Note that this is a simulation of an asteroid with a diameter of 500 km. The asteroid that killed the (big) dinosaurs had only 10 km. That's 50^3 times smaller.
Here’s a version with just the impact and some music to enjoy it with. Used to leave this video running on various Macintoshes at the Apple Store on my way out.
I always thought the story was that Roger Waters asked the vocalist to think about death, but perhaps that’s apocryphal. At the very least it’s appropriate for this video!
Hilarious. Had I known that I wouldn't have commented like the puppet I am.
I remember when the Killers song Somebody Told Me was all over the radio. I HATED that f'ing song. But I came to love the killers as a side note. When I found out later that was their song I couldnt help liking it more and myself less.
This happened to me with the Foo Fighters. That mentos music video they did- I hated the video, song, and I hated TFF. By the time their next song was out I hated it on principle. Finally I had to admit I was wrong, they were great. Now they are one of my favorite bands with some of my favorite songs.
I enjoyed the video, although they say multiple times that an impact like that would kill every living thing, but we now that some living things survived, so I don't know how accurate that actually was.
Edit: They are using a much larger asteroid in their simulation, makes sense.
Those impacts in the early evolution of the Earth sterilized everything, life had to start over again from zero once the surface cooled.
Actually might be wrong about that:
"Three-dimensional computer models developed in May 2009 by a team at the University of Colorado at Boulder postulate that much of Earth's crust, and the microbes living in it, could have survived the bombardment. Their models suggest that although the surface of the Earth would have been sterilized, hydrothermal vents below the Earth's surface could have incubated life by providing a sanctuary for heat-loving microbes."
"it is thought that this happened 6 times in earth's history... all living creatures were wiped out... only to begin again..."
interesting. If true, doesn't this have implications for Sagan's Equation? i.e. if life is wiped out and it (somehow) starts again, that implies that any planet like Earth will develop complex life forms given enough time? (or am I missing something...)
I would have thought that the estimated 6 impacts, if they were on this scale, all occurred before life began evolving on Earth. Such impacts apparently formed the Earth-Moon system and the oceans.
That video creeped me out! I mean, we'd be screwed. Luckily there are no known astroids, let alone moon-sized ones, heading towards Earth that we know of.
But if we discovered one, even with ample lead time, what could we do?
Depends on the lead time. We have mapped out most possible asteroids for 100 years which presents something of a reasonable upper limit on lead time. Deflecting a 500 mile wide asteroid ~10,000 miles on those timescales might be vaguely possible. Trying to abandon earth or build some kind of ultra deep bunkers given 100 years seems doomed to fail, but it’s not like a lot of other options exist.
Old Discovery Channel was a national treasure. Even if they juiced the limits of science for television, it was much better/curiosity inspiring than the reality television rabble they put on today.
The producers and sponsors of discovery channel 90s-00s should be immensely proud of themselves.
I'm inclined to think that's artistic embellishment.
There might be some disruption of the asteroid during its final approach due to tidal forces from the Earth. Whether or not that would result in significant heating of the asteroid's interior is another question.
Early in the history of the solar system, it's possible that many bodies were still hot from latent heat of formation (effectively: the conversion of gravitational potential energy to heat, plus whatever contribution comes from radioactive materials in the body). Note that the heat of Earth's interior is just this, still leaking slowly into space after 4.5 billion years. Large objects take time to cool, and the vacuum of space eliminates conductive and convective cooling, leaving only blackbody radiation. Thermal management is a major issue for satellites and space probes, particularly if they have a significant energy demand.
After last few years, between our handling of the epidemic, global politics, resource management, warming, and the near impossibility of ever obtaining consensus about any given fact, I'm kinda worried.
Some would deny an asteroid was coming, clinging to their profits or parties or deities by FUDing the astronomers and engineers.
Some would say let's put all all our effort to get some people off planet, at least into long term orbit (Stephenson's Seveneves), to save the gene pools. Begin debating who goes.
Some would say don't waste any resources on the orbit plan: put everything we have into deflecting the asteroid so it misses Earth altogether.
