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Comets Are More Dangerous Than We Thought
- hownottowrite 6y ago<<It’s now “indisputable” that an asteroid killed the dinosaurs.>> But actually, it is.
- HugoDaniel 6y agoThis time it looks like it will be Global Warming that kill the dinosaurs.
- BLKNSLVR 6y agoOnly the poor dinosaurs, not the rich ones.
- hutzlibu 6y agoThat remains to be seen. With some major crash and money not being worth anything anymore - it will be more about claws, fangs and numbers.
- saalweachter 6y agoHow are birds faring with climate change, actually?
- Bjartr 6y agoIt'd impact migration patterns first I suspect. Well, unless migration is a circadian mediated behavior rather than a climatologically mediated one. Anyone know which it is?
- saalweachter 6y agoThere'd be a certain irony if burning dino juice (I know, I know) killed off all of the dino-descendants' competitors.
- dspillett 6y agoMy understanding is that it may have finished them off quite decidedly, at least those that were not on their way to becoming birds & others, but evidence suggests many of the large species were already in significant decline due to other pressures (there are various theories about what the main cause(s) of that was, including changes in atmosphere balance, changes in temperature, changes in food supply due to evolution elsewhere in the chain, etc.)
- Robotbeat 6y agoI recently did a review of just what happened during the asteroid/comet impact and afterward, and it was insanely bad. And not limited to near the impact site, either, as ejecta shot back into space and rained down on the whole planet. The atmospheric temperature was well above boiling, rain of fiery stones starting literally all the world’s forests on fire, earthquakes of 11 on the Richter scale. For those within visual distance of the impactor, flesh would turn to flame due to the intensity of the light. Massive inland tsunamis. Followed by years and decades of dark winter (50 degrees below average) and then 5 deg C global warming for thousands of years. Almost everything would’ve been dead on land within hours. That species survived means a few individuals survived. Something like 99% of everything living on land would’ve been killed early on. No exclusively land-based tetrapods over 25 kilograms survived.
- tolbish 6y agoI would like to learn more about these 11-on-the-Richter-scale earthquakes.
- dboreham 6y agoDinosaurs are so easily hoaxed.
- bregma 6y agoI hear the tyrannosaurs were up in arms over the hoax but it did little good. The brontosaurs were sticking their necks out but it never came to a head. The triceratops kept trying to put a fine point on the argument but alas, it came to naught.
- Naga 6y agoI thought it was strange that they highlighted that sentence as well since the rest of the article goes on to dispute that. I'm guessing whoever made the excepts didn't read the rest very well.
- SamBam 6y agoI thought it made sense. They were quoting a scientist from one study, and then showed how the next study disputes this. They were highlighting the scientific argument. I guess if you think of pull-quotes as the take-away points of the article it's confusing, but I don't usually read them that way.
- MeteorMarc 6y agoThere is another reasons comets might be more dangerous than we think. There are rare meteor outbursts that are associated with long period comets whose earlier appearance has never been recorded in human history. Any of these might reappear at any moment. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0019103502000714 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00191...
- Reason077 6y agoIt was indeed a comet, not an asteroid, that Bruce Willis had to blow up in Armageddon (1998).
- rich_sasha 6y agoI thought the Oort cloud is a (sound) hypothesis, not a confirmed thing? > [long-period comets] originate in the Oort cloud, which extends several light-years from the sun [...] to the edge of the solar system
- simonh 6y agoYes that's correct, it's not possible to directly observe these objects at the moment.
- marcus_holmes 6y agoI also thought the cloud wasn't that big. 200,000 AUs is 3 and a bit LY. Alpha Centauri is 4 and a bit LY away. When does our cloud stop and theirs begin?
- antognini 6y agoThe extent of the Oort cloud is basically defined by the point where Galactic tides start to overwhelm the gravitational attraction to the Sun. But objects in the outer Oort cloud are very loosely bound and can easily be expelled or exchanged by interactions from passing stars.
- simonh 6y agoI suppose Alpha Centauri is only in one specific direction, so it distorts the cloud in that region.
- rich_sasha 6y agoThere’s also other “clouds”, with smaller radii. Kuiper Belt is roughly where Pluto is. There is the Scattered Disc (probably) beyond that. Only then, a long way away, maybe, the Oort Cloud. So there is a lot of cloudy stuff closer in too.
- 4lejandrito 6y agoI read "Comments are more dangerous than we thought" and was expecting a discussion about comments in source code. A comet will kill you instantly and painlessly. A misleading and outdated comment however can make your life miserable for a while.
- m_mueller 6y agomight not be so instant if a planetary killer hits on the far side and the acid rain / global winter / famine is what does you in. in such a case it would almost match my feelings about outdated comments...
- pkolaczk 6y agoThe number of times I was misguided by an outdated comment: 0 The number of times a comment saved my ass, despite being slightly inaccurate: 435 The number of times I struggled to understand what the authors thought when writing "self-documenting" code, because they left no comments: 249579
- leephillips 6y agoThe number of times I’ve been obliterated by a comet: 0. Draw your own conclusions.
- SideburnsOfDoom 6y agoLevel of risk = probability of the harmful event occurring, multiplied the severity of the harm. granted, the probability of comet-strike in your lifetime is low, but the severity is off the charts high.
- LudwigNagasena 6y agoThis definition of level of risk is relevant only when you have a von Neumann-Morgenstern utility function though.
- EdwardDiego 6y ago> Would a comet contain enough [Iridium]? It depends on what the comet was made of. There aren’t a lot of pieces of comets to test, but the samples returned from Comet Wild-2, courtesy of NASA’s Stardust mission, found that they were very similar to carbonaceous chondrite meteorites, which are known to contain iridium (although somewhat less than ordinary chondrites). Presumably the iridium level of a cometary object wouldn’t be that far off, but it remains to be seen. So, the theory proposed doesn't account for existing observations? Keen to see what kind of comet would be needed, theoretically, to create the K-Pg Boundary. That said, I find the timing of the Deccan Traps and the (alleged) Shiva Crater to be reasonably compelling for the "something broke up and hit the Earth bad"
- Gravityloss 6y agoVery nice article. A bit of a lame start though, talking about a particular TV show and brand of chocolate on the sidewalk. I guess such things are taught, that you should start off with something familiar to the reader.
- classified 6y agoIndeed, one measly comet crash-landing on my desk would ruin my whole compile.
- Jeff_Brown 6y agoTl;dr, anyone?