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From: jlg@lanl.ARPA (Jim Giles)
Newsgroups: net.space
Subject: Re: nearby supernovas etc.
Message-ID: <80@lanl.ARPA>
Date: Tue, 4-Mar-86 19:42:28 EST
Article-I.D.: lanl.80
Posted: Tue Mar  4 19:42:28 1986
Date-Received: Fri, 7-Mar-86 05:49:29 EST
References: <8603020306.AA00249@s1-b.arpa> <73@lanl.ARPA>
Reply-To: jlg@a.UUCP (Jim Giles)
Organization: Los Alamos National Laboratory
Lines: 60

>...       Most of the oil and gas in Texas, The Gulf of Mexico, the Middle
>East, and the North Sea come from vegetation living in the Tythes Seaway
>which was a shallow strip of warm seas lying between (what became) North
>America and (what became) North Africa and Europe.  This seaway existed
>(to various extents) between 120 and 80 million years ago.  60 to 80
>million years is plenty of time for oil and gas formation.

I misspelled Tethys.  Also, the North Sea oil fields were not really part
of the Tethys Seaway, athough the area was frequently connected to the
Tethys realm.  Since this area was fairly far north at the time, the
vegetation responsible for the oil there may have predated the Tethys
formation.  The Tethys Seaway was first created about 160 million years
ago.  Remnants of it are still to be seen: the Mediteranean, the Black
Sea, the Caspian Sea, and the Aral Sea.

>This is not to say that I oppose the space program - I support it.  I think
>we should devote more resources to it than we have.  But, if we don't, we
>will become somone else's dead past - like the Romans, Greeks, Assyrians,
>Babylonians, and Egyptians before us.

This last is a (loose) paraphrase of something from Jacob Bronowski's
"Ascent of Man."

"I am infinitely saddened to find myself suddenly surrounded in the West
by a sense of terrible loss of nerve, a retreat from knowledge into -
into what?  Into Zen Buddhism; into falsely profound questions about:
Are we not really just animals at bottom; into extra-sensory perception
and mystery.

"... It sounds very pessimistic to talk about western civilization with
a sense of retreat.  I have been so optimistic about the acsent of man;
am I going to give up at this moment?  Of course not.  The ascent of
man will go on.  But do not assume that it will go on carried by western
civilization as we know it.  We are being weighed in the balance at this
moment.  If we give up, the next step will be taken - but not by us.  We
have not been given any guarantee that Assyria and Egypt and Rome were
not given.  We are waiting to be somebody's past, and not necessarily
that of our future.

"... If we do not take the next step in the ascent of man, it will be
taken elsewhere, in Africa, in China.  Should I feel that to be sad?
No, not in itself.  Humanity has a right to change its colour.  And yet,
wedded as I am to the civilization that nurtured me, I should feel it
to be infinitely sad.  I, whom England made, whom it taught its language
and its tolerance and excitement in intellectual pursuits, I would feel
it a grave sense of loss (as you would) if a hundred years from now
Shakespeare and Newton are historical fossils in the ascent of man, in
the way that Homer and Euclid are.

"...  We are all afraid - for our confidence, for the future, for the
world.  That is the nature of human imagination.  Yet every man, every
civilization, has gone forward because of its engagement with what it has
set itself to do.  The personal commitment of a man to his skill, the
intellectual commitment and the emotional commitment working together as
one, has made the Ascent of Man"

						- J. Bronowski

J. Giles
Los Alamos