We should start now, today, learning how to build a planetary consensus about everyday things before we're faced with an urgent extinctor. We already ushered in the long term one.
At this point I'd believe faced with an asteroid impact the US would try and nudge it to hit China. Fuck it up due to a english to metric conversion and do self own.
A dinosaur-killing asteroid hitting China isn't going to do much good for the US. Kill off your largest competitor (and supplier) along with the rest of Asia, and then watch the ejecta fall back down around the world as they superheat the atmosphere and burn forests. Then look forward to dealing with a starving and freezing population as thick clouds envelop the planet for several years.
If you detect it far enough away you can just spray paint it. Change the albedo on one side and let the solar radiation pressure push it away enough that it misses by a safe margin.
Buried hydrocarbons are not really dinosaurs. They're prehistoric plant and microscopic life for the most part. Algae, plankton, etc.
I believe a lot of coal harkens back to the great forests of the carboniferous (sp?) Period, which is special because it took millions of years for life to learn how to digest the cellulose in trees. So you can imagine millions of years of buried forests that could burn, but not decompose. Forest fires in those days must have been truly terrifying.
That was a one off event in Earth's history, and has not been repeated. I believe it's partially responsible for why modern CO2 levels are much lower than historical levels. It was a massive natural carbon sequestration program. At least until us humans in our short sightedness dig it up and burn it.
The Carboniferous was roughly 60 million years long. And oxygen levels were much higher than today. This showed up in large insects. For example they had dragonflies over 2 feet wide - that's over 6x as large as the largest today.
Maybe I'm reading too far into this, but are you suggesting that higher oxygen concentration is responsible for larger insects? If true, I'd love to understand why
Getting sufficient oxygen is a key limiting factor in metabolism. The more oxygen an animal can get, the bigger an animal can afford to get.
And it's not just insects. For example, the ancestors of dinosaurs evolved a highly efficient respiratory system towards the end of the permian period when oxygen concentrations were low, which likely helped them survive the deadliest mass extinction ever. Afterwards, oxygen levels skyrocketed up, and the dinosaurs, who still had their efficient lungs, could take advantage of it and became the giants we know and love. This same system is also key to the ability of modern birds to fly.
Insects and other arthropods breathe through their skin, so the amount of oxygen they can get is limited by their surface area, whereas the amount of oxygen they need is determined by volume. Thus for any given oxygen concentration, there is some maximum surface area to volume ratio for insects, and in turn a size limit for any given body plan. This is why, for example, the largest species of tarantulas across multiple continents, despite evolving separately, are all the same size - being big has a lot of perks, but if they got any bigger they'd suffocate.
Jeffrey S. Dukes, "Burning Buried Sunshine" (2003)
Marine sediments produced the majority (about 86%) of the world’s petroleum, while deltaic and lacustrine sediments yielded smaller amounts (about 11% and 3%, respectively) (Demaison, 1993). The organic matter in carbon-rich marine sediments is primarily composed of the remains of phytoplankton. The percentage of annually fixed organic carbon that accumulates in sediment (the PF) is difficult to estimate because it can vary over several orders of magnitude, depending on the length of time that organic matter experiences oxic conditions, and on other factors (Bralower and Thierstein, 1987; Bordenave, 1993; Canfield, 1994; Gélinas et al., 2001). Two types of marine settings are thought to have been the major environments for the formation of petroleum source rocks: silled basins with oxygen-deficient waters, and highly productive upwelling zones (which generated 78% and 8% of world petroleum stocks, respectively; Demaison, 1993).
Duke's paper goes on to estimate that the fossil fuels (coal and natural gas in addition to petroleum) consumed in 1997 represent over 400 times the current net primary production (plant growth) on Earth, and the petroleum consumed that year represents five million years of accumulated ancient biomass.
(The reason for the difference is that whilst conversion from biomass to fossil fuels gives the first value, the additional geological losses in forming and preserving petroleum over hundreds of millions of years give rise to the five-million-fold factor. Fossil fuels are a very lossy battery.)
