The Malaysian Insider

JAN 19 - I used to have little knowledge of, and even less interest in, politics. Politicians from all sides came in only one colour, as far as I was concerned, and that was a shade of “putrid pond scum”.

Blissfully apathetic, even scornful, I remained until March 08. Wow, that sure woke me up, even though I was far away in Europe on that fateful date. The SMS messages reached Venice faster than the tsunami (not the political analogy, the real Dec 26 ’04 one) raced across the Indian Ocean.

Now that I’m awake, politically speaking, all these post-KT “wake up” calls are beginning to sound annoyingly like that alarm clock that refuses to go into snooze mode.

Unable to go back to my sweet dreams, I checked with google to see what KT heralded, other than Umno/BN’s need to stir.

The omens are bad, extremely bad. Much worse than bad. Think of the worst thing that can happen, and it’s worse than that. “Catastrophic” does not even come close to being an adequate description.

Kuala Terengganu, it seems, was not the first KT event of significance. The last time a KT thing happened, it was not just the political landscape that changed, it was everything that changed. It was the end of the world, almost. It was wholesale extinction, planet-wide.

Yup, the dinosaurs were wiped out, along with most advanced animal and plant life on earth, all because of an alleged collision between our home orb and an alleged asteroid.

The prehistoric KT was derived from Cretaceous-Tertiary, in the way that scientists – like politicians – love to name things clearly.

The acronym itself came from the so-called K–T boundary, a thin band of sedimentary rock found in various parts of the world.

Above the layer is the beginning of the Tertiary period, which led to the world as we know it today.

Below the layer, and only below – in the Cretaceous and older rocks – paleontologists find fossils of dinosaurs. Above the layer, no dinosaurs.

In their days, creatures like the famous Tyrannosaurus Rex knew no fear. Those huge all-powerful, lumbering monsters grabbed and consumed whatever they liked. They were, after all, absolute masters of all they trampled before them. Sounds like any party you know?

I don’t know if there was ever a lizard-like as-yet-undiscovered creature called Umnosaurus that once looked up into the Jurassic sky and saw a comet.

Even if there was and it did, would the walnut-sized brain that dinosaurs of its ilk possessed have enough processing power to comprehend the doom it portended? My guess is no.

To cut short a long – 70 million years long, plus or minus – story, the powerful but dim-witted uber-lizard, which had ruled their domain for so long, perished. Just like that.

To be fair to them, even the best and biggest brains ever would probably not have made an iota of difference to their fate. You can’t negotiate with a heavenly object, nor can you bribe your way out of a speeding offence when velocities of 70,000km an hour, or something crazy fast like that, are involved.

And you thought a big tsunami was the most powerful force bearing down on the unsuspecting? Many tsunamis of an unimaginable size were just one of the sideshows of the original KT event.

And so, I'd respectfully differ with all the analysts who study KT and conclude it is a wake-up call. With a wake-up call, you can ... well, wake up.

This KT event may well be recorded by historians of the future as Umnogeddon.

But it's not the end of the world, except for dinosaurs. Life, as Ian Malcolm (Jeff Goldblum) kept insisting in Jurassic Park, always finds a way. Eons pass and eventually nimble mammals, and ultimately, humans like us, inherit the earth.

* Paul Si is glad that the Geology 101 lessons of some 30 years ago, at which the lecturer was fond of punctuating his points with shouts of “Wake up!”, are finally of some use.

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