Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. on Monday removed every member of a scientific committee that advises the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on how to use vaccines and pledged to replace them with his own picks.
The 17-member Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices had been in a state of flux since Kennedy took over. Its first meeting this year had been delayed when the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services abruptly postponed its February meeting.
Example: It took a billion years to evolve the T Rex, and every single one of them was dead within 5 minutes of the meteor hitting.
Eh, 5 minutes is probably an exaggeration. Some (non avian, some avians made it to now 😉) dinosaur species may have made it into the very very very early Paleocene. T. rex probably did go extinct fast - obligate carnivore, less food, hot blooded, going to starve to death quickly. But it’s not as if the impact instantly killed everything. They might have made it a generation before they starved out.
I don’t know about that. The video simulations that I’ve seen of the big meteor strike all show the entire surface of the planet basically going molten within minutes. Those that survived were generally in the oceans or underground deep enough.
Whichever it is, the point remains - millions of years to evolve, gone in a cosmic flash
Avian dinosaurs (birds) and mammals survived on the surface. The entire surface of the earth did not turn molten, and there were many species that survived that were not “in the oceans or underground deep enough.”
It’s not that all animals were incinerated in the impact (although some certainly were) - it’s that it triggered volcanism, changes in ocean acidity, gas concentration in the atmosphere and other things that put pressures on most animals food sources.
Certainly a “cosmic flash” time wise, but it’s not the apocalyptic movie scene like at the end of V or beginning of Titan AE etc.
Valid.
Its like how we are in a mass extinction event right now.
Extinction is usually a long and drawn out process. There can be delayed responses to changes in the natural environment that mean that the species is essentially bound to be extinct even thousands of years before it actually goes extinct. Steller’s sea cow is an interesting example. Humans certainly dealt the killing blow, but the species would have been doomed anyway.
This is what is very concerning in our current mass extinction. Ocean acidification is going to wipe out a lot of species. If you make the environment hostile to phytoplankton, you are reducing calories available in the ocean. Certain more harmful algae species might overproliferate in response to the new space to live in. Phytoplankton and different species of sea grass are huge oxygen producers - decreased oxygen production could possibly have long term effects on us.
Ecology is ridiculously complicated, and tugging on one thread in the web of life can cause an entire ecosystem to collapse through a delayed response. Things are rarely instant.
Maximum entropy. Trends towards “heat death”