Asteroid Just Misses Earth

[Brian.Pearson]

Originally Posted by 6 FOOT 3

We could always have an asteroid tournament. Let's see i'll go up against Village Life and you can play against Livewire in the opening round. Something tells me we''l get our butts kicked .

I used to go to one of those game places where they have a console. I got to where I regularly exceeded two million. After that, the fatigue factor began to take its toll.

Besides, they started charging 50 cents from 25, and it began to hurt my wallet so I quit cold turkey.

[GregW]

I just watched a TV program (no idea what source) explaining the near instantaneous elimination of the very large mammal dominated ecosystem in the northern hemisphere 12,900 (yeah, that accurate) years ago. The theory posits the extinction was caused by a big but not huge asteroid impact. A crater large enough to be caused by the estimated energy release has not been found but other signs of an impact are present. The Arctic ocean could be covering the evidence.

I wondered what did in the Mammoths and never believed it was a few spear wielding humans.

[Six Foot Three]

Originally Posted by GregW

I wondered what did in the Mammoths and never believed it was a few spear wielding humans.

If that is correct then it should have wiped out the Cro mags (humans) also? It seems like once we left africa 60,000 years ago we 'possibly' killed off not only the large game herds but also our cousins the neanderthals.

[GregW]

I can believe we killed or bread off the Neanderthals. IIRC the Clovis people (homo early New Mexico) disappeared from North America about the same time and were replaced by another migration from Asia or, possibly from humans surviving in South America. 6ft3 - I have not studied this in detail, yet, but it makes a tidy answer to the problem of how such a mature ecosystem just ceased to exist.

The show provided an example of a site in west Texas where there was a shallow layer of soil with an elevated Iridium concentration with a layer of charred material above it and a layer of barren soil above that. The carbonaceous layer was carbon dated (!) at 12,900 years, not mega years. On the geologic time scale this was last evening!

I believe our government could switch some “anti-terrorist money” to an improved world wide asteroid detection and tracking system. Then if one was detected we might be able to get people out of the impact zone. I seriously doubt if we could divert a Tunguska or even Meteor Crater sized meteor from impacting. There is no way we could divert a 10 km diameter Dragon Slayer.

We should be thankful the near misses were misses.