Robert T. Bakker Quotes

If the Earth gets hit by an asteroid, it's game over. It's control-alt-delete for civilization.

This planet is 15 million years overdue for an asteroid strike like the one that killed the dinosaurs.

An asteroid can literally destroy 80 or 90 percent of the species that are alive on Earth. These are big events. I mean, this is called extinction.

If you get asteroids about a kilometer in size, those are large enough and carry enough energy into our system to disrupt transportation, communication, the food chains, and that can be a really bad day on Earth.

Threats that could wipe out the bulk of life on earth abound. Planetary catastrophe could come in the form of a killer asteroid impact, the eruption of massive supervolcanoes, a nearby gamma ray burst that sterilizes the earth, or by human-driven environmental collapse.

What happens if a big asteroid hits Earth ? Judging from realistic simulations involving a sledge hammer and a common laboratory frog, we can assume it will be pretty bad.

When you look at Earth from that one picture, the one from space, it's really a rather attractive thing. I have nothing against the planet per se. I root for the big comet or asteroid as a way of cleansing the planet. The comet or asteroid 65 million years ago is probably what gave us our opening to replace the reptiles. The greatest entertainment I have in my life is chronicling internally, not necessarily for the public, the slow dissolution of order.

Americans who read the papers or watch Jay Leno have been aware for some time now that there is a slim but real possibility - about 1 in 45,000 - that an 850-foot-long asteroid called Apophis could strike Earth with catastrophic consequences on April 13, 2036.

the day the asteroid hit the Yucatan Peninsula and wiped out the dinosaurs, making room for our little primate ancestors to grow big and brainy and to take over the planet.

It's much more likely that an asteroid will strike the Earth and annihilate life as we know it than AI will turn evil.

The dinosaurs never saw that asteroid coming. What's our excuse?

While we didn't know the dinosaurs personally, we do know that they were wiped out by an asteroid impact.

Of the four billion life forms which have existed on this planet, three billion, nine hundred and sixty million are now extinct. We don't know why. Some by wanton extinction, some through natural catastrophe, some destroyed by meteorites and asteroids. In the light of these mass extinctions it really does seem unreasonable to suppose that Homo sapiens should be exempt. Our species will have been one of the shortest-lived of all, a mere blink, you may say, in the eye of time.

There is good reason to believe that we have already entered the Sixth Extinction, a period of destruction of species on a massive scale, comparable to the Fifth Extinction 65 million years ago, when three-quarters of the species on earth were destroyed, apparently by a huge asteroid.

Because our lungs regularly deal with carbon dioxide, they see nothing wrong with absorbing its cousin, SiO2, which can be fatal. Many dinosaurs might have died this way when a metropolis-sized asteroid or comet struck the earth 65 million years ago.

If one wants to talk about the end of the world, the apocalypse, you're talking about the world itself. It's not Southern California breaking into the sea. The story is global, and it requires that kind of approach.

Most people have already seen a cosmic collision. If you've seen a shooting star ever, you've seen a cosmic collision, because a shooting star is not a star. It's a tiny dust or pea sized fragment of an asteroid or a comet hitting our atmosphere and burning up as it hits in, as it comes in.

Some 5 billion years from now, there will be a last perfect day on Earth... then the sun will begin to die, life will be extinguished, the oceans will boil and evaporate away.

With respect to phenomena like mass extinction, somebody might say why worry about it because in a geological perspective mass extinctions aren't so bad, they wipe out some things and then 10 million years down the road we get new and interesting objects.But I tell you mass extinctions are really awful for folks caught in the midst of them.

Nuclear holocaust would be like no other.

I think the evangelicals want to provoke an immense global disaster to precipitate the second coming of Christ.

Armageddon is not a foreign policy.

There is a very real danger that we will kill everything on this planet now that we have the technological power to do so.