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Not 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, pur

Not 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 ago
I 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.
  - magduf 7y ago
    Maybe not, but it was still a little bit younger, so there should have been somewhat more asteroid strikes, even if only by a couple percent. Moreover, the dinosaurs were around for over 150 million years. Hominids have been around for only about 2M years, and modern humans only about 200k. They had loads of time to observe asteroids, realize they're a threat to their existence, and develop advanced technology and an effective and credible space program to deal with the threat. But they were just too lazy, or too busy fighting each other, to bother doing this, and look what the consequences to them were.

magduf 7y ago

I 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.
- magduf 7y ago
  Maybe not, but it was still a little bit younger, so there should have been somewhat more asteroid strikes, even if only by a couple percent. Moreover, the dinosaurs were around for over 150 million years. Hominids have been around for only about 2M years, and modern humans only about 200k. They had loads of time to observe asteroids, realize they're a threat to their existence, and develop advanced technology and an effective and credible space program to deal with the threat. But they were just too lazy, or too busy fighting each other, to bother doing this, and look what the consequences to them were.