They say that a giant meteor struck the earth and wiped out the dinosaurs. Scientists point to a crater in the Yucatan and nod their collective heads in unison. The rest of us don't know any better, so we say wow, a meteor killed the dinosaurs and we have to stop this from happening again, but is this what really happened, is this the whole story? Humm.., maybe that is not what happened after all, or maybe it is only partially true? Yeah I know there are many theories out there, but fairly recent evidence has shown us something else, something that you hardly ever hear mentioned. It is a common sense thing, something that should have been checked a long time ago, but it wasn't. Science is supposed to operate by checking out each possibility and then moving on to the next. Somehow this possibility was not checked out. Well I think that I am being unfair here, the possibility that I am about to tell you about, really couldn't have been checked out too far in the past, because there was no way to verify the possibility of any connection, because the instruments that were at our disposal at the time didn't allow for the measurements that were needed.

Science has long suspected that everything in the Milky Way Galaxy revolves around the galaxy's center. It operates just like our solar system, where the planets revolve around the sun, but in a much grander way. The center of the galaxy is believed to house a black hole that is 2.6 million times the mass of our sun. All this mass is thought to be packed into an area that is smaller than our solar system. It turns out that there is a star, Sagittarius A, that is dead center in the galaxy. I don't know why the so called black hole doesn't seem to effect it, but it is there and was discovered about twenty some odd years ago. Using specialized instruments we were able to measure it's movement around the center, which is so slight that human eyesight would not detect it. We then calculated our movement around the center based on this and we came up with a figure that indicates it takes our planet about sixty two million years to return to the same spot in the galaxy. Why is this so important? It is a very important fact because the great extinctions on earth were said to have occurred every sixty four million years or so. If we allow for an error in either calculation of about two million years, which is quite possible, this would indicate that the extinctions are tied in with the earth being in a certain position in the galaxy.

Could scientists have been wrong all these years about what happened? It certainly does seem that there may be a good chance that this is so, but why is our position in our galaxy so important? There could be many different reasons, but one of them just might tie in with the meteor theory. You see, maybe a meteor did destroy the dinosaurs, but it happened because the earth swings into an area that has way more of them, for some unknown reason. Maybe this isn't even the case, maybe it is that even though we are in the same place, we are at a higher or lower point, which makes us more vulnerable to these things, because we may not be protected as well from them, due to different alignments of other systems and such. So far we have only discussed the meteor theory in conjunction with the positional theory, but what if it is something entirely different. Maybe the earth is more susceptible to things like cosmic rays, when it is in a certain position? If there is this huge black hole in the center of the galaxy, could the force it exerts be uneven? Could it be exerting more force on us when we are in this position? If that is so, could this force disturb our atmosphere or do something to our sun that makes it put out increased radiation? The force I am talking about isn't gravity, but could be some unknown force that we don't understand yet.

For all we know, the hole in the ozone layer may be something that happens when we get to the ninety four million year position. Maybe it will even get worse as time goes by, until it is responsible for ending much of the life on this planet by allowing cosmic rays in. Sure there are signs that meteors have hit the earth, but they may not be the reason that some animals, like the dinosaurs disappeared. The hit may have been coincidental. It is hard to believe, but we live on a world that is always in motion. It is rotating, traveling outward and circling the center of the galaxy at the incredible speed of 486,000 miles per hour. Since it takes somewhere around ninety four million years for our sun to make one orbit of the galaxy, that has to give you some idea of how enormous our galaxy is. We are located at about twenty six thousand light years from the center of our galaxy and are out on an arm. If you want to know how far a light year is in more familiar terms, it is about six trillion miles.

Some researchers have said that the reason that there have been mass extinctions on this planet, is due to the fact that our galaxy has had other galaxies pass through it, in it's continual journey through space. This is not as uncommon as it sounds. There are signs of this happening in many areas. Right now, we are absorbing a dwarf galaxy. The galaxy contains hundreds of thousands of stars and will become part of the Milky Way. It lies in the direction of the constellation Virgo and is estimated to be at a distance of 30,000 light years from Earth, As these stars pass into our galaxy, they create gravitational tides when they get too near other bodies and this could have been what caused prior extinctions on this planet. Some galaxies will even pass through other galaxies without too many collisions. There is a lot of space between stars, relatively speaking, so even though it looks like everything is crashing into each other, this is usually not the case. So what type of motion does our star, the sun make in it's travels, relative to the galactic center? It moves closer and farther away and it also moves up and down. Any of these placements might cause unknown problems for the planet.

The placement theory, as I like to call it, doesn't seem to be very popular with the scientists yet and it may never be. There is just no way of knowing when some other theory will come along that fits the situation even better. There is something to be said for this theory however. Is it just a coincidence that several extinction events occurred at the same time intervals? The odds of this happening are very great. It is hard to believe that this didn't have anything to do with our relative position in the galaxy. The galaxy that we live in is under continuous study and who knows what else we will find out about these events? It is certainly possible that something that we haven't even thought of yet, is the culprit. It might turn out that there is a region of the galaxy that doesn't rotate, but remains static and we have to pass through it. I don't think that this is likely, but nothing can be ruled out at this point. It would be very interesting to find out for sure what killed the dinosaurs, because our own fate may hinge on this information.