The Gulf of Mexico, they believe, is a huge asteroid. That was an impact zone, you know that? Yeah, for that big a thing to actually hit our globe, it would have had to adjusted the spin, the axis.
If the Earth gets hit by an asteroid, it's game over. It's control-alt-delete for civilization.
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.
Some asteroids have us in their sights. Be nice to sort of go near them and find out what they're made of, possibly tag their ears so they're always broadcasting to us their location. In case one of their trajectories head straight for us, we'll know well in advance to do something about it.
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.
"Sooner or later disasters such as an asteroid collision or a nuclear war could wipe us all out, But once we spread out into space and establish independent colonies, our future should be safe."
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 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.
The day that most changed the course of history was
This planet is 15 million years overdue for an asteroid strike like the one that killed the dinosaurs.
The chances that your tombstone will read 'Killed by Asteroid' are about the same as they'd be for 'Killed in Airplane Crash.'
The chunks of comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 were so large, and were moving so fast, that each hit Jupiter with at least the equivalent energy of the dinosaur-killing collision between Earth and an asteroid 65 million years ago. Whatever damage Jupiter sustained, one thing is for sure: it's got no dinosaurs left.
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.
What if an asteroid were to strike planet Earth? What could we possibly do to prevent it? However many guys we have working on this problem, it can't possibly be enough.
Consider that the overwhelming majority of those 40,000 near-Earth asteroids are small enough to fit on the parking lot at the mall. And while these rocky runts won't cause Armageddon, they could still flatten such popular hominid hangouts as Manhattan or downtown Des Moines.
They say asteroids hit the moon pretty often, which is how the moon gets its crater, but this one is going to be the biggest asteroid ever to hit it and on a clear night you should be able to see the impact when it happens, maybe even with the naked eye but certainly with binoculars. They made it sound pretty dramatic, but I still don't think it's worth three homework assignments.
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.
Most estimates of the mortality risk posed by asteroid impacts put it at about the same risk as flying in a commercial airliner. However, you have to remember that this is like the entire human race riding the plane - it is one of the few risks that really could wipe us all out.
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.
While we didn't know the dinosaurs personally, we do know that they were wiped out by an asteroid impact.
It would take an extremely large spacecraft to deflect a large asteroid that would be headed directly for the Earth.
The Moon is a ball of left-over debris from a cosmic collision that took place more than four billion years ago. A Mars-sized asteroid - one of the countless planetesimals that were frantically churning our solar system into existence - hit the infant Earth, bequeathing it a very large natural satellite.
Our moon was born too small to harbor life. It came from the collision of a Mars-sized world into the primordial Earth. From that colossal crunch spun a disk of rocks that condensed into a satellite.
If an asteroid is coming toward you, you don't have to blow it up. You just have to slow it down long enough for our country to rotate out of the way.
Asteroids have hit the Earth millions of times. We can see them as shooting stars every night. When they get bigger, things get complicated. It is only a matter of time until a big one hits us. And since we can do something about it, we should.