'And the light isn't reflected around the world?' said the Senior Wrangler. 'It is at home. It's always very beautiful, the glow that comes up through the waterfall.'
'No,' said Rincewind. 'It just gets dark, unless the moon is up.'
'And there's still just the one sun, isn't there?' said the Senior Wrangler, a man with something on his mind.
'Yes.'
'We didn't add another one?'
'No.'
'So ... er ... what is that light over there?'
As one wizard, they turned towards the opposite horizon.
'Whoops,' said the Dean, as the distant thunder died away and lights streamed high across the sky.
The lizards had heard it too. Ponder looked around. They were lining the walkways, watching the horizon with all the intelligent interest of a thinking creature wondering what the future may hold...
'Let's get back to the High Energy Magic building before the boiling rain, shall we?' said Ridcully. 'This really is too depressing.'
THE DEATH OF DINOSAURS
LlFE TURNS UP EVERYWHERE IT CAN.
Life turns up everywhere it can't.
And just when it seems to have got itself going really comfortably, with a sustainable lifestyle and gradual progress towards higher things, along comes a major catastrophe and sets it back twenty million years. Yet, paradoxically, those same disasters also pave the way to radically new lifeforms ...
It's all rather confusing.
Life is resilient, but any particular species may not be. Life is constantly devising new tricks. The one with eggs is brilliant: provide the developing embryo with its own personal life-support machine. Inside, the environment is tailored to the needs of that species, and what's outside doesn't matter much, because there's a barrier to keep it out.
Life is adaptable. It changes the rules of its own game. As soon as eggs make their appearance, the stage is set for the evolution of egg-eaters ...
Life is diverse. The more players there are, the more ways there are to make a living by taking in each others' washing.
Life is repetitious. When it finds a trick that works, it churns out thousands of variations on the same basic theme. The great biologist John (J.B.S.) Haldane was once asked what question he would like to pose to God, and replied that he'd like to know why He has such an inordinate fondness for beetles.
There are a third of a million beetle species today, far more than in any other plant or animal group. In 1998 Brian Farrell came up with a possible answer to Haldane's query. Beetles appeared about 250 million years ago, but the number of species didn't explode until about 100 million years ago. That happens to be just when flowering plants came into existence. The 'phase space' available for organisms suddenly acquired a new dimension, a new resource became available for exploitation. The beetles were beautifully poised to take advantage by eating the new plants, especially their leaves. It used to be thought that flowering plants and pollinating insects drove each other to wilder and wilder diversity, but that's not true. However, it is true for beetles. Nearly half of today's beetle species are leaf-eaters. It's still an effective tactic.
Sometimes natural disasters don't just eliminate a species or two. The fossil record contains a number of 'mass extinctions' in which a substantial proportion of all life on Earth disappeared. The best-known mass extinction is the death of the dinosaurs, 65 million years ago.
In order not to mislead you, we should point out at once that there is no scientific evidence for the existence of any dinosaur civilization, no matter what events are going on in the Roundworld Project. But... whenever a scientist says 'there is no scientific evidence for', there are three important questions you should ask -especially if it's a government scientist. These are: 'Is there any evidence against?, 'Has anyone looked?', and 'If they did, would they expect to find anything?'
The answers here are 'no,' 'no', and 'no'. Deep Time hides a lot, especially when it's assisted by continental movement, the bulldozing ice sheets, volcanic action and the occasional doomed asteroid. There are few surviving human artefacts more than ten thousand years old, and if we died out today, the only evidence of our civilization that might survive for a million years would be a few dead probes in deep space and various bits of debris on the Moon. Sixty-five million? Not a chance. So although a dinosaurian civilization is pure fantasy, or, rather, pure speculation, we can't rule it out absolutely. As for dinosaurs who were sufficiently advanced to use tools, herd other dinosaurs ... well, Deep Time would wash over them without a ripple.
Dinosaurs are always among the most popular exhibits at museums. They remind us that the world wasn't always like it is now; and they remind us that humans have been on this planet for a very short time, geologically speaking. Basically, dinosaurs are ancient lizards. The ones whose bones we all go to gawp at in museums are rather big lizards, but many were much smaller. The name means 'terrible lizard', and anyone who watched Jurassic Park will understand why.
An Italian fossil collector who watched the Spielberg movie suddenly realized that a perplexing fossil, filed away for years in his basement, might well be a bit of a dinosaur. He then sent it to a nearby university, where it was found not just to be a dinosaur, but a new species. It was a young therapod, small flesh-eating dinosaurs that are the closest relatives of birds. Interestingly, it didn't have any feathers. A story straight out of the movies: narrative imperative at work in our own world ... traceable, as always, to selective reporting. How many fossil hunters owned a bit of dinosaur bone but didn't make the connection after seeing the movie?
In the human mind, dinosaurs resonate with myths about dragons, common to many cultures and many times; and many miles of suggestions have appeared to explain how the dragon-thoughts in our minds have come down to us, over millions of years of evolution, from real dinosaur images and fears in the minds of our ancient ancestors. However, those ancestors must have been very ancient, for those of our ancestors that overlapped the dinosaurs were probably tiny shrewlike creatures that lived in holes and ate insects. After more than a hundred million years of success, the dinosaurs all died out, 65 million years ago, and the evidence is that their demise was sudden. Did proto-shrews have nightmares about dinosaurs, all that time ago? Could such nightmares have survived 65 million years of natural selection? In particular, do shrews today have nightmares about fire-breathing dragons, or is it just us? It seems likely that the dragon myth comes from other, less literal, tendencies of that dark, history-laden organ that we call the human mind.
Dinosaurs exert a timeless fascination, especially for children. Dinosaurs are genuine monsters, they actually existed, and some of them, the ones we all know about, were gigantic. They are also safely dead.
Many small children, even if they are resistant to the standard reading materials in school, can reel off a long list of dinosaur names. 'Velociraptor' was not notable among them before Jurassic Park, but it is now. Those of us who still have an affection for the brontosaur often need to be reminded that for silly reasons science has deemed that henceforth that sinuous swamp-dwelling giant must be renamed the apatosaur. So attuned are we to the dinosaurs that the drama of their sudden disappearance has captured our imaginations more than any other bit of pakeontology. Even our own origins attract less media attention.