One is the aftermath of reading this recent and STUNNING article from The New Yorker entitled "The Day the Dinosaurs Died."
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/04/08/the-day-the-dinosaurs-died
It is a long read, but if you are interested in such things, it is WELL worth your time. Of course, I grew up hearing about the idea about the asteroid impact in the Yucatan. The idea had been around for a time, and in 1980, there was some good evidence uncovered from around the globe that there had been a massive asteroid. In 1991 they discovered the actual impact crater. This newest discovery (reported upon in the New Yorker) in the Hells Creek formation tops it all. The paleontological evidence lines up with computer models of the event, which is huge.
The most stunning thing to me is the description of the impact and its aftermath. I had never thought about it graphically or known much about its effects. It is an image I can't unsee. Just so you can share in my *joy*, and in case you are too stubborn to click on the link, I will copy the front end of the article here for *your enjoyment*. Then perhaps you will be able to understand what I am talking about afterward.
If, on a certain evening about sixty-six million years ago, you had stood somewhere in North America and looked up at the sky, you would have soon made out what appeared to be a star. If you watched for an hour or two, the star would have seemed to grow in brightness, although it barely moved. That’s because it was not a star but an asteroid, and it was headed directly for Earth at about forty-five thousand miles an hour. Sixty hours later, the asteroid hit. The air in front was compressed and violently heated, and it blasted a hole through the atmosphere, generating a supersonic shock wave. The asteroid struck a shallow sea where the Yucatán peninsula is today. In that moment, the Cretaceous period ended and the Paleogene period began.
A few years ago, scientists at Los Alamos National Laboratory used what was then one of the world’s most powerful computers, the so-called Q Machine, to model the effects of the impact. The result was a slow-motion, second-by-second false-color video of the event. Within two minutes of slamming into Earth, the asteroid, which was at least six miles wide, had gouged a crater about eighteen miles deep and lofted twenty-five trillion metric tons of debris into the atmosphere. Picture the splash of a pebble falling into pond water, but on a planetary scale. When Earth’s crust rebounded, a peak higher than Mt. Everest briefly rose up. The energy released was more than that of a billion Hiroshima bombs, but the blast looked nothing like a nuclear explosion, with its signature mushroom cloud. Instead, the initial blowout formed a “rooster tail,” a gigantic jet of molten material, which exited the atmosphere, some of it fanning out over North America. Much of the material was several times hotter than the surface of the sun, and it set fire to everything within a thousand miles. In addition, an inverted cone of liquefied, superheated rock rose, spread outward as countless red-hot blobs of glass, called tektites, and blanketed the Western Hemisphere.
Some of the ejecta escaped Earth’s gravitational pull and went into irregular orbits around the sun. Over millions of years, bits of it found their way to other planets and moons in the solar system. Mars was eventually strewn with the debris—just as pieces of Mars, knocked aloft by ancient asteroid impacts, have been found on Earth. A 2013 study in the journal Astrobiology estimated that tens of thousands of pounds of impact rubble may have landed on Titan, a moon of Saturn, and on Europa and Callisto, which orbit Jupiter—three satellites that scientists believe may have promising habitats for life. Mathematical models indicate that at least some of this vagabond debris still harbored living microbes. The asteroid may have sown life throughout the solar system, even as it ravaged life on Earth.
The asteroid was vaporized on impact. Its substance, mingling with vaporized Earth rock, formed a fiery plume, which reached halfway to the moon before collapsing in a pillar of incandescent dust. Computer models suggest that the atmosphere within fifteen hundred miles of ground zero became red hot from the debris storm, triggering gigantic forest fires. As the Earth rotated, the airborne material converged at the opposite side of the planet, where it fell and set fire to the entire Indian subcontinent. Measurements of the layer of ash and soot that eventually coated the Earth indicate that fires consumed about seventy per cent of the world’s forests. Meanwhile, giant tsunamis resulting from the impact churned across the Gulf of Mexico, tearing up coastlines, sometimes peeling up hundreds of feet of rock, pushing debris inland and then sucking it back out into deep water, leaving jumbled deposits that oilmen sometimes encounter in the course of deep-sea drilling.
The damage had only begun. Scientists still debate many of the details, which are derived from the computer models, and from field studies of the debris layer, knowledge of extinction rates, fossils and microfossils, and many other clues. But the over-all view is consistently grim. The dust and soot from the impact and the conflagrations prevented all sunlight from reaching the planet’s surface for months. Photosynthesis all but stopped, killing most of the plant life, extinguishing the phytoplankton in the oceans, and causing the amount of oxygen in the atmosphere to plummet. After the fires died down, Earth plunged into a period of cold, perhaps even a deep freeze. Earth’s two essential food chains, in the sea and on land, collapsed. About seventy-five per cent of all species went extinct. More than 99.9999 per cent of all living organisms on Earth died, and the carbon cycle came to a halt.
Earth itself became toxic. When the asteroid struck, it vaporized layers of limestone, releasing into the atmosphere a trillion tons of carbon dioxide, ten billion tons of methane, and a billion tons of carbon monoxide; all three are powerful greenhouse gases. The impact also vaporized anhydrite rock, which blasted ten trillion tons of sulfur compounds aloft. The sulfur combined with water to form sulfuric acid, which then fell as an acid rain that may have been potent enough to strip the leaves from any surviving plants and to leach the nutrients from the soil.
There you have it. In light of such findings, every human problem I can think of suddenly becomes insignificant and petty. Frankly, I can't exactly say what about this report this disturbs me, and I don't even know what questions I have. I know it's not the way I wish the world worked. I want to hear philosopher-theologians speak to this in a meaningful way, and by that I don't mean a three-paragraph rebuttal from Answers in Genesis, with boiler-plate answers in response to so many peer-reviewed journal articles published over several decades. I know that people, including myself, have many reasons to believe in God, and that there are many ways of understanding what the Bible is teaching us, which lead us closer to God and all that is Good. What is the human desire for significance? What does death and destruction mean? And when good and life come out of it? What is creativity and the creative action of God? I don't even know if those are my questions. But I know that this image is not leaving my mind as long as my mind works.
That was the first existential crises I mentioned... which keeps me up at night. The other is much smaller and closer to home.
...I spent so much of my life looking forward to the chapter of my story which involved having children. I had no idea that pregnancy would work for me, of course. Or how sick and exhausted and uncomfortable and sleepless and frightened it would leave me. But three out of four of those trips turned out really well. And there was also so much joy and wonder in the journey, which continues. I had no idea how hard it would be to be a parent. NO IDEA. Still, I wouldn't trade it for the alternative.
Some people never wanted to be parents and aren't. Some people didn't want to be parents but wound up there on accident. Some people wanted to be parents but they never got the chance. And some people had a specific plan - like the stereotypical American dream of one boy and one girl, two years apart. They did it, and they moved on. Maybe none of those people can relate to my thoughts.
I'm not exactly any of those people. I imagined the beginning of the chapter, but I never thought about the end of the chapter. I liked being surprised by the arrival of my children, and I liked not starting out with a specific plan, and I don't like being near the end of the story.
Now I'm 38. I have three children. I'm exhausted. What happens when this chapter closes? I don't know what's next. (Except for college tuition...) I suddenly feel old and surprised to find myself in this part of the story. I don't like to think about the door closing.
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