With almost every frame of footage, with each image of monster and man-made thing, the filmmaker has brought us a close encounter with a message for our times, spoken from a voice far older than the 60 million years separating humans from dinosaurs. Composer John Williams has far outdone himself with a powerful, haunting film score that echoes with profound melodic questions.

The very fact that record millions of people are flocking daily to see this cinematic spectacular serves as another symbolic reference point. What's all this about dinosaurs? Our culture has been steadily developing a consuming passion for dinosaur-related imagery and entertainment for years, and the trend is increasing, even moreso now with the whole Jurassic Park Thing, the candy and toys and McDonalds tie-ins and on and on.

We've got this passion for dinosaurs. Well before Spielberg's film, pre-schoolers have been generating megabuck sales of Barney merchandise ever since that gentle purple prehistoric dragon began singing songs of friendship and affirmation on the PBS network. Currently, the largest automatronic exhibition of dinosaurs in the world has been assembled at the New York State Museum in Albany, including thirty-foot-tall moving replicas. It will be on display throughout the rest of the year. PBS television presented another popular offering called Dinosaur!, an excellent documentary narrated by Christopher Reeves (available at the Tompkins County Library).

Now, with Spielberg's film, here's this positive mania for dinosaurs crystallized in the ultra-merchandising grandeur of the whole Jurassic Park Thing. You don't even have to have seen the movie to be bombarded by dinosaur hype.

What's up anyway? Why are we so obsessed with these creatures that died over 60 million years ago? Maybe we're trying to tell ourselves something, to remind ourselves, with an ancient voice, that we may be in Big Trouble in terms of our longevity. And maybe we have a lesson to be learned here, a call from across the vast canyon of time, from what appears to be among the most successful life forms ever to have existed on the planet. The most radical of recent findings suggests that a hominid-like critter, the elusive Missing Link, may have been here around two million years ago. Dinosuars roamed the Earth for millions of centuries longer than that. We are, at best guess, infants compared to the Great Lizards.

A recent front page article in The New York Times Magazine (5/30/93) poses the notion that we're flirting with the extinction of our species. Perhaps all these dinosuars are a way to remind ourselves that we have a very real possibility of disappearing from the scene.

In the 1950s, dozens of bug-eyed giant monster movies were churned out, often predicated on a variation about some scientific experiment gone awry. For instance, in Them!, radioactivity somehow mutated tiny ants into car stomping, people chomping menaces. Jurassic Park, as a cautionary tale, modernizes that same premise with a chilling measure of scientific understanding unknown in the 1950s... specifically genetic manipulation, getting right down into the molecular structure of life and...and what?

Edgar Cayce suggested that the people would learn how to create monsters. Perhaps he was speaking as a poet as well as prophet. Since the mid-1980s, Dr. Robert Strecker, a Los Angeles physician and diagnostic pathologist, has been asserting that the current proliferation of AIDS-related HIV's was the direct result of tinkering in various biological laboratories by high minded scientists hell-bent on seeing if they could come up with something. They came up with it all right. And Strecker is not alone in his view of things. A former University of Rochester medical researcher concurs with and amplifies Strecker's scenario.

Those interested in accessing more information on the real AIDS story can punch up the InterNet to locate plenty of hard, scientific documentation, along with growing apocrypha, strongly suggesting that AIDS 1) Most definitely did not come from an African Monkey. 2) Was somewhat systematically tested, particularly in the target groups that first began showing symptoms. The thumbnail story is that some forms of the virus were introduced through several supposed "vaccination" programs. Whether by boo-boo or design, the HIV got out of the test tubes and into human beings.

In recent years, some researchers have noted a growing number of destructive viruses that have been able to develop resistances to antibiotics and other known medical cures. TIME magazine devoted an expanded Science article to the problem. The documentation is there for those who care to do a little digging, and it doesn't take much. Check out the books of Dr. Lyall Watson. The evidence is abundant. Viruses are breaching the human immune system. Watson likens it to a war being fought. The assault is on the bio-molecular level.

Some argue strenuously that AIDS is a "natural" epidemic...whatever that means. Even a cursory glance at the history of the Black Plague of the 1400s points to the filth of Europe's ports as a major vector, which bred the rats which were infected by the fleas carrying the unusually destructive parasite.

Since the 1400s, we have spewed untold poisons into the air and into our water system. We're talking in the BILLIONS, possibly TRILLIONS, of tons of toxic substances never meant to be in the Natural World. The ocean, and the living critters populating it have absolutely no defense against the tons of acid that recently leaked from a broken vessel, just as the humans of Mexico City have no defenses against the deadly cloud of particulants that hovers over the city like a predatory bird. Humans Beings, as in thousands of residents of Bhopal, India, have no way to assimilate a bath in methyl isocyanate. We just burn and bleed and choke and die.

How does our DNA deal with the zillions of radioactive waves released into our atmosphere over the past fifty years? Or with the widespread ingestion of DDT? Not to mention countless other toxic chemical combinations.

Through science, business, agriculture, and weapons production, Humanity has been mucking around on a bio-molecular levelÑfor that matter on a sub-atomic level as wellÑfor a good many years. Do we have any clue as to what the hell we're really doing and what the consequences really are?

The New York Times Magazine piece notes that "In the midst of uncertainty, opinions on the human prospect have tended to fall into two schools. The first...holds that since humankind is transcendent in intelligence and spirit, so must our species have been released from the iron laws of ecology that bind all other species. No matter how serious the problem, human beings, by ingenuity, force and will and...divine dispensation, will find a solution.

"The opposing idea...sees humanity as a biological species tightly dependent on the natural world. [The Human spirit is] not enough to free us from the constraints of the natural environment in which our human ancestors evolved."

In the 1950s, author Immanuel Velikovsy shook up the white-coated scientists when he suggested that large objects from outer space had passed by and smashed into the earth (possibly within the historic memory of humans). Since the publication of "World's in Collision" and "Earth in Upheaval" many of what the learned scientists referred to then as "Velikovsy's crackpot science" has become the prevailing academic thought.

For instance, a relatively new theory gaining currency among fossil finders is that the majority of dinosuars did not die out in a long slow drama, but suddenly, after a large celestial object smashed into the earth, dramatically upsetting the entire ecosystem. After 165 million years of ascendancy, they died in one great shaking of the ground and darkening of the sun. Those who choose to think that humanity's ingenuity can solve all problems ought to try that one on for size.

True, there's nothing we can do if a comet decides to plow into West Virginia. But we don't need a big chunk of rock to hit us, we've been stirring up quite a broth of disasters of our own, some of them on a planetary level. Urban generated ashfall has been recorded in annual layers of ice in the most remote arctic wastelands. We put that ash there, with our cars and our coal-fired electricity and our consumer habits. Humans have been fouling the ports of the earth for a long time. We've let many monsters loose. In Jurassic Park, our worst carnivorous nightmares are realized, with jaws far more powerful than the Great White Shark's. Even as Spielberg seems to indicate that a rescue might be possible, the message is as plain as the flashing claws and jagged teeth of a Velociraptor, and just as serious. If we choose to keep juggling the building blocks of Nature, we will surely be devoured by the monsters we've created.