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More Evidence For An Extinction Comet
Andy_Howell writes: "There is more evidence that a comet or an asteroid is believed to be the cause of another mass extinction. This one happened 250 million years ago, long before the one that killed the dinosaurs, it and wiped out most of the life on earth, including the trilobites. The evidence comes from buckyballs with unusual isotopes trapped inside -- isotopes that were apparently created in carbon stars."
Assuming that by "The world", you mean planet Earth, a mass extinction means absolutely nothing. Short of the eventual expansion of the Sun int a red giant (in about 4 billion years) The Earth is still going to be here, no matter what. Life, in some form, will survive, no matter what.
Now, as a human being, I have a vested interest in human beings not going extinct. But I don't equate my personal interests with those of the planet.
-jon
Remember Amalek.
was a frood who really knew where his towel was. Here's the Fuller FAQ, as well as a coupla other (+1; Informative) links to Bucky/Buckyball info...
props to all dead homiez
A likely scenario has been suggested by Hermann Burchard (at okstate.edu):
To summarize the above--a comet crashed into Earth, which triggered massive volcanism, which in turn led to extinctions.Fast forward to today. Global warming, yada yada yada. Only, assume that only 1 kg of dust, meteorites, etc. per year fell to earth. So that's ..um.. 250 million Kg the earth picked up, not counting the odd rock bumping into the Yucatan or prehistoric Winslow, AZ. To maintain the same orbital period the earth has to move away from the Sun, or to maintain the same distance, it speeds up (conservation of momentum or Keppler or somthing anyway.)
The way I see it, it sped up, the seasons got shorter, the dinosaurs couldn't deal with the fast pace of the comparatively modern world and gave way to those twitchy little mammals which could.
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A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Nice article explaining what a Buckyball is.
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A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
I bet it'll happen again sometime. Maybe not in our lifetime, but it'll happen, and someone will be there to sell t-shirts.
Douglas Adams
1952-2001 :(
Yes.
The theory of natural selection is a theory about what happens in the physical world, not a philosophy about what is good.
Furthermore, Darwin specifically pointed out that by "survival of the fittest" he meant "survival of those most suited to the environment". He never meant to imply any general statement about things becoming better able to survive in general, in new environments which the species has not been exposed to. This can happen, but it is a side effect of becoming more adapted to the environments the species has been exposed to.
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In answer to the question, you have to ask where are you going to get a lot of He/Ar (old stars) where carbon is abundant at a high enough density to create the Buckyballs, at a low enough temperature that it isn't destroyed in the stellar atmosphere, and mass outflow from the star to cause it to end up in comets -- q.e.d. Carbon stars.
This written in a book 1000's of years old which means the people of the time couldn't have had the scientific facilities to know this themselves... Coincidence? I would think most with an OPEN mind & willing to find out for themselves wouldn't believe so.
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No, it's not a coincidence. And I think that you don't need ANY scientific "facilities" to discover that the 8th day is the first good one, it just takes a little experiment:
- circumcize on the 1st day: lots of blood and a death child.
- circumcize on the 2nd day: same thing happens.
- 3rd day, etc.
- 8th day: oh well, it works.
I don't understand why people keep seeing God in everything.
An even more interesting catastrophe is the collision with our then closest neighbor, which created the Moon. This planet, called Oberon IIRC, was supposedly located between the orbits of old Earth and Mars, and intersected the orbit of Earth.
At one point, old Earth and Oberon grazed each other, liquefying most of both planets and spinning a lump of rock off into orbit. The lump became the moon. The Discovery Channel devoted most of their "What if we had no Moon" program to this theory.
It is also speculated that the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter is the remnant of another such collision, where the planets involved did much more than graze each other.
The REAL jabber has the /. user id: 13196
The REAL jabber has the user id: 13196
What you do today will cost you a day of your life
According to this Space.com article, there would have been a bigger mass exinction that happened 600 to 700 million years ago, or 350 to 450 million years before the collision described in the article above, which would have killed about 95% of all life forms on the planet. Here's a short version of the Space.com article:
In the 1960's, geologists were unable to explain the evidence of glacial deposits found in the rock strata of every continent, including those at sea level aroung the equator. Was it evidence that ice had covered the entire planet at one time (i.e. a "super ice age")? Continental drift could have been responsible as well. Plus, how could the Earth get so cold as to have ice sheets covering it entirely?
A recent theory suggested that for every drop in global temperature there is an increase in surface snow and ice. As more snow and ice builds, more heat is reflected away, and it gets colder and colder. If ice glaciers had progressed as far as 30 degrees to the equator, a runaway ice age would have frozen the Earth completely. The massive cold snap would easily triggered an extinction like no other. The theory only had one problem, though: how did the Earth eventually thaw?
According to modern-day geologists, the levels of CO2 in the air are directly related to volcanic activity (which puts it there) and global temperature. As volcanoes erupt, they give off CO2 which is washed back to the Earth via rain. In turn, this CO2 is deposited back into the oceans where it settles on the sea floor as carbonate sediment. It is reheated to liquid, then gas, and the process starts anew when it is ejected again by volcanic activity.
If a frozen Earth was still geologically active (tectonic and volcanic action), all the CO2 thrown off my erupting volcanoes would have nowhere to go. As the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere rises, the global temperature rises as well. A few million years later, ice begins to melt, the water vaporates into rain where some of the CO2 is redeposited back onto the ice where the process is repeated. Complete thaw would be quick, happening in less than a couple of hundred years due to the excessive amounts of CO2.
As with the Permian-Triassic Boundary event (the meteor/comet incident 250 million years ago) that triggered the evolutionary process of the rise of the dinosaurs, the great freeze of 600 million years ago also triggered its own evolutionary growth: the Cambrian explosion. The massive dip in population followed by millions of years of harsh environments would have favored the birth of many new forms of life.
UNIX: Find it, fsck it, forget it.