[Wally_Kalbacken]

If a “KT event” were to happen again...it would be a very large pile of not good.

[Shadowstrike]

Oh, just give me one more thing to worry about why don't ya!

[calex59]

And SUVs would be the cause of it. If we are going to be hit by an asteroid then we will be, not much we can do at this point in time.

Think how lucky the dinos were, they had no knowledge of asteroids or collisions, just lived along until Whammo, death from the sky. BTW, if we are hit every million years then it has skipped many, many millions of years. The dinos lived for far more than a million(about 185 million)before being smacked(if that is what actually happened) and reptiles were around for serveral hundred million before the Dinos came along. As the article points out it has been 70 million years since the Dinos went under.

So that begs the question: If only one major Asteroid has hit earth over the last 500 million years or so, how do they come up with the "once every million years" figure? BTW, I believe there was one other major extinction of life they didn't mention here, after the Dinos.

[LibFreeOrDie]

It’s a game of pinball, bowling, or marbles on a cosmic scale...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LyzIau5dBao&feature=related

[djf]

“advanced life”... sounds like the DU’rs will get by unscathed. (and, sadly, a few freepers...)

[pillut48]

Obvious Hand of God ping!

[Daniel II]

“The first this to understand about the KT event is that is was absolutely enormous: an asteroid (or comet) six to 10 miles in diameter streaked through the Earth’s atmosphere at 25,000 miles an hour and struck the Yucatan region of Mexico with the force of 100 megatons -the equivalent of one Hiroshima bomb for every person alive on Earth today. Not a pretty scenario! “

Let’s see ... 100 megatons = 100 x 10^6 / 12.5 x 10^3 (Hiroshima bomb yield) = 10,000.

Correct me if I’m wrong here, but 10,000 does not quite equal 6,000,000,000.

Maybe they meant gazilliatons?

[RayChuang88]

Scientists postulate that Earth possibly experienced a large meteor or comet entering the Earth atmosphere and detonating in the sky over the North American continent about 12,000 years ago. It was that gigantic explosion that ended the reign of the large mammals (e.g., the wooly mammoth and the saber-toothed tiger) in North America and drastically altered human population movements.

Today, a land impact of a 100-meter diameter meteor or comet will cause ENORMOUS long-term damage, not only will we have the shockwave from the impact (both through severe ground shaking and the gigantic air blast effect), but the impact will kick up a huge amount of dirt and rocks that will rain down potentially a couple of thousand miles away--and the debris will be a hotter than the melting point of lead. Such an impact will cause essentially a nuclear winter as all the impact debris thrown up in the air severely cuts the amount of light from the Sun possibly for a couple of years.

[tlb]

The probability of asteroid impacts is one of the factors I have argued is omitted from the Drake Equation for calculating the likelihood of intelligent alien life, and significantly reduces the probabilities of other such life.

Most stars in the Milky Way are clustered in the Galaxy Center, unlike Sol out in the relatively spacious spiral arms. Stars being more densely packed would increase the gravitational influence on nearby stars, unsettling their own Oort Clouds and driving in killer comets and asteroids towards the inner rocky worlds.

>>>How many times in our galaxy alone has life finally evolved to the equivalent of our planets and animals on some far distant planet, only to be utterly destroyed by an impact? Galactic history suggests it might be a common occurrence.

As far as I know, there is no such evidence of external life whatsoever. Comets and asteroids we have confirmed and studied. Alien life is just a hope, not something so casually to assume.

[SunkenCiv]

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[BenLurkin]

What?

A bigger threat than global warming?

[Sawdring]

Wouldn’t humans, because we are an advanced species, have a better chance of survival because we are intelligent, do not have a specialized niche, are omnivorous and have adapted our behavior to survive in every climate the earth offers? Granted we wouldn’t survive in great numbers but we would survive. Remember we used to have a mine shaft gap, but we don’t anymore!

[marron]

Early results indicate that in terms of population lost, China, Indonesia, India, Japan and the United States face the greatest overall threat; while the United States, China, Sweden, Canada and Japan face the most severe economic effects due to the infrastructure destroyed.

See, here's how it works. In an event that causes the extinction of all life on the planet, the larger countries lose more people. The smaller countries lose fewer people. See?

[wendy1946]

The biggest threat to advanced life forms in the universe is probably rogue political parties like the demokkkrats.

[Soothesayer]

We could use a good planet-killing asteroid right about now. Screw this world.