Posted on 07/13/2010 2:25:11 PM PDT by sodpoodle
The last extinction event, 11 million years ago, saw 10 per cent of the Earth’s inhabitants wiped out. This means there is around 16million years until the next event takes place, although the graph shows that it occasionally the event takes place up to 10 million years early. Asteroids crashing into the Earth are commonly believed to be one of the main reasons behind mass extinctions like that suffered by the dinosaurs - the Cretaceous-Tertiary (KT) extinction.
The extinction wiped out more than half of all species on the planet clearing the way for mammals to become the dominant species on Earth.
The extinction was caused by a massive asteroid slamming into Earth at Chicxulub in Mexico.
The asteroid, which was around 15 kilometres wide, is believed to have hit Earth with a force one billion times more powerful than the atomic bomb at Hiroshima.
Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1294372/Life-Earth-wiped-27-million-years.html#ixzz0tbF3yhKW
(Excerpt) Read more at dailymail.co.uk ...
cue Mass Effect ending...
I am soooooo not paying off my Visa now.
A ping.
The science teacher just told her class that the sun will burn out in five billion years and that will be the end of Earth and all the planets. A kid in the back is jumping up and down with his hand raised so the teacher calls on him. He says “how many years?” Teacher: I said five BILLION. The kid wipes his forehead and says, “on, thank God, I thought you said five million!!”
lol
As children we were told the earth would last for eternity. Somehow that was comforting - in spite of the fact that we were also told we would all die sooner or later;)
Faith is a funny thing.
Not to worry. 16 million years from now, the benefits of Obama Care, as opposed to the costs, will have kicked in and we all will be saved.
whew.. what a relief.
I guess I can remodel the bunker with confidence and get some good use out of it after 2012 ,, maybe. :-)
 |
||
| · join · view topics · view or post blog · bookmark · post new topic · subscribe · | ||
| Google news searches: exoplanet · exosolar · extrasolar · | ||
[1999 -- The letter of rejection from Nature for the following article is dated August 28, 1968. At the time most earth scientists would not even accept the fact that meteorites regularly impacted the earth. For example, Barringer Crater in Arizona was still thought by many to be of volcanic origin, as well as the craters on the moon. Bob Dietz had just published his work on shatter cones but I wouldn't say that had been generally accepted. There was not even general agreement on sea floor spreading and plate tectonics outside the radical few at Scripps, Woods Hole, and related institutions.]Possible Formation of the Guatemala BasinThe earth must be as frequently cratered per unit area as the moon. By a relative cross section argument, more than 13 times the number of craters the size of the maria on the moon exist, or existed, on the earth. Whether such events occur with sufficient frequency in recent geologic time to provide tangible evidence today of such cratering is uncertain. From the arguments set forth, and the continuing discovery of meteorite craters on the continents (Short, 1966, Baldwin, 1963, Dietz, 1961, and Prouty, 1952) it seems likely that the importance of the effect of extraterrestrial bodies impacting the earth has been, at least, underestimated (the Alverez's hypothesis concerning the end of the dinosaurs by such a mechanism was more than a decade in the future). Certainly there is as much evidence at present to support our hypothesis for the formation of the Guatemala Basin as other hypotheses advanced to explain the low heat flow found in this basin.
by the Impact of an Extraterrestrial Body
by Charles E. Corry and Miller L. Bell
With the tests for shock processes advanced by Short (1966), our hypothesis should be capable of field verification or rejection.
|
|
|||
Gods |
Thanks ConservativeMind! The Nemesis hypothesis reconsidered, from the look of it. :') The Ries Basin in Germany is an impact crater from about 15 million years ago. IMHO the fact is, there's no periodicity to these events, they happen when they happen, a possibility which creates a lot of anxiety among those suckled on the teats of uniformitarianism. Yes, I *did* just want to use SOTT in a sentence for the first time in my life. |
||
|
· Discover · Bronze Age Forum · Science Daily · Science News · Eurekalert · PhysOrg · · Nat Geographic · Texas AM Anthro News · Yahoo Anthro & Archaeo · Google · · Archaeology · The Archaeology Channel · Excerpt, or Link only? · cgk's list of ping lists · · History topic · history keyword · archaeology keyword · paleontology keyword · · Science topic · science keyword · Books/Literature topic · pages keyword · · |
|||
Nemesis: Does the Sun Have a 'Companion'?Richard A. Muller... a physicist at University of California at Berkeley... [has] ideas... generally rooted in solid science and genius extrapolation... But Muller's biggest idea is a real Nemesis. Or so he claims. Like a thorn in the side of mainstream researchers, Muller's Nemesis theory -- that our Sun has a companion star responsible for recurring episodes of wholesale death and destruction here on Earth -- seems to reemerge periodically like microbes after a mass extinction. It's a theory that has many detractors. And it's a theory that has been beaten down and left for dead in the minds of most scientists... Muller's idea for Nemesis came to him 1983. Luis Alvarez, then an emeritus professor of physics at the University of California at Berkeley, and his son Walter had recently put forth the theory that a giant impact had wiped out the dinosaurs... Around the same time, two other researchers had suggested yet another controversial idea, that mass extinctions occurred at regular intervals -- every 26 million years or so. Scientists immediately folded the ideas into a new and breathtaking possibility: Impacts by space rocks were causing massive global species destruction every 26 million years.
