<chirp, chirp> “Moire here, what can I do for you while staying six feet away?”

“Hi, Sy, this is Cathleen. you’re invited to to an experiment.”

“What sort of experiment?”

“You’ve been to a few of our ‘Crazy Theory’ events. We can’t do those now, of course, but we’re trying it online. Interested?”

“Sounds like fun. Email me the details and I’ll dial in.”

---

“Hi, everyone, welcome to our first-ever online ‘Crazy Theories’ seminar. I’m afraid it’ll be a bit different from our traditional affairs. Everyone but the presenter’s on mute so don’t bother shouting encouragement or booing. Any spitballs or wadded-up paper napkins you throw you get to clean up. As always at the end we’ll take a vote to award the Ceremonial Broom for the craziest theory. Type your questions and comments in the chat box; we’ll get to them after the presenter finishes. Everybody got all that? OK, our first presenter is from my Planetology class. Go ahead, Kareem.”

“Hey, everybody. I’m Kareem and my Crazy Theory isn’t mine, personally, but it’s the one that got me into Planetology class. Its was in this science fiction novel I read a couple of years ago. The story’s complicated and has a lot of science that I didn’t understand, but the part that caught my imagination was his idea that what killed off the dinosaurs was smart dinosaurs.”

<consults notes>

“A little history first. In the late 1970s two scientists named Alvarez discovered that all around the Earth there’s a thin layer of soil with more than ten times the normal amount of an element called iridium. They found that the layer was 66 million years old, which just matched the end of the Cretaceous Era when the last of the dinosaurs died off. They knew that some meteorites have a lot of iridium so in 1980 they suggested that a meteor strike must have done the deed.

“That idea was so controversial that John McLoughlin came up with his own explanation and based his book on it. He supposed that about 66 million years ago evolution produced intelligent dinosaurs that took over the planet the way that we humans have in our time. They weren’t huge like T‑rex but they were big enough to use Triceratops as draft and meat animals and smart enough to develop lots of iridium‑based technology like we use copper. Anyway, they got into a world war and that was what wiped everything out and left behind the traces of iridium.”

<gulps down soda>

“McLaughlin’s book came out in 1988. Since than we’ve learned that the Alvarez guys were basically right although there was some other stuff going on, too. But the book got me thinking that maybe there could have been a world‑wide civilization and the only things left after 66 million years were bones and this trace of a metal they used. Humans have only been around for like a hundred thousand years and we’ve only been doing metals big‑time for a few hundred which is teeny compared to a million years. A paleontologist wouldn’t even be able to detect a time period that small. So my Crazy Theory is, maybe there were smart dinosaurs or something and we just haven’t found evidence for them.”

<burp>

“Ever since then I’ve kept an eye out for publications about what a vanished civilization might leave behind for us to discover. In this book Weisman lays out survival times for our civilization’s stuff — plastic, houses, roads and so on. Pretty much everything but Mount Rushmore and the Chunnel will have dissolved or eroded away much sooner than a million years. Really readable if you want more details.”

<more soda>

“I also found a paper, ‘The Silurian Hypothesis,’ that took a more technical approach. Their big library research project pulled results from scores of geologic isotope analysis and fossil survey reports looking for ancient times that resemble Earth’s sudden change since the start of the Industrial Age — climate, species declines, whatever. They found about a dozen, but as they said, ‘the known unique markers might not be indicative, while the (perhaps) more expected markers are not sufficient.’ In other words, my Crazy Theory might be crazy. Or maybe not.”

~~ Rich Olcott