The recent meteorite event in Siberia,
has a number of people wondering just how great is the risk of riding on a
planet racing through rock littered space? Other than TPP’s gut reaction that if this is the sort of worry that
keeps you awake at night, you need some help, botanists really don't know about such things. However, this was an interesting question and people with more data have
thought about it as well. Meteor Crater
in Arizona is quite a blemish on the surface of the Earth, and according to the
people who have studied it, an area of 1000 square kilometers was
devastated by this meteorite strike. Based upon the number of such craters on Earth, a meteorite strike this
big happens about every 1500 years. The
Earth is pretty big in comparison with a
surface area of about 510,000,000 square kilometers, so your chance of being in
the wrong 1000 square kilometers, is 1 in 510,000, but this is only going to
happen once every 1500 years, so that’s one in 765,000,000 chances of getting
slammed by a meteorite in a year's time. (And in the
process TPP figured out the “calculate” command buried deeply in MSWord.) To put this another way, about 1 person will get killed by a meteorite somewhere on Earth about every 50 years. Some people worry about the “big one”, a
meteorite big enough to pretty much wipe out most of life on Earth, the sort
hypothesized to have caused the big extinction event at the end of the
Cretaceous. Now we have the technology
to be able to observe such a threat and predict where and when the impact will
occur. For one of these events, best get
an extra large margarita, sit back and just watch the show. The dinosaurs never knew what hit them, but
that’s how we differ from them. HT tobandolier.The recent meteorite event in Siberia,
has a number of people wondering just how great is the risk of riding on a
planet racing through rock littered space? Other than TPP’s gut reaction that if this is the sort of worry that
keeps you awake at night, you need some help, botanists really don't know about such things. However, this was an interesting question and people with more data have
thought about it as well. Meteor Crater
in Arizona is quite a blemish on the surface of the Earth, and according to the
people who have studied it, an area of 1000 square kilometers was
devastated by this meteorite strike. Based upon the number of such craters on Earth, a meteorite strike this
big happens about every 1500 years. The
Earth is pretty big in comparison with a
surface area of about 510,000,000 square kilometers, so your chance of being in
the wrong 1000 square kilometers, is 1 in 510,000, but this is only going to
happen once every 1500 years, so that’s one in 765,000,000 chances of getting
slammed by a meteorite in a year's time. (And in the
process TPP figured out the “calculate” command buried deeply in MSWord.) To put this another way, about 1 person will get killed by a meteorite somewhere on Earth about every 50 years. Some people worry about the “big one”, a
meteorite big enough to pretty much wipe out most of life on Earth, the sort
hypothesized to have caused the big extinction event at the end of the
Cretaceous. Now we have the technology
to be able to observe such a threat and predict where and when the impact will
occur. For one of these events, best get
an extra large margarita, sit back and just watch the show. The dinosaurs never knew what hit them, but
that’s how we differ from them. HT tobandolier.