Welcome to my Metazoic site! This site discusses the existence of the creatures to come along after humans will be extinct. I first became interested in a world after man when I acquired my first copy of Dougal Dixon's After Man: A Zoology of the Future in 1992. However, I unwittingly created creatures that did not exist from the time I was about 8 years old. But it was after I obtained a copy of that book (now a collector's item) that I decided to take these same creatures I created as a child and make them more realistic in an evolutionary sense. Though it may be hard for a lot of us to grasp, humans will soon become extinct. One of the biggest factors of how this will happen is the current overpopulation rate. Which is why I don't contribute to the population. I created this world with little more than mammals fulfilling all ecological niches with the help of some friends. I even gave the era of the age after man a name, I called it the Metazoic, derived from the words for "After-era" (Meta, meaning after, and zoic meaning era). We are now in the Cenozoic era. To view all the animals I have created since I began this project, you can go to the "Meet the Mammals" section of this site. To discuss your own ideas about what you think will happen in the future world, and share your ideas with others, please feel free to leave a comment.
One more thing, some of you may find this site quite offensive, and you have a right to your own opinion. But please respect my right to have an opinion too. I'm not saying there is no GOD, I believe it was HIM who got the ball rolling. But I believe after that, evolution took over. There is so much more evidence of evolution than there is of creation. Even that going on right under our noses. Other than that, enjoy yourself and visit our many links.
Thursday, January 8, 2009
Giant Planets Form Quick or Not At All
http://dsc.discovery.com/news/2009/01/08/jupiter-planets.html
Jupiter-Sized Planets Grow Up Fast
Irene Klotz, Discovery News
Jan. 8, 2008 -- Compared to small, rocky worlds like Earth, Jupiter-class gas giant planets form quickly or not at all, a new study shows.
The realization stems from studies of a five-million-year-old star cluster in the constellation Canis Major made with NASA's Spitzer infrared space telescope. Scientists discovered that all stars in the cluster that were as least as big as the sun had no accompanying disks of gas and dust from which to make gas giants like Jupiter.
Only a few stars in the cluster that were smaller than the sun still had protoplanetary disks, though several did still have debris remnants that could be used to build smaller rocky bodies like Earth or Mars or icy worlds like Pluto, say researchers with the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Mass.
Extrapolating from the data, scientists conclude that while a planet like Earth took 20 million to 30 million years to evolve, Jupiter was fully grown in a fraction of the time, just two million to three million years.
"We have an understanding of how star formation proceeds, and our own star should not be an exception to that. It is the assumption that our solar system should not be special," said lead researcher Thayne Currie, who presented the team's findings at the American Astronomical Society meeting under way this week in Long Beach, Calif.
The cluster studied by Currie and his colleagues, NGC 2362, is located about 4,500 light-years away from Earth -- too far to be probed with current technologies to determine if any of its stars harbor planets, Currie told Discovery News.
The research builds on earlier findings from a team led by University of Arizona astronomer Ilaria Pascucci that probed 15 sun-like stars, ranging in age from three million to 30 million years old, for gas that could be used to form Jupiter-like planets. They discovered that all the stars, even the very young ones, have less than 10 percent of Jupiter's mass in gas swirling around them, indicating that the giant worlds either had already formed or they were not to be.
Currie's team says the window of opportunity for stars to form Jupiter-class worlds is even smaller, less than five million years.
"Whatever process is responsible for forming Jupiters has to be incredibly efficient," Currie said.
Scientists have two leading theories for how planets like Jupiter form: by building up a solid core which gases then accrete on to or from gases that collapse in on themselves due to gravitational forces.
If the second theory is correct, Jupiter-sized worlds could form in just thousands to tens of thousands of years, said University of Washington astrophysicist Thomas Quinn, who has done computer modeling of planetary formation.
"There's still an ongoing debate about exactly what the time scale would be," he said.
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