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"Drilling into the seafloor off Mexico, scientists have extracted a unique geologic record of the single worst day in the history of life on Earth, when a city-
by yters 7y ago
"Drilling into the seafloor off Mexico, scientists have extracted a unique geologic record of the single worst day in the history of life on Earth, when a city-sized asteroid smashed into the planet 65 million years ago, wiping out the dinosaurs and three-quarters of all other life."
I wonder if we can learn from that disaster in order to deal with climate change? Seems to be at a similar scale of what may be threatening us.
- mc32 7y agoThat doesn’t seem right. That thing vaporized Rick, ignited the atmosphere, kicked up massive amounts of earth into the atmosphere and caused huge waves in the oceans (tsunamis isn't even the right word).
- fhars 7y agoProbably not much. What we are currently doing is more similar to the less sudden end-permian extinction, which nonetheless was quite a bit more deadly than the K/Pg extinction with an extinction rate in the 90% range.
- _Understated_ 7y agoNot to troll here but I'd be interested in you expanding upon what you mean by this. The reason I say that is the asteroid impact was, by every definition, pure chance in that earth was in the way when it flew through space across our orbital path. (Not wanting to get into a debate about climate change / climate change denial here...) Climate change is something that is happening due to somewhat preventable actions, not chance. I'm curious what you think we could learn from it.
- magduf 7y agoI think the idea is that you should try to prepare for disasters and be able to mitigate them. Basically, the reason most of the dinosaurs went extinct is because they were foolish and short-sighted and didn't bother to develop a serious space program so they could detect, track, and then intercept inbound asteroids. They lived at a time when there were surely more asteroids hitting the Earth than now (the system was younger, so there was more debris flying around), so they surely had more warning than we do: craters, smaller impacts, etc. They ignored all this, so when a really big asteroid came along, they had no way of redirecting it, or even detecting it beforehand. We're not doing much better. We can detect some asteroids, but are we able to intercept and redirect them? No, because we haven't bothered investing much money in a program to develop that capability. Yet we've had plenty of impacts and near-misses. One hit in Russia a few years ago, injuring 1000 people. One flies by pretty frequently, and I think one is supposed to come extremely close this month. Where's the program to intercept these things well ahead of time and redirect them? Climate change isn't that different, except that it isn't just some natural occurrence, it's something we're mostly doing by ourselves. So we're studying it some, we've made predictions about what the effects will be based on evidence from earlier times, yet we absolutely refuse to make any real changes to attempt to avoid this fate. In short, we really aren't much smarter than the dinosaurs.
- jsweojtj 7y ago> They lived at a time when there were surely more asteroids hitting the Earth than now (the system was younger, so there was more debris flying around), so they surely had more warning than we do: craters, smaller impacts, etc. This is a tangential point, but they weren't living in an appreciably younger solar system. 65 million / 4.5 billion is ~1.5%. So, the solar system (and the Earth) was 98.5% of its current age.