Here Be Dragons, dark matter, and some good books · 11:03pm Nov 12th, 2023
In anticipation of the arrival of dragons to G5 Equestria, I decided to do some background reading on these big reptiles.
Consulting the random references on my bookshelf, beginning with Helen Keen’s hugely entertaining The Science of Games of Thrones. The dragons of G5 Equestria are probably a different species to those in Game of Thrones, but that hardly matters as Keen’s book focusses more on interesting science than GoT canon. One thing they do have in common is that they arrive in the universe in the form on an egg, of unclear parentage.
Keen gives us some interesting facts about Komodo dragon parenting and personal relationships. The Komodo dragons of our world, living on a remote Indonesian island, don’t seem to go along with the Magic of Friendship thing. Keen says, “when an opportunity for socialising with the other sex comes up - say, while gathered around the messily slaughtered carcasses of their prey Komodo courtship can occur, It just isn't going to make for a cute viral You Tube hit anytime soon.”
Like all dragons, they hatch from eggs. Then quickly learn to climb up trees to avoid being eaten by adult dragons. Mark Carwardine explains in Last Chance to See (written with Douglas Adams), “Most animals survive because the adults have acquired an instinct not to eat their babies. The dragons survive because the baby dragons have acquired an instinct to climb trees.”
I suspect things are going to work out differently on the Isle of Scaly.
Another curious story Keen tells is a possible theory for how the myth of fire-breathing dragons developed in Wales. The Welsh are very proud of their dragons (they put a big red one on their flag). Wales is also a land with a long tradition of mining. For centuries, miners have been aware of the danger of natural gas pockets in underground tunnels. At least any miner not aware of the danger, who walked down such a tunnel with an unshielded torch, would have ended their days in a big underground fireball, and created a legend of fire-breathing dragons sleeping on underground hordes of treasure. Cute story.
Moving on to another science of… book. Terry Pratchett, Ian Stewart and Jack Cohen’s The Science of Discworld has plenty of say about dinosaurs. And making a determined effort to link these big lizards to dragons:
“In the human mind, dinosaurs resonate with myths about dragons, common to many cultures and many times; and many miles of suggestions have appeared to explain how the dragon-thoughts in our minds have come down to us, over millions of years of evolution, from real dinosaur images and fears in the minds of our ancient ancestors. However, those ancestors must have been very ancient, for those of our ancestors that overlapped the dinosaurs were probably tiny shrew like creatures that lived in holes and ate insects. After more than a hundred million years of success, the dinosaurs all died out, 65 million years ago and the evidence is that their demise was sudden. Did proto-shrews have nightmares about dinosaurs, all that time ago? Could such nightmares have survived 65 million years of natural selection? In particular, do shrews today have nightmares about fire-breathing dragons – or is it just us? It seems likely that the dragon myth comes from other, less literal tendencies of that dark, history-laden organ that we call the human mind.”
This brings me to the last book I’ll mention: Dark Matter and the Dinosaurs by Lisa Randall. Professor Randal gets top marks for coming up with a cool title to appeal to readers (and publishers).
Although the book is not an easily readable bit of pop science like the others, but 400 pages of technical detail on astrophysics.
The connection in the title is a plausible, but unproven, idea. If the dark matter in our galaxy is not a uniform distribution, but comes in clumps, then maybe once every galactic orbital period (that is 230 million years), our solar system passes through a clumpy patch of dark matter. We won’t see it of course, it its gravitational field could, perhaps, shake up the Oort and send a lot of comets into the inner solar system. If one were to hit our planet, then we could have a mass extinction event.
It’s a nice theory, although as we still don’t know enough about dark matter to know whether to categorise this as science or fan fiction. We can speculate what might have happened had the dinosaurs had invested more in fundamental science and the technology to detect dark matter.
Managed to watch Winter Wishday recently. Has it been pointed out anywhere that when they reach Grandma Figgies place, on panning accross the photos on the wall inside, theres one on the left side of a Young Hitch wearing a Purple and Green Dragon costume thats very close in appearence to Spike?
the thing abut the Komodo Dragons makes me think of certain niche AUs here that have a behaviour that Dragons are Delicious. This is proposed as a mechanism that a widespread species that is extemely long lived and has a clutch a time regularly ends up at best keeping a stable population, especially given how hard they are to kill off. Various magics, energetics, localisation requirements in minerology, symbiotic paracitology or even nuclii decay chains constrain and control reproduction locations and rates of sucess etc?
Proposals for silicones and silicate based lifefoms have some consideration, but its peculiar that the highest melting point compound and element, are Carbon based, and include super strength, super, semi and extremely good conductors and insulators amongst many.
I blame the CGI rendering software limitations for making the dragons have pony faces, as even the Sphinx that has a good chance of still being around ould look different due to being feline, but I suspect would end up ponyfaced as well?
I also wonder just on the magic, physical flight performance of Dragons, if they fly like Pegasi, Griffins, Bees, Concorde, or just simply glidable with assistance when they could only plummet during time of no magic, and what that did to their evolution if they kept trying to reclaim their flight the same way as Bagon to Shellgone to Salamence does in Pokemon? Keeps throwing itself at the ground until evolution decides to give up and give it wings?
Would be intresting if Dark Matter gives rise to Dark energy effects through whatever means,a nd those forces and fields end up being what we call magical effects, the simplest being complex or negative gravity effects stabilising macroscopic wormholes etc?
How can Dragons fly? because their dense dark matter bones interact with the field effects from the dense dark matter planet core causing a dark energy repulsion effect, neutralising most of teh gravitational mass, depending?
Did I mention my theory about the dragon of Rhodes when we met up in Oxford? I just watched a YouTube vid of a Nile crocodile killing a wildebeest, and that monster certainly qualifies! Quite a number of medieval legends about dragons don't give them wings, and stories of crocs wending their way along the trade routes from Africa to Europe probably had an influence.
I don't know enough about current dark matter theories to comment on that part of the post, but I hope it doesn't turn out to be as mythical as (most) dragons!
5754774
I had forgotten, but I reminder that now. Yes, a very plausible theory. It's easy to imagine that occasionally a croc could make it across the Mediterranean, and make quite an impact on the local culture wherever they washed up. Did you manage to track down some good pictures of the dragon of Rhodes?
5754795
Unfortunately, no. We found microfilm of du Theveneau's journal in the Bibliothèque Nationale, but not the part that covered his time in Rhodes. The librarians suggested checking with the Société de Géographie, which might have some of his papers, but we ran out of time. It's an outside chance that he might have sketched the dragon's head in his notes, anyway, but we will check next time we're in Paris. They also suggested the Vatican Library. Since de Gozon was later made a saint, there ought to be notes of the proceedings, at least, and possibly evidentiary support materials. Tough place to get into, though.