Welcome to Space News from the Electric Universe, brought to you by The
Thunderbolts Project at Thunderbolts.info.
A radical tenet of the Electric Universe theory, as proposed by the chief
principals of The Thunderbolts Project, is that conditions in the inner solar
system and planet Earth were vastly different within human memory. Ancient
man lived in awe, reverence and sometimes terror of the planetary gods. If planets
and moons, including Earth, move on different courses today than in the
relatively recent past, one thing is certain: the gravitational force on Earth
has not remained constant since the Earth's formation, supposedly
four-and-a-half billion years ago. If Earth's gravity has not remained fixed
over countless eons of time, a clear test of this hypothesis could come in the
comparison of life-forms in our world today versus those of prehistoric
eras. Scientists tell us that for about 165 million years on planet Earth,
fantastic and often giant creatures, called dinosaurs, ruled our world. Of
course, the largest of the dinosaurs dwarf any animal that walks the earth
today. Yet, consensus scientific theory tells us that Earth's gravity was not
weaker during the Mesozoic Era. In today's episode we asked author Ted
Holden to explore the controversial question, "Do dinosaurs pose a gravity
problem?" Engineers in the late 19th century had understood well enough that
they had a big problem with understanding how a sauropod dinosaur
could walk on land, right? I mean, they never managed to put numbers on it. I'm
the first person that managed to put real numbers on that. But they knew there was a
problem, they were assuming that though sauropod dinosaurs must have lived in
water, right, but more recently it's turned out that there [was] no adaptation
whatsoever for living in water. They would have needed snowshoe-feet. The feet
they actually had would just sink right into the muddy river bottoms, right, I mean it
would be immobilized almost immediately.
The idea of a large dinosaur using his neck as a snorkel wouldn't work, (that)
they finally figured that out. They've got tracks showing dinosaurs, you know,
walking easily enough on land, right, I mean, in fact they have more in the way
of footprints than they do of bones in the case of large dinosaurs. If some, you
know, they keep finding bigger ones, they keep finding bigger bones, they keep finding
bigger footprints. So they've got footprints which indicate a creature
which would be 200 feet long. You know, which you would tell breviparopus and
there's a couple of other things like that, that's the one word that I can
remember easily, um. You've got titanosaurs. Now it's like, you know, they
used to think that a Brontosaur was a really big dinosaur when I was a child
right, and they had a brontosaurus' skeleton in the Smithsonian Museum. But they keep
finding bigger ones, the ultrasaur, not not even the largest of the titanosaurs
but Christopher McGowan, the curator of paleontology at the Royal Museum in
Ontario has a book out about dinosaurs and just from purely
volumetric calculations had calculated a weight of 180 tons for the ultrasaur. The
question becomes like, "What is it that's allowing these kinds of creatures in our
world? The first thing that occurred to me was that; you know, we don't really
know very much about dinosaurs, how exactly they lived, as far as muscle or
anything like that. But we know quite a lot at this point about the
weightlifting sports, right, and they hadn't made any sort of a science out
of the weightlifting sports, you know, in late 1800's, early 1900's, whereas they have
now where we know what the limits of size for a human athlete would be, right, so I
mean, any kind of a size limit you could compute for the human athlete is also
going to serve as an upper bound for, any sort of a herbivore of the same size. The
only other kind of argument you could try to make would be that dinosaur must
have had better muscle than we have. That doesn't work out either. Muscle tissue is
all pretty much the same under a microscope, I mean, for vertebrate
animals, I mean mice, dogs, cats, humans, elephants, it's all pretty much the same
how strong something is, is just a question of how much muscle mass do you have
and how well is that trained. So at that point you can start to ask
yourself, how do you compute, like, its size limit for the strongest people we
have in the world. And you get into the scaling system that they use for Olympic or
powerlifting events, which says that you, you scale by a general average of cross
section, which is this two-thirds power body weight. Where does that come from
and why would you want to do that? You're talking about Square-Cube Phenomenon at
that point and we've all seen this, okay, it's like there's always this littlest
kid in your classroom that could do the most pull-ups and most pull-ups are in a kind
of a ratio of exercise where strength is proportional to cross section of bones
and muscles and weight is proportional to volume which is the cubed figure. We know
that strength basically varies according to cross section of bones and muscles. If
you know a person's weight and you want a general average of body cross section
then weight is going to be some, it's proportional to volume, some
number times volume. You might have a weight-lifting event at a bench press,
for instance, and you've got six to seven or eight different weight divisions.
You'd like to know who had really done the best lift, overall. What you do is you
divide through by two-thirds power of the athletes weight in each case and the
numbers all line up, they almost become the same number. One will stand out just
a little bit, right, and that's going to be the guy that did the best lift.
