I will reply immediately, to avoid all of you from thinking that I am a quack for tagging both dinosaurs and gravity. Simply put I work around giant dinosaur fossils everyday, and I began to wonder how they could have such long thin tails, how the could lift their own weight, or even lift up their long necks. I stumbled down a rabbit hole of numbers and calculations involving NASA estimates of average meteor impacts per day, which is about 1000 tons, and extrapolated this out over sixty five million years.
I also estimated the mass of the Chicxulub crater asteroid, and added these two very large numbers together to see how much weight the Earth had gained from extraterrestial bodies. The result was a disappointing 26 trillion tons; about 7 or 8 orders of magnitude less the the current mass of planet earth. This amount of mass gained would be absolutely negligible.
Further more I found a study that stated almost exactly my yearly estimate of the Earth gaining 40,000 tons per year from space debris, but sight as much as 50,000 tons of helium and hydrogen escape of gravity each year; hence the Earth is losing weight, suggesting that if anything there may have been slightly more gravity 65 million years ago.
It was an interesting thought experiment, but ultimately fruitless. Still I cannot imagine how an animal this large even moved around. There are physical limits to size and strength that pertain to the smallest shrew to the largest elephant.
If anyone has any ideas, I would love to hear them. Please, facts and figures, science and math, no quack theories.
Thanks.
