to destroy the planet - or to save it. But we might have the power to save ourselves."
-Ian Malcolm
"Destroying The World", Jurassic Park, by Michael Crichton
9:17 AM
