[RightWhale]

Referencing supernovas that cleared out the near interstellar space of dust. Dates and likely candidates.

[RightWhale]

recent history bump

[biblewonk]

I can't believe I actually used to belief this junk.

[Asclepius]

It is possible Homo sapiens may have been one of these.

My intuitions are correct. We are a race of genetically damaged mutants. An accident. An evolutionary blotch. A rent in the cosmic fabric. Never meant to be. An affront to nature; an outrage to the gods.

[dead]

Here’s another article on this theory:

Study Suggests Supernova Snuffed out Marine Life Two Million Years Ago

[texson66]

This is a wonderful example of "wishful" thinking....

[Senator Pardek]

This is most interesting, but it's too "local" to have a bearing on any of the various anthropic principles.

I have no idea what that means.

[DentsRun]

I wonder what qualities were possessed by bi-pedal hunting apes on the African savannas that allowed them to surivive a super-nova's radiation.

[Jeremy_Bentham]

Interesting article, especially considering the iron-60 deposits.

Bump for later.

[gcruse]

 these hazardous, radioactive times.

Is iron-60 radioactive?  Is UV radiation
considered radioactive?  Or is this a
mistake?

[crystalk]

If I have this year's current fad wisdom down pat, homo sapiens is supposed to have come into being only some 100M to 250M years ago. So this supernova 2 mill yrs ago might have nudged things along but failed to produce homo sapiens.

Ho, hum. Wonder where science will be next year. At least the Bible still reads the same as it did way back when I was in college.

[e_engineer]

Geologists have found that plankton and molluscs were wiped out in vast numbers and that land animals and plants were also affected. 'We now think these creatures were killed off because Earth's ozone was blasted away by two or more supernovae,' said Benítez. 'There would have been no protection against the Sun's intense ultraviolet radiation. All sorts of changes could have resulted.'

If you stripped all of the ozone from the atmosphere today, the UV light from the sun would replace it very quickly. UV light makes ozone (O3) by splitting oxygen molecules (O2) into atomic oxygen (O) which quickly re-combine to form ozone. This paper suggests that the ozone layer was "blasted" away, which implies a shock wave. (rather than radiation) If he is suggesting a shock wave, then why would it only take the ozone layer? What about the rest of the atmosphere? If the density of the dust and gas in the shockwave was high enough to strip away the ozone layer, it would also deposit huge amounts of dust and gas into the atmosphere.

The asteroid theory of mass extinctions claims that dust in the upper atmosphere blotted out the sunlight, causing plants and the rest of the food chain to collapse. The shock wave remnant of a supernova would contain lots of dust and gas, and due to its velocity, lots of that dust (including Iron 60) would be dumped into the upper atmosphere, causing global extinction by the same method as the asteroid impact. (No need to invoke the ozone layer and UV light to explain this one)

[Elsie]

Many are rare - like iron-60. These particles hit our atmosphere and settle like a thin layer of dust over the planet.' Intriguingly, the iron-60 layer found by the German group did not come from a single supernova but appeared to come from a number of them. 'Different layers seem to have fallen at different times, but all around two million years ago,' said Benítez. v

Revelation 12
3. Then another sign appeared in heaven: an enormous red dragon with seven heads and ten horns and seven crowns on his heads.
4. His tail swept a third of the stars out of the sky and flung them to the earth. The dragon stood in front of the woman who was about to give birth, so that he might devour her child the moment it was born.
5. She gave birth to a son, a male child, who will rule all the nations with an iron scepter. And her child was snatched up to God and to his throne.
6. The woman fled into the desert to a place prepared for her by God, where she might be taken care of for 1,260 days.
7. And there was war in heaven. Michael and his angels fought against the dragon, and the dragon and his angels fought back.
8. But he was not strong enough, and they lost their place in heaven.
9. The great dragon was hurled down--that ancient serpent called the devil, or Satan, who leads the whole world astray. He was hurled to the earth, and his angels with him.

[Consort]

Our universe, like all other universes, came out of a large Black Hole from another universe. It happens all the time and will keep on happening. Send a probe into a Black Hole to verify it. It's called Cosmic Recycling.

[P-Marlowe]

I just love the way the author of this article writes everything down as if he were an eyewitness to all this evolution stuff. And they accuse creationists of inventing myths.

[MissAmericanPie]

ROFLOL, oh, this is priceless. This evolution thing is getting pretty desperate to promote an idea like this.

[razorbak]

In the early '70s and before, the uniformitarianism that dominated the community of evolutioniary scientists caused them to scoff at the catastrophism of the Bible. Now evolutionists are wedded to catastrophism as closely as are Biblical creationists. There is still much disagreement, but at least the evos are moving in the right direction.