We’ve been taught that dinosaurs went extinct 66 billion years ago when a mega-meteor plummeted into the Yucatan Peninsula. But Dr. Joe Hanson, host of It’s Okay to be Smart, takes exception. “Thanks to science, we know that our planet is home to 10,000 or so species of living dinosaurs,” he says. “We call them birds.” In the following video clip, Hanson explains birds’ place on the tree of life.
The doom and gloomers gave the Oil Age an early epitaph in the early 2000s, claiming fossil fuels had run their course and there was no more oil to be pumped on the planet. Fast forward 15 years and there’s oil everywhere. The world pumps 93 million barrels of oil a day and there’s still more than a trillion barrels waiting to be extracted in the Earth’s crust. So will we ever run out of oil? Biologist and science writer Joe Hanson explains in this edition of It’s Okay To Be Smart
“In the history of life on Earth, we know of five different mass extinctions when a majority of life on Earth at the time disappeared in the blink of a geologic eye,” says biologist and science writer Joe Hanson. The most cited is the Cretaceous-Paleogene Extinction 66 million years ago that wiped out the dinosaurs. But the most deadly was the mother of all extinctions called the End Permian, 250 million years ago, which obliterated 96 percent of Earth’s species. Hanson says we are now in the midst of the sixth mass extinction and we are the perpetrators. Hanson explains why in this edition of It’s OK To Be Smart.
More than 2 billion children anxiously await the arrival of Santa Claus tonight, but is Jolly Old St. Nick for real? In this edition of It’s Okay to be Smart, Joe Hanson employs a little scientific analysis, including quantum physics, to tackle the age-old question.