Whereas if you say, okay, now we're going to go from the realm of real things into
thought experiments and we're going to conduct a thought experiment of
scaling the same athlete's different sizes. Well, that sort of isometric
scaling becomes perfect, right, because you're talking about the same guy, just
making him different sizes. You would like to know at what size does the Square-
Cube thing make one of these top human power lifters dysfunctional. What you do
is, you say, okay we're just going to exactly use this two-thirds power of weight
scaling factor. On the left side of the equation I'm going to say, "Okay Bill
Kazmaier plus the bars, like 350 pounds plus the 1000 for the bar, right, 1350 divided by the
two-thirds power of 350, equals on the right side of the equation, just the guy
lifting himself up off the floor, right, that's x divided by the 2/3
power of x. And so on the right you get a number like somewhere between eighteen
thousand and about 21,000 pounds, right. That's the theoretical maximum size
limit for for the world for one of the strongest athletes we know anything
about. That's the theoretical limit and the thing that's funny is, the biggest
elephants that we know anything about are typically fourteen, fifteen, sixteen
thousand pounds. Now I don't think anybody claims to have any kind of a
stuffed elephant any bigger than the one that you see at the Smithsonian. And those
people told me that that elephant was eight tons. So that is 16,000
pounds. Kind of interesting that you've got this theoretical number which I've
produced and it matches up very nicely with the real world's number.
You would expect the real world limit to be a bit lower than, than the theoretical
absolute maximum. You know, because you're never going to get an elephant that's
all muscle. So this is the first little thing that we introduce, it says that there's
a theoretical size limit of about 20,000 pounds in our present world and then you
get into another question which is that other calculation that you see in that
paper. You know, like how much attenuation would you need for something like an ultrasaur
to walk around. Well the observation you make is that walking around may not have
been any more of an effort for the ultrasaur in his world than it is for that
elephant in the Smithsonian in his. You see what I'm saying, we should just
equate the two levels of efforts, weight divided by two-thirds power mass. We know that the
ultrasaur would weigh about 180 tons in our world and the elephant weighs about
eight. The ratio of about twenty-two and a half to one. You can just substitute
the one of those ideas into the other and it's like the constant of
proportionality falls out, right. You get a ratio of about 2.8 to one. That says
you would need to have at least, at very least, the 2.8 to 1 reduction in gravity for the
ultrasaur to stand up as easily as an absolute maximum lift effort by one of
these top human lifters. That's the basic idea, as far as strength goes, but
there's more to it than that, you've got other kinds of things you're trying to
account for. Every kind of a measure of efficiency aside of just strength, varies
with some kind of squared figure, right. It's like a bird's ability to fly. It
turns on surface area of wings which is a squared figure. Your ability to
breathe is proportional to surface area of lungs. It's another squared figure.
Even your ability to digest food is proportional to surface area of your
digestive system which is why some authors have noted that they don't see
how anything could possibly become bigger than an elephant in today's world.
You know, simply because the elephant has to spent the whole day eating to support
his size. You've got a question of birds which says that the largest birds which
can fly in our world are 30, 35 pounds, something like that. That's the biggest
thing that flies in our world, right. Now when you get to ten, twenty, thirty
thousand years ago, they had like an Argentinean Teratorn, which was
basically a Golden Eagle, with a twenty five-foot wingspan, couple of hundred pounds
that flew. And then you've got these flying creatures, you know, which you like
the Texas Pterosaurs, the Big Bend Pterosaurs and those things could have gone
like five hundred to a thousand pounds. And they flew, right? Now when Warren Langston
first started working with Texas Pterosaur bones, he didn't
really have much in the way of wing bones. The bones he did have indicated a
wingspan of 60 feet. But more recently have actually found more in the way of
wing bones for those things, both in Israel and in Mexico, and what they've
actually found indicates, you know, wingspans of 60 feet. You've got like huge,
huge things flying in ancient times that couldn't begin to fly in our present world.
The oldest version of this paper of mine, spoke about the Pteranodon and the fact
that scholars who had studied what was involved in flying had examined the
Pteranodon and decided that the size limit of a Pteranodon, it had to be the
biggest thing that ever possibly flew, so any bigger than that, even just
gliding, even trying to hold its wings straight and at turn it would snap its wing
bones. One other kind of a thing which you would want to try to account for,
which is the question of sauropod dinosaurs and their necks. I believe
that that's the biggest problem of all. You've got two basic kinds of large
dinosaurs. You've got what they call brachiosaurus and which held
the neck upwards according to the bones. Then you've got the diplodocus, right,
which held, which apparently held the neck outwards. Now the largest thing that we
have bones for, far as length goes with the size we saw, was
a diplodocus. The question is, if you've got a neck which is, you know, 50 feet
long and weighs forty thousand pounds or something like that, how are you going to
hold that neck? If you hold it upwards, then you've got an extreme problem
getting blood to your brain, right. It's like a giraffe's vascular system would,
and blood pressure, would blow our vascular system apart. They have a very,
very tight skin which acts like a flight suit, you know for jet fighter pilot, just
getting blood up as high as you need to get it for giraffe is a big problem,
right. If you had to get blood up, you know, like 40 feet above your shoulders,
you would have a creature which was constantly walking around in constant
danger of some sort of a major circulatory system disaster, right. That's
no way to dominate the earth for tens of millions of years.
Stay tuned for part 2
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