Weird Earth. Donald R. Prothero
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weird earth
weird earth
DEBUNKING STRANGE IDEAS ABOUT OUR PLANET
DONALD R. PROTHERO
This book is a publication of
Red Lightning Books
1320 East 10th Street
Bloomington, Indiana 47405 USA
© 2020 by Donald R. Prothero
All rights reserved
No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48–1992.
Manufactured in the United States of America
First printing 2020
ISBN 978-1-68435-061-2 (hdbk.)
ISBN 978-1-68435-136-7 (web PDF)
This book is dedicated to the great geologists who trained me and inspired me:
Harry Cook
Mike Woodburne
Mike Murphy
Lewis Cohen
Peter Sadler
Paul Robinson
Wally Broecker
Neil Opdyke
Dennis Kent
Bill Ryan
Walter Pitman
Rich Schweickert
Larry DeMott
Dewey Moore
Bob Dott
CONTENTS
1 Science and Critical Thinking
6 Did We Really Land on the Moon?
12 Is the Earth Only Six Thousand Years Old?
18 Mysterious Earth: Why People Want to Believe Weird Things
FOREWORD: ROMANCING THE STONE
The book you hold in your hands by my friend and colleague Donald Prothero is one of the most captivating you will ever read. Once you start in, you won’t be able to put it down as you will be constantly amazed by what strange ideas people have about our planet. I’ve been studying weird beliefs for over a quarter century, and in reading this book I was still stunned by what some members of my species think about earth, including that it is at the center of the universe, that it is only six thousand years old, that all those dinosaur fossils are faked, that it is a giant magnet, that it is flat, that it is hollow, that it is constantly expanding, that we never visited its moon, that there are mysterious ley lines around it directing the planet’s energies, and that there was once an ancient advanced civilization on it called Atlantis.
On this last claim, on May 16, 2017, I spent nearly four hours on Joe Rogan’s wildly popular podcast debating an alternative archaeologist named Graham Hancock, who believes that long before ancient Mesopotamia, Babylonia, and Egypt there existed an even more glorious civilization that was so thoroughly wiped out by a comet strike around twelve thousand years ago that nearly all evidence of its existence vanished, leaving only the faintest of traces that he thinks include a cryptic warning that such a celestial catastrophe could happen to us.
Hancock has put forth variations on this general theme in numerous well-written and best-selling books, including Fingerprints of the Gods: The Evidence of Earth’s Lost Civilization (1995), The Message of the Sphinx: A Quest for the Hidden Legacy of Mankind (1997), Underworld: The Mysterious Origins of Civilization (2002), Magicians of the Gods (2015), and most recently America Before: The Key to Earth’s Lost Civilization (2019). I listened to the audio editions of Magicians of the Gods and America Before, both read by the author, whose British accent and breathless revelatory storytelling style is, I confess, compelling. But is it true? I’m skeptical. As I explained in my June 2017 column in Scientific American: “First, no matter how devastating an extraterrestrial impact might be, are we to believe that after centuries of flourishing every last tool, potshard, article of clothing, and, presumably from an advanced civilization, writing, metallurgy, and other technologies—not to mention their trash—was erased? Inconceivable.”1