Phil Plait is trying hard to depress us with the most horrific youtube video ever. Watch it and realize that the universe does not love us, we are incredibly fragile, and there are cosmic forces out there that with a little bad luck, could turn us into cinders in an instant.
Hmmm, I guess I can be depressing, too.
Chilling. So T.S. Eliot was wrong, and the Book of Revelation has nothing on this.
PZ
Check out the way technology averts the tragedy…
Cheers, Julian
Man that would suck.
I wonder how many times that has actually happened on other planets that had life and/or civilizations.
Well, look at it in a positive way: Evolution will probably get another shot at coming up with some fabulous new creatures from scratch.
And the religious right will get what they always wanted: Entering Kingdom Come.
So there’s something in it for everyone ;-)
That looked like a scorched rock by the end of it.
Not sure an atmosphere was returning to that.
Hopefully that won’t happen for another fifty years or so when we’ll all (thankfully) be already dead from climate change, loss of biodiversity, nuclear war, and superviruses.
Hey, if ya gotta go, hell, go in a big way!
BTW, I just read a short blurb that scientists have found a 300 mile crater under the Antarctic icecap which seems to be date to the Permian extinction. Anyone see anymore info on this?
Look on the bright side, thanks to science we’ve scoured the solar system for objects that large, predicted their paths, and confirmed there aren’t any ones to worry about. If one did sneak up on us, we’ve also got the tools to put up some kind of fight.
Contrast to a scant few centuries ago when we had no idea what was going on above us, and no chance of averting distaster if it did arrive.
Ummm. I dunno. We can barely cobble together a semi-permanent space station.
Oh, look… A[nother] secular “End Times” scenario. Hmm… Maybe the best and brightest minds will be “raptured” by some more advanced alien species before right before something like this happens.
Come on, Jason, that’s your lamest pot-shot ever. I can’t even figure out that it is you’re pot-shooting. You’re losing your touch.
How appropriate that this discussion takes place on Pharyngula, where a good chunk of the population has some concept of time’s immensity. Could a several-km size meteorite (much, much smaller than the planet smasher in the video) hit the earth in our lifetimes? Sure, but it’s not what you’d call likely. JPL gives the odds:
To an order of magnitude, it looks as if one of those events will happen on average once in several thousand of my lifetimes. A planet-smasher-video-size event would be way rarer; hence my lack of urgency in taking out space rock insurance.
It puts me in mind of a joke my Dad used to tell:
An astrophysicist gives a lecture on star life cycles to a general audience. After the talk, one man approaches him.
“Excuse me, Professor, but could you tell me again how long it will be before the Sun turns into a red giant?”
“Certainly; we estimate it at about five billion years.”
“Thank God! I thought you said five million years!”
Guess Robert Frost was wrong too.
And I suspect there would be an atmosphere after all that, although all that cyanobacteria-created free oxygen would last about, say, five minutes. If the heritage of DNA is lucky, there’ll be some thermoacidophiles or some such that survive that holocaust and give evolution a head start – other than that, it’ll have to start over from abiogenesis, and that doesn’t give life much time before the sun enters red-giant stage.
On the other hand… wait for advanced alien species to “rapture” us? To hell (pardon the expression) with that – give us humans a couple centuries more to figure out how to make small self-sustaining ecospheres and we’ll darn well rapture ourselves.
Unless it was meant to be a joke Jason (unlikely given other comments you make), your comment was pretty silly. Why would the best and brightest minds expect any kind of intervention from aliens or a god? I would hope they would use their “best and brightest” evolved human brains to try and do something about it rather than waste time doing useless things like praying.
Jason reminds me of Ann Coulter when she came up with the Raccoon Flatulence varient of ID.
Just so you know, this video was originally done for a Japanese public television show “the Miracle Planet”, and depicts what would happen if one of the moderate size impacts of the Hadean Eon (the first segment of the Precambrian) occurred today. The impactor is about 100 km in diameter: its crater blasts all the way through the crust and plasmifies mantle material underneath. (That’s the wave that spreads over the Earth in about one day, raising surface temps to about 4000.)
Thankfully this is WAY larger than any impact we’ve seen in the last 4 billion years or so. Most of the hunks of rock that size in the Solar System have been swept up into other bodies by now.
Of course, if they REALLY wanted to be scary, they could have shown what happened when “Theia” (the hypothetical Mars-sized body) slammed into the proto-Earth, to produce the Earth and the Moon as the result. Now THAT was a serious impact…
Guess I better start hoarding cans of VanDeKamp’s now. While I’m out getting supplies this evening, I’ll stop by the local hardware store too and pick up some shovels and air filters…
Jason says:
“Oh, look… A[nother] secular “End Times” scenario. Hmm… Maybe the best and brightest minds will be “raptured” by some more advanced alien species before right before something like this happens.”
