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Mining Asteroids@Home
An anonymous reader writes "Like the lively discussion on mediation strategies for exterminating asteroids, a six-person expert panel is debating today whether humans exist because of big collisions or in spite of them. Interestingly Mexico's oil (and most of the rest of the world's resources) seem to have arisen from later mining of these byproducts: the luck of geography or the price at the pump for dead dinosaurs."
It would have been the remnants of the entire world, representing far more mass than dinosaurs, that would have turned into the "fossil fuels", and not merely dinosaurs. Come to think of it, the vegitation alone would dwarf the collective mass of the dinosaurs, not to mention insects, which can breed and grow on high geometric curves.
Maybe.
Chaos theory doesn't say that every change will result in a vastly different outcome.
It just says that some changes can result in vastly different outcomes.
What it rarely points out is that most change results in only a minor difference. But then, it wants to be ***Chaos***Theory*** and not just the instability section of the chapter on metastable systems.
There are other events that might cause a mass extinction. A gamma ray burster within our galaxy could cause quite a problem. Or a nearby star goin supernova. Now there would probably be some evidence of these things happening... does anyone know anything about this?