A Productive Apocalypse

I have always loved a good apocalypse story, whether it be the tales of surviving nuclear war or natural disaster or global pandemic. As I have discussed elsewhere, these tales rank among some of my favorite science fiction stories. And, now, science non-fiction as well.

In The Last Days of the Dinosaurs, Riley Black vividly describes the biggest, nastiest apocalypse of them all, which she repeatedly describes as the single worst day in the history of life on Earth. This is, as the book’s title suggests, the massive asteroid strike that killed off all non-avian dinosaurs, along with lots of others (75% of all species on Earth) in basically just a couple of hours.

Black’s book starts out, as all good apocalypse stories do, with the day before, following a T. rex on her daily activities: hunting, resting, scratching at her parasites, feasting on the carcass of another dinosaur that she chances upon. Using the best of modern paleontology, filling in the details based on the behaviors and biology of contemporary nature, Black recreates the world that is about to die.

And then the asteroid. Black explains the size, the orbit, the velocity and angle of its descent, setting us up for vivid descriptions of the apocalypse itself: the asteroid slamming into the Yucatan. The immediate impact: Massive, devastating. Asteroid and bedrock melt and explode, blasted with enough force to leave the atmosphere. Earthquakes rocked every part of the globe. Then all those fine particles and fragments of asteroid and of the bedrock plummet back down, each one heating up as it does. A literal rain of fire generating a massive pulse of heat that sets every forest on fire. I’ve read about the asteroid, about the size of the impact crater, about some of the effects, but always in dispassionate, disinvolved scientific discussion. Black, however, describes it all in vivid detail that rivals any description of nuclear war or alien death ray. This was truly the mother of all destruction, and the poor triceratops who is our central character in this chapter does not stand a chance.

But just like the best of its fictional kin, the book is not really about the apocalyptic ending, but what happens next. Who survives and why? How do the survivors begin to recreate the world? Black, too, moves beyond the disaster itself, not just one day after, but then a month, a year, ten years, a hundred, a thousand, on to 100,000 years, and finally, dwarfing even the time frame of Walter Miller’s classic A Canticle For Liebowitz, we end 1 million years after.

But here is where science diverges from fiction. In Miller’s classic, as in all novels of the apocalypse, humans will triumph. We rebuild. There is struggle and loss, but in the end, some semblance of the world from before re-emerges, sometimes ready to make the same mistakes again, sometimes avoiding them. In the real world, however, there was no rebuilding. There was no going back. The dinosaurs are gone – destroyed in the first few minutes of the global conflagration, never to return (other than the tiny, feathered ones that are still with us.) The giant pterosaurs will never return to the skies; the mighty mosasuars will never dominate the seas. The tiny reptiles, amphibians, mammals and birds that survived in burrows or under water, will create a new world. The conditions left behind by the impact and debris and three years of darkness will require new attributes and abilities, and this provides the main narrative thread of The Last Days of the Dinosaur, as in each chapter we follow a different creature as it lives out a life in the new world forming around it.

In the end, the asteroid represents a productive apocalypse. It cleared away one world, radically transforming it, clearing the stage for a completely different world to follow.  Without the asteroid, the dinosaurs would continue to dominate the earth, leaving only fringe ecological niches for mammals. Even if and when the dinosaurs died out (say, by the later ice ages), they would have shaped the world for millions of additional years, pushing mammalian evolution into different paths, paths that would not necessarily lead to us.

And so, Black ends with a paradox: she loves dinosaurs, mourns their passing, would love to see them. Yet it is only the fact that they died in such a cataclysmic fashion that allowed humans to evolve and for Black to even exist, mourning the dinosaurs passing.

The true apocalypse destroys. And creates.