Film-maker Emily L. Collins has snatched a tale from Howard Bloom’s new book The Case of the Sexual Cosmos: Everything You Know About Nature Is Wrong and has run with it. Collins has made a two-minute film telling Bloom’s tale of the loony dinosaurs who flew, a part of his explanation of how nature commands us to take to the skies, to go up, to defy gravity, and to fly.
Says The Case of the Sexual Cosmos, The Tale of the Loony Dinosaurs Who Flew is one of nature’s seven great space programs. Every one of those space programs seemed audacious, impossible, and radically unwise. But every one of them paid off big-time.
For example, the first bacteria that took to the land 2.75 billion years ago were doing the impossible. They were daring to leave their cozy home in the sea, the sea that had given them birth, and to invade a territory that was utter poison to them. It was a hostile surface of barren stone lashed by bacteria-killers, ultraviolet rays. And it wasn’t really worthwhile. It was a mere 30% of earth’s surface.
But today that bacterial space program has taken off massively. There is now 80 times more biomass—living and formerly living matter—on land than there is in the sea. As Bloom puts it, “Nature loves those who oppose her most.” Nature rewards space programs.
To see how a space program 150 million years ago paid off for dinosaurs, see Emily L. Collins and Howard Bloom’s Are You Ready to Fly, a Message for Humanity, at