Well at least you are marginally amusing in your paranoia. The difference between the “evil secular” scientists and you end-timers is that all you can do is sit around and wait to get killed/sucked up/whatever. Meanwhile the nasty secular scientists are working on a solution to save your lazy ass from such a scenario, should it become probable. I’d be thanking them if I were you. After all, WWJD if someone saved his life?
For those interested, here is the original version (with Japanese narration and, IMO, better sound track and sound effects):
Rocky,
The supposed “300 km P/Tr crater” is, umm, how to put this delicately… A set of rather premature conclusions.
Scans seem to suggest a circular object underneath the ice, which might be a crater. If so, its big. Since the K/T extinction seems to have an impactor (with a ~150 km diameter crater) as its ultimate cause, than this might cause an even bigger one. The P/Tr extinction is bigger (in terms of biodiversity overtun) than the K/T one. So…
In other words: they have not demonstrated it is a crater, nor have they have not demonstrated that it is at the P/Tr boundary. There is still much, much more research to be done on that structure.
Also, there are number of really nasty terrestrial phenomena already known to be happening at 251 million years ago, so that there is no reason to suspect an impactor. (The much-hyped buckyballs found at the boundary have not yet been replicated in other labs, as far as I have seen in the literature. Nor are the expected ejecta and related material (iridium, tektites, etc.) yet shown.)
Forgot to mention this about the Impact video: I don’t believe that any human-generated structure (such as the Temple of Poseidon or Big Ben’s tower) would survive the powerful H-bomb level winds and magnitude 12+ earthquakes that would be fealt globally before the mantle plasma waves start baking everything. But it looks cooler that way…
You missed the other significant difference. We aren’t rejoicing at this possibility and hoping it comes soon.
“Oh, look… A[nother] secular “End Times” scenario. Hmm… Maybe the best and brightest minds will be “raptured” by some more advanced alien species before right before something like this happens.”
Arthur Dent was Raptured? Suddenly I see the Hitchhiker’s Guide in a whole new light.
Thomas R. Holtz, Jr., thank you sir. Good info. The gravity maps seems to show further investigation is warranted, if nothing else to further research impact sites. The P-T boundary impact hypothesis is no doubt not in stone by any means. Recent info I’ve read seems to indicate three distince phases occured, and the Siberian traps and rising methane levels over a 50 thousand year timeframe was possibly the cause. Other reserchers have noted “fullerenes” in the correct level of deposits, so an impact of the right age has been predicted. Would be interesting to see if both events were synergistic somehow.
What a wonderful time to be alive!
Of course, if they REALLY wanted to be scary, they could have shown what happened when “Theia” (the hypothetical Mars-sized body) slammed into the proto-Earth, to produce the Earth and the Moon as the result. Now THAT was a serious impact…
Especially considering the catastrophic lack of soft-drink containers in that era…
Not quite the “most horrific ever,” PZ. They could have had Kent Hovind narrate.
I suspect that anything insufficently large to simply shatter the planet won’t actually kill off all the deep-sea life that doesn’t give a damn what happens 10,000 feet over its head. From there, we can skip ahead to the recolonization of the upper oceans and it’s a skip and a jump to higher terrestrial lifeforms.
BlueIndependent: “The difference between the “evil secular” scientists and you end-timers is that all you can do is sit around and wait to get killed/sucked up/whatever. ”
I wish – the problem with the Rapturists is that they vote for slaughter and destruction, on the grounds, that it’s All Good, and that they’ll be pulled out.
NBarnes,
True, anything that didn’t affect the deepest sea would not eliminate all multicellular life. In the particular size impact shown here, though, there are no more oceans left: surficial planetary temperatures are temporarily raised high enough to boil all the ocean to a vapor, down all the way to the bottom of the trenches, and them start melting the crust. Not a happy day, even in the Abyss…
In an event such as the one shown, would any traces of humanity be left? Would sucessor life (or visiting aliens) be able to tell we ever existed? Any traces of cities/etc. on the surface would be first cooked in the 4k heat, then scoured by whatever successor atmosphere formed, and then eroded and buried if a rain cycle got reestablished. Anything left from that would get subducted by plate tectonics.
There’d be whatever we’ve left on the moon, and anything in a stable enough orbit to stay up (like satellites in high geosynchronous orbits, though I dunno what they’d look like in a billion years).
Look on the bright side: as jimBOB pointed out, such an event would leave traces that we existed, including artifacts on the moon and in orbit. Presumably the atmosphere will contain a lot more oxygen than one would normally expect. The banded iron formations might survive, as would various fossils.
So any aliens who come along after us will have a chance to find out that we existed. That won’t be the case when the sun turns into a red giant. Or if the universe wakes up and realizes that it hasn’t had a good supernova in our part of the galaxy in too long.
Folks on the Bad Astronomy/Universe Today boards were estimating that this impactor was more like 600 km in diameter, not 100 – there are a couple of images that allow some better size comparison. And, if anything, the post-impact events weren’t violent enough – there would have been a huge disruption on the opposite side of the planet from the point of impact, from the re-converging seismic waves.
Buh-bye, us…
did