There is evidence that the asteroid that created the Chicxulub crater didn’t wipe out the dinosaurs:
New clues at other sites in Mexico showed that the extinction must have occurred 300,000 years after the Chicxulub impact and that even larger asteroids may not be the purveyors of doom they’re thought to be, according to a paper published in the Journal of the Geological Society by researchers from Princeton, New Jersey, and Lausanne, Switzerland.
“We found that not a single species went extinct as a result of the Chicxulub impact,” said Gerta Keller, a professor of geosciences at Princeton University, in a release distributed by the Geological Society of London. “These are astonishing results.”
Maybe. But even if true, it’s not an excuse to ignore the problem. Being hit by one of these things will mean a bad day, and maybe a bad decade, depending on its size and strike location. Tonguska was only a hundred years ago, and if it were to hit a populated area (e.g., the eastern Seaboard) today, it would be more devastating than a nuclear blast (minus the radiation), potentially killing hundreds of thousands of people. Even if it didn’t wipe out species, you can bet that anything that can create a crater over a hundred miles across wiped out a lot of life. We should still be investing a lot more than we are to become spacefaring, and prevent a repeat.
And what’s frustrating is that we wouldn’t even necessarily have to spend more money. We’d just have to spend NASA’s budget smarter. But that wouldn’t keep the jobs in the right districts.
[Update a few minutes later]
I wonder if this topic will come up at the Planetary Defense Conference. Looks interesting — wish I could attend. A. C. Charania is blogging it.
[Update a few minutes later]
Or maybe we shouldn’t waste all this money on planetary defense, and just get the president to apologize and make peace with the solar system.
The defenders of the Chicxulub theory will be hard to convince, Keller said.
The same can be said of Keller, who has been beating this dead horse for the better part