by Robert Roy Britt
03 April 2001Searching for a Tenth PlanetThe main justification for the search was made when discrepancies in the predicted positions of the outer planets Uranus and Neptune kept cropping up with alarming regularity. Uranus has completed over two and a half orbits since its discovery in 1741, and Neptune, discovered in 1846, has completed almost one full circuit. Both planets should have accurately determined orbits by now. And yet, variations in their predicted positions, called residuals, persist. Critics, most prominent among them, British astronomer Dr. Brian Marsden with the International Astronomical Union, say that inadvertent data error is the real culprit behind the residuals, not a missing planet. In fact, says Dr. Marsden, Planet X is not a scientific problem as much as it is a psychological problem...
by Jeff Kanipe
Oct 15 1999
In the October 11 issue of the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, Dr. John Murray, an astronomer from the Open University in the United Kingdom proposed that a large object in the extreme outer realms of the solar system may be gravitationally affecting the orbits of long-period comets. He theorizes that the object would have to orbit the sun 32,000 times farther away than Earth (about 3 trillion miles) and would have to be at least as massive as Jupiter, if not more so. Given its distance, it would also be extremely faint and slow moving.
In other research, a professor of physics at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, Dr. John J. Matese, is making a case for the existence of a 2- to 3-Jupiter mass object orbiting some 2.3 trillion miles from the sun. In a paper soon to be published in the planetary journal, Icarus, Dr. Matese asserts that this object, too, has created a "concentration" of Oort cloud comets and is responsible for sending a significant number of them - perhaps as much as 25 percent - into the inner solar system... Dr. Matese's theory focuses on different aspects of long-period comet orbits, but nevertheless begs the question: could the darkest corner of our solar system harbor a tenth planet or a brown dwarf? A brown dwarf, he contends, would not have been detected in the previous infrared searches, such as the one conducted by the Infrared Astronomical Satellite (IRAS) in the early 1980s, because the alleged planet/brown dwarf is too near the galactic plane. To ferret out such an object in that busy IR region requires greater sensitivity than IRAS possessed at the time.A mystery revolves around the sun:Speculation about the existence of unseen celestial companions dates back far before the discovery of Pluto in 1929... This latest hypothesis, however, is aimed at answering nagging scientific questions about how particular types of comets make their way into the inner solar system. Some comets, like Halley's Comet, follow relatively short-period orbits - circling the sun in less than two hundred years. These comets are thought to originate in the Kuiper Belt, a disk of cosmic debris that lies beyond Neptune's orbit... Even further out is the Oort Cloud, a spherical haze of comets surrounding the solar system at distances between 10,000 AU and more than 50,000 AU. That's where long-period comets such as Hale-Bopp are thought to come from. For some time, astronomers have noticed that the directional patterns of these comets are not completely random... No telescope has yet detected this object. But on the basis of its gravitational effect, John B. Murray, a planetary scientist at Britain's Open University, speculates that the object could be a planet larger than Jupiter, the biggest of the solar system's known planets... Meanwhile, researchers at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette say the object could be a planet or brown dwarf - that is, a dark, failed star - roughly three times the size of Jupiter and orbiting at 25,000 AU. The researchers, led by physicist John Matese, say their paper is to be published by the journal Icarus... Brian Marsden, who heads the International Astronomical Union's Central Bureau for Astronomical Telegrams as well as the Minor Planet Center at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory... expressed some skepticism about the evidence behind the latest research... Matese noted that theories proposing a correlation between extinctions on Earth and celestial orbits had fallen out of scientific favor in recent years. But he said there could be a "much more gentle" effect that links periodic changes in cratering to the solar system's oscillating motion through the galactic plane.
Researchers suggest that huge unseen object
orbits on fringe of solar system
by Alan Boyle
Oct 7 (1999?)
 |
||
| · join · view topics · view or post blog · bookmark · post new topic · subscribe · | ||
Very interesting, thanks Civ! If such a Nemesis star or planet exists, it will obviously have to be destroyed. We’ll build our own Nemesis, and name it The Death Star!!
Let’s just take the Dinos for instance. They Originated, roughly, about 235 million years ago and went, mostly, extinct about 65 million years ago, that is about 170 million years. So what happens to the “every 27 million year extinction” theory then? They only went extinct once in that 170 million year period.
I have no explanation for that discrepancy. I just work here. Let’s ask an expert.
SC - get over here!!!
Paging Herr Doktor. Is Dr. Freud in the house?
But I can empathize. Wouldn't want to see you you Jung out to dry...
So, that means that we will be destroyed about the time they get that hole in the Gulf plugged.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.