Re: On Topic Saturday: Planets are very big

Stoned koala bears drooled eucalyptus spittle in awe
as <the_ghost@xxxxxxx> declared:

John F. Eldredge wrote in rec.arts.sf.written:

On Tue, 13 Jun 2006 00:43:52 +0200, Danijel Starman
<the_ghost@xxxxxxx> wrote:
James Nicoll wrote in rec.arts.sf.written:
[snip]
Not realy ontopic but I thought I'd share:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3JHdYBet_4Q
Meteor strikes Earth
To borrow a phrase from _Lucifer's Hammer_, what you have here is
"pasteurized planet". In a collision of that scale, I don't think
even deep-sea life would survive. Life would have to start over from
scratch.

But humanity could survive, maybe. If we knew for example that a hit of
this magnitude would happen in, lets say, 10 years could we do
something, send people to space? On the Moon, Mars?

Nope. We'd go extinct, for sure.

Oh, it'd be possible to send a bunch of people to the Moon to sit it
out, possibly -- with an all-out effort -- a couple of hundred, but even
if they survived the rain of red-hot debris blasted all the way out to
lunar orbit, there'd be nothing habitable for them to come back to on
Earth within the life span of their supplies and tech support. And we
wouldn't be able to ship them an entire self-sustaining industrial
economy to the moon to keep them alive after their initial bunch of
tools and machines break down.

To survive anywhere except Earth takes the products of a civilization
with the resources to devote to engineering on a heroic scale, *or* a
human-compatible biosphere. Ten years, even ten years of all-out effort,
isn't enough to establish either of those things elsewhere in our solar
system. A hundred years wouldn't work either -- we don't tend to take
events seriously if they happen on time frames much greater than an
average human lifespan.

Thirty years and a planetary dictatorship that's serious about lasting
forever, and we might stand a chance. Ahem: *someone* would stand a
chance -- the lucky one in ten million, maybe. Not you or I, that's for
sure.

Luckily for us, going by the footage on that video, the impactor in
question was about the size of the Moon. There don't seem to be many of
those knocking around the solar system these days ...


-- Charlie
.

Relevant Pages

  • Re: ancient magnification optics?
    ... >when the Azoic period (before life formed) was seen as lasting about three ... the planet which became earth was struck by a mars-sized object ... >pretty well all the craters you can see on the moon to this day (there being no ... in the solar system has been much the same. ...
    (sci.archaeology)
  • Re: Is the speed of light really constant ?
    ... how does knowing that change my life? ... >> differently for most of us if the Earth went around the moon? ... Man is very quick to place himself at the center of the Universe and then ...
    (sci.physics.relativity)
  • Re: Lithopanspermia and you
    ... may have seeded life to Mars by this method. ... Life going from Earth outward is a bit of a stretch, ... basin and its moon that's more than a thousand fold by ratio bigger ...
    (sci.space.history)
  • Re: Moon landing hoax
    ... damn good and well how downright lethal our moon was, ... all life upon Earth. ... a living need-to-know hell on this Earth. ... Isn't excluding evidence the exact same as telling a lie: ...
    (sci.astro.amateur)
  • EVOLUTION - TRUTH
    ... HISTORY OF LIFE ON EARTH ... Rise of biological diversity ... Many of the important fossils telling the story of the Cambrian ...
    (alt.politics)