Posted on 07/13/2010 2:25:11 PM PDT by sodpoodle
This Stekel while to sink in for some people, but I think you’re on the Reich track.
Well, to be fair the question wasn’t aimed at you per se:)
In prison they have the 95/5. 95% of the population want to get along and do the right thing. Not make waves. The other 5% just want to make trouble.
I love this place. I think I 'fit' right in. LOL
Oh, thanks, no, no, let me take care of it... ;’)
The reason for this is, there were periods punctuated by mass extinctions in that 170 million year stretch, with the K-T mass extinction being the worst of those. The P-T (Permian-Triassic) extinction was actually much worse, over 90 percent of species just went piff. IOW, there is no such problem.
My view remains that, when uniformitarians try to make catastrophe behave, it’s like when old people, well, you know...
An object the size of, say, one of the moons of Mars, would upon impact on the Earth probably sterilize the entire thing, leaving nada, possibly even at depth, where the extremophiles live. All the water on the surface (as well as all or most of the subterranean “seas”, water that has collected in gigantic cracks inside the Earth’s crust) would turn to vapor in a time frame from near-instantaneously to a few hours.
IOW, this would be something to avoid, if at all possible.
The P-T extinction involved one or more impacts (by “one or more”, think of the SL-9 comet fragments which rained down over a couple of weeks and scarred Jupiter’s face for months) of a mass that was perhaps twice or maybe three times that of the impactor at the K-T extinction. The K-T object may have been as large as ten miles across.
An object one mile across (give or take velocity and mass, but these would be quibbles) on impact would release more energy than all the Earth’s nukes if they were piled up and set off simulataneously.
An object two miles across (same quibbles) would be eight times that much (at least), and represents more energy than has been released by all human activity throughout history and prehistory, combined. Kind of a lot, really.
Uh-oh. I’d better rethink some things... ;’)
http://www.enchantedlearning.com/subjects/dinosaurs/glossary/Period.shtml
You never disappoint;)
Has the Earth’s orbit ever changed with these violent assaults? Not even a smidgeon?
p.s. Someone needs to smack Mel Gibson:)
When the chips are down, the buffalo is empty.
It’s possible that it exists, but it’s supposedly been ruled out at least three times, by various means. Still crops up in conversation, simply due to the (obviously non-periodic, merely occasional) violent mass extinction events.
There’s sometimes a whacky contingent of Sitchin followers and wannabees, who claim there’s a Nibiru that’s been on the same comet-like orbit for millions of years, and despite its Brigadoon-like life, somehow developed an advanced civilization first, and then turned a bunch of Earth monkeys and a bunch of petri dishes into a slave species we like to call, uh, us.
That school (such as it is) seizes on every little flicker in its psych meds to proclaim that, no, really, this time we mean it, Nibiru (or whatever moniker each uses) is on its way, and (guess what) NASA, the Trilateral Commission, the Bildebergers, the Skull ‘n’ Bones, and even the crew of Apollo 20 which filmed alien cities on the back side of the Moon are in cahoots to keep this covered up.
Ahem.
But anyway, my guess is, there’s no Oort Cloud per se, there’s probably not a Kuiper Belt per se, either, and if there are any decent-sized planets beyond Pluto, they probably move in retrograde because they were captured by the Sun, with or without the help of Jupiter and the other known planets.
That’s true about Mel Gibson, and Russell Crowe for that matter. Weird, because I pretty much always like them in their film roles, *and* I like Australia. Ah well.
[’Civ pauses as he’s seized by an AC/DC “Rock and Roll Train” flashback]
[’Civ pauses as the previous flashback triggers a “Friday On My Mind” flashback]
Whew. Luckily, there wasn’t a Crowded House flashback.
The mass of the Earth has always been really, really huge by comparison with the impactors; in order to get a handle on how the Earth’s orbit might have changed (and it would have changed a smidgeon, probably) we’d have to have some idea of what the Earth’s orbit *was*, and that’s probably going to remain a matter of speculation until some clever person figures out time travel of some sort. ;’)
My thanks to whomever it was sent me this link, originally. It was actually a saved XML file, and didn’t do what it was supposed to, AND I do apologize to whomever sent it, I should have saved that information in the same folder.
Muller, one of the good guys, in case anyone wondered.
http://muller.lbl.gov/
Muller’s Nemesis page:
http://muller.lbl.gov/pages/lbl-nem.htm
Here’s an answer to Muller’s question:
http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://131.243.129.75:554/ramgen/Teid/TABL/Mar-18-2005-CBC-Muller.rm
All you had to do was list the various other “lesser” extinctions that occurred. Hopefully a moon sized object will never hit us. However, we must all know that sooner or later the sun will kill all life when it goes.
Now I'm agonna have to read up on perturbation theory.
But one would think any large impactor would have some effect on a planets orbit. Uranus got rolled by something. Maybe not an impactor. Prolly happened when "Venus" came cruising by on it's way to become Venus.
(Sigh!) It figures. That’ll be just as the Mariners are getting ready to win their first World Series.
Isn’t the pre-Cambrian extinction, sometimes called ‘iceball earth’, thought to be the worst mass extinction these days.
In the long run Stichin will be shown to be more correct than we give him credit for I suspect.
I remember years ago when the term "millions" seemed like a lot........
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