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Mining Asteroids@Home

Posted by Hemos on from the pulled-down-from-space dept.

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."

5 of 110 comments (clear)

  1. Billions of factors... by $$$$$exyGal · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Humans exist, today, because of billions and billions of tiny factors, and probably about a dozen large factors. If you took any of them away, you wouldn't be alive today.

    As a matter of fact, if you won't back in time 1 billion years and swished your hands around, and then came back, nothing would be the same. You guys know the Simpson's episode ;-)

    And from the article: We should bear in mind that 99.9% of all species that ever dwelled on Earth were wiped out, most likely, as a result of large impacts.

    If those species wouldn't have died, we also wouldn't be here today.

    --naked

    --
    Very popular slashdot journal for adul
    1. Re:Billions of factors... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting
      If you'd finished reading the article, most of them disagree with the fact that spieces died out "most likely, as a result of large impacts."
      First of all, in contradiction to Benny Peiser's remarks, Peter Ward has presented data showing that while it is true that the majority of species that have ever existed are now extinct, only a minority of those, a few percent in fact, were victims of mass extinctions. Instead, most extinct species have come to an end at some random time between mass extinctions.
  2. Role in planetary forming by nairnr · · Score: 4, Interesting

    A few interesting points from this article. One is that a number of impacts helped in creating some of the earths key resources. As evidenced by Canada's nickel deposits around the Sudbury impact crater, and Mexico's oil deposits around the Chicxlub impact.

    In addition, the major impacts may not have contributed that much to mass extinctions. While there may have been a momentary spike in extinctions, the vast majority of extinctions were not related to a major event.

    It is difficult for us to fully understand the effect of asteroid and comet impact on the earth, as we are so dynamic that much evidence gets lost..

  3. Re:Big collisions exist because of humans by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting

    The problem is... we don't pose a threat to the UNIVERSE... at least not yet...

    sure we have fscked up the Earth almost to the point of no return, but thats such a small ripple in the big picture, no?

  4. Re:Praise to the dinosaurs. by blair1q · · Score: 2, Interesting

    1. There weren't enough dinosaurs. Oil is dead pine trees.

    2. Mummies were once so plentiful in Egypt (as recently as the '50s) that people were burning them for heat.