A quick skim of your comments shows that you consider yourself to be better informed than the majority of scientists in several fields. How did you become an expert in so many areas of study, and why are you having so much trouble convincing your peers of the truth?
I prefer track record over appeals to authority. So far I correctly predicted that SARS-2 originated in a lab before it was acceptable to have that view.
My only other outlandish predictions are climate related: that the earth isn't warming, it's cooling, that CO2 isn't a major driver of climate change (vs. water and the sun), and that oil is mostly a renewable resource.
Your account seems to be using HN only to get involved in flamewars about ideologically contentious topics. Can you please not do that? It's not the kind of site we're trying for here.
How do these "established and widely accepted scientific claims" explain why oil wells are filling back up?
"Established and widely accepted scientific claims" are often nothing more than political propaganda, in this case propaganda originating with Standard Oil, the Rockefellers, and the even older money that backed that empire.
Oil being non-renewable justifies overregulation by governments and price gouging by producers.
> How do these "established and widely accepted scientific claims" explain why oil wells are filling back up?
Rocks are variably porous. It wouldn't surprise me at all to exploit a well until production is low, wait a period of time, and find there's small amounts of newly accessible oil there. Oil could maybe get squeezed out of the surrounding rock by the pressure differential crated by removing the oil in the first place.
I don't know if that's true though, it's just a theory of mine. The success of fracking lends some credence to it.
Note that hydrofracking literally works by using high-pressure water to expande cracks in the oil-bearing rock layer, then wedging bits of sand into the cracks to hold them open.
Wellhead pressure (or lack thereof) is another major aspect of drilling and well production. Early "gushers" would spout 100s of feet (30--60m) into the air, spewing thousands of barrels of oil a day. Pressures could be ... immense (I've lost track of a cite I had for maximum recorded, though it was large).
Mature or less-prolific wells have far less reservoir pressure and rely on slow seepage through what's actually mostly-solid rock. "Stripper" wells operated by pump-jacks may return only 10--15 barrels of oil per day. As the price of oil (or electricity necessary to run the pumps) rises and falls, these wells are literally turned on and off due to being only marginally economically profitable.
Fracked petroleum wells have an operational life of ~10 years, possibly less. There are traditional wells still pumping strong after 80+ years. The First Oil Well, Bahrain, has been supplying oil since 1931, 90 years:
Abiogenic petroleum is a fringe crackpot theory, not seriously considered by geologists.
There are two possibilities, here.
1. You are an experienced geologist, and know far more on the subject of geology than I, or anyone else posting in this subthread. In that case, surely you would be able to preface your claims with a big fat disclaimer that most experts disagree with you, and that there are incredibly serious hurdles that your claims need to overcome.
2. You are, like me, a layman with little actual knowledge in the subject. In this case, you need to defer to expert consensus.
Given your other response in this subthread, I think we'll have to go with the latter.
Human knowledge doesn't advance because someone who is very smart, but understands nothing about a subject tells people that wet streets cause rain, and that they need to wake up and do their own research. Human knowledge advances when someone who deeply understands a subject posits a claim that can withstand cross-examination by people who know what they are talking about.
I don't disagree with your point. However, i disagree with your tone, particularly using "fringe crackpot theory".
He's not advocating that green men put oil underground. He's promoting a theory that most (majority? some?) of oil has non biotic origins.
Wikipedia itself says there are deposits worldwide that are abiotic, and also refers to this abiotic origin thesis as unlikely. He isn't arguing "wet streets cause rain". We are far from "fringe crackpot theory".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abiogenic_petroleum_origin
When the dispute is around the question of quantity "how much" vs whether it is physically possible at all, and the question currently is settled in terms of probability (95%~) vs replicable experiment proof (99.99% reliable), we should refrain from using wording that ridicules the other side.
Their lung analogs are more like holes/tubes where air can go and maybe slosh around a bit.
So there is a surface area to volume trade off point that depends on O2 concentration.
When photo-vores covered all the land the only place left to go was up. But Lignin was what emerged as the scaffold and it was amazingly successful and completely indigestible.
It would be as if animals figured out how to make their bones out of Teflon or silicon dioxide, after a few tens of millions of years the planet would be hundreds of feet deep in old non decomposed skeletons.
My favorite analogy is it is like trees were made of plastic. You know how today people say the plastic bottles will sit unchanged in landfills for thousands of years? Back then it was the same for trees. They grew, they fell, they sat there unchanged unless they burned. So if they fell in water, they stayed.
Today trees rot because microbes evolved to decompose lignin. A million years from now maybe plastic will rot too.
It helps to make clear how the giant carboniferous coal deposits were formed: plastic tree landfills.
That's a good analogy. There already appear to be bacteria evolving to eat some kinds of plastic. I don't think it will take millions of years. But it will also reduce demand for plastic, because like wood and paper, it will be able to rot.
At least nature may bail us out of that mistake we made with plastic. Could you imagine if we used it for millions of years without it being able to decompose? Your analogy would become reality.
It would be cool if somebody could model what the landscape then would look like. I don't think there would be massive piles of wood anywhere but wet places because as you indicated fire is another way dead wood can be cleared.
A magnetic pole reversal wouldn't do it, but a sufficiently large change in the rotation would. Of course, to get such a big shift would take an asteroid hitting us...
There is a heaping pile of physical evidence that the earth's rotation changed at the same time the sun had an ELE scale micronova as recently as 12,000 years ago. The theory is that, exactly like solar maxima and minima are on a predictable cycle, these micronovas are as well, about every 12,000 years.
We found flash frozen waves, instantly frozen animals, and all other manner of things that can only be caused by a sudden drop in the earth's temperature.
The theory is that the earth and sun's magnetic fields are interlinked (they are), and pole reversals in the earth are tied to the sun. The sun micronovas at the same time, which causes half the earth to freeze and the other half to cook. At the same time, the earth's rotation flips, causing massive tsunami's. There's evidence of the massive tsunamis if you look at the continental shelves on google earth. There are fission tracks on the moon and on earth that prove a solar event, although that information is closely guarded by NASA.
It's a fun theory. I don't rule it out at all. Check out suspicious0bservers.org and select videos from the Diehold Foundation (skip the religious videos).
Regions the size of the Earth do not "flash freeze" rapidly enough to stop waves or animals in their tracks. Radiative heat loss to space is simply not that efficient. Human-engineered flash-freezing works through direct contact with cryogenic surfaces or liquids, and even that takes hours.
Your link directly contradicts the "heaping pile of evidence" of rapid shifts, and the proposed theory is not one of sudden (in a matter of seconds, or even centuries) shift, but at the order of millennia. Even that rate of movement has no supporting evidence:
While there are reputable studies showing that true polar wander has occurred at various times in the past, the rates are much smaller (1° per million years or slower) than predicted by the pole shift hypothesis (up to 1° per thousand years).[2][3][22] Analysis of the evidence does not lend credence to Hapgood's hypothesized rapid displacement of layers of the Earth.
Demonstrating it to sufficient degrees of robustness to be widely and generally accepted is another matter.
Note that this does in fact happen, as in the case of another geological crackpot theory now accepted as not only fact, but the core theory of all geology: plate tectonics. This occurred over the course of 50 years as increasing independent lines of evidence all pointed at the same conclusion:
- The correspondence of shapes of numerous continents.
- Similar geological formations and fossil records in now widely-separated regions.
- An understanding of the atom and nuclear chemistry, giving rise to radioactivity, the thermal engine driving geotectonics.
- Seismic observations of the Earth's interior.
- Seafloor surveys, including evidence of magnetic pole reversals, giving a timeline and estimate of seafloor spreading.
- Evidence of extrusion and subduction.
- Widely correlated zones of tectonic and volcanic activity.
Those are measures of proof that are sufficient to establish a given scientific (in this case, geological) fact and theory.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PENT_hnyO-o