4 ms·

But I'm thinking if it hits a pole it could release CO2 and permanently affect the temperature.

• jerf 14y ago
  It's still unlikely. The universe tends to be stable, because if an impact could heat up Mars, it would have, over cosmological time. This is not Mars' first impact. Our Earth intuitions are really wrong for dealing with the rest of the universe. The rest of the (known) universe doesn't have intelligent critters on it making active and wild changes in very short periods of cosmological time. The universe is generally full of stable systems, in the physics sense of the term "stable". To the extent that you think otherwise, it's because we humans are interested in the unstable bits and they get a lot of play in the press, but we know and talk about them because they are the exceptions.
  • scarmig 14y ago
    Transients on this scale, however, could last hundreds of years. Even on Mars, CO2 takes a while to escape from the atmosphere; on human time scales we'd see a new metastable Martian temperature. (Assuming a bunch of CO2 actually were dumped into the atmosphere, that is.)