1 Chapter 1: What is Sociology? – The Scientific Study of the Human-Shaped Struc
1 Chapter 1: What is Sociology? – The Scientific Study of the Human-Shaped Structure
An Explosive Introduction
The fact that you are reading this is a miracle. I mean this in part compared to all the other things you could and would rather be doing, but mainly because you even exist. Sixty-six million years ago, an event would change the entire life course on Earth. It would spur you to end up where you are right now eventually: reading this sentence. To figure out why we need to travel back in time to a world ruled not by humans but by dinosaurs.
Way out on our solar system’s outer edge, past the planets, is something called the Oort cloud. Here it is believed to be where many frozen balls of dust, rock, and ice known as comets tend to hang out. Comets are leftovers from the solar system’s formation (which was billions of years ago). Occasionally, one of them breaks free. The gravitational force of our Sun pulls it into the inner solar system – where we are on Earth. Sometimes they crash into the Sun and explode. Others go into a big orbit around our solar system. You have probably heard of one of them, Halley’s Comet, which is due back to be seen by the naked eye from Earth in 2061 (every 75ish years). However, another option is one that happened sixty-six million years ago. A massive comet got bumped loose from its orbit by Jupiter’s gravitational field (Siraj & Loeb, 2021). The comet changed its trajectory, zipping through our inner solar system, increasing speed as it zoomed past the planets towards the Sun. As it neared the Sun, the forces on this comet were so strong that an at least 16-kilometer (10 miles) wide piece broke off. The problem is that this broken piece was now heading straight for Earth.
Piercing through the Earth’s atmosphere, this flaming chunk of history slammed into modern-day Mexico at a speed of 100,000 kilometers (62,000 miles) per hour. It released millions of times more explosive power and energy than if we detonated every single bomb ever made! The impact seared through the Earth’s surface in seconds, carving a hole 19 kilometers (12 miles) deep and leaving a crater 150 kilometers (93 miles) wide. The comet piece evaporated as it cut through the Earth, tossing the existing rocks and dirt in its way up into the air, creating molten hot and poisonous dust clouds. Within minutes of impact, the effects rippled across the world in the form of earthquakes, tsunamis, volcanic eruptions, and forest fires that started through autoignition. The surrounding air is so hot, called flashover, that anything flammable will catch fire spontaneously without directly touching flames! Tsunami waves triggered by the powerful earthquakes blasted water from the Gulf of Mexico to near the Canadian border, flooding the entire United States (DePalma et al., 2019). Most life in Central, South, and North America would be gone within hours.
The life that did not get obliterated from the surface instantly was quickly killed off by the intense gr