Gas: Passed and Past

From an email that's circulating about the 'web, I received the following apparent 'factoid' on human biological functions:

If you farted consistently for 6 years and 9 months, enough gas is produced to create the energy of an atomic bomb.


Whoa, dude.  I had absolutely no idea.

All those SBDs in school, church, around the camp fire, along with the not-so-silent-but-just-as-deadlies, wasted and laughed or winced at depending on where they were fired...were that potent collectively?

That means, mathematically and flatulenchantly, that I have created the power of 8 nuclear devices in my lifetime.  And am well on my way to a 9th.

And me, not a nuclear physicist.  Merely a human, with a love of foods that taste great going in, but gaining in increasing lethality, once they begin marinating in and marauding around the lower digestive tract.

I have no intention of moderating my diet, revelation aside. 

But despite my obvious 'power', and Einstein's theory of relative bagels, a far more potent source for clearing glades and emptying elevators once ruled the Earth as 'Master and Flatulator'.

From an FP* story out of the capital of national methane, WASHINGTON, DC —  A new study using stimulus money in return for votes, suggests that dinosaurs were blowing apart forests and pranking each other with their flatulence and burps 200 million years ago.

The research published Monday in the National Flatugraphic suggests that large dinosaurs made a significant contribution to whoopie cushions and sonic 'boom's back then. Study author David 'Razzie' Raspberry of Liverpool Thomas Crapper University in England estimated that about 570 million tons of methane came from dinosaurs.  Just how he came to those measurements is based on his comparative studies to the Democrapic National Committee's main HQ in DC.  He even claims to have measured methane production from Congress to be running at an annual rate of nearly 100 tons a year of methane.

The study looks at the biggest — and presumably gassiest — dinosaurs, called saurophfffts. These were the long-necked plant eaters that munched on the top of trees, so they could ignore the chanting tree huggers chained to the bottom of them. They were large animals that had food fermenting in their guts for long periods of time because of their giant size, said University of Methaneland paleontologist Thomas Holtziznose, who wasn't part of the study, and expressed some degree of satisfaction in not being so.

Raspberry said dinosaur gas was just one factor at a time when the world was quite tropical, and smelled much like the campfire scene in Blazing Saddles.

Raspberry said some in the media and blogosphere have misinterpreted his study to claim that AlGore predicted this situation in his book, An Inconvenient Prank, and dismissed Gore's claims as being on par with his crack-sniffing claim of having "invented the man-bear-pig" featured on South Park.

What caused the ancient pre-human world to be so hot — just the way the dinosaurs made it — was a variety of factors. What dinosaurs ate what plants, in what quantities, and how many dinosaurs went into politics, rather than simply wandering, eating, burping and farting.

NASA climate scientist Gassin Schmidt quickly ran some calculations based on Raspberry's figures. Without dinosaur methane, the Moon would have been 100,000 miles closer to Earth.

It also suggests the study blames dinosaur flatulence for their extinction, Raspberry said. He noted that the saurophffts started showing up — and getting gassy — around 200 million years ago and didn't die off until the creation of elevators, wherein dinosaur farts were catacylsmically lethal.

University of Victoria primate scientist Bobo Weaver said: "Frankly, methane emissions from dinosaur burps is probably not the No. 1 thing we should be concerned about in modern society.  We should be concerned with someone trying to artificially replicate dinosaur farts."
*  Flatulated Press

So there you have it:  you can create enough gas to match the energy of an atomic detonation.  And dinosuars could do it even faster.  So before some scientist decides to try the Jurassic Park DNA experiment, think not about how history might be made; think more about what a dinofart will do in a shopping mall.