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."

Comments

Role in planetary forming

[nairnr]

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..

Re:Billions of factors...

[Anonymous Coward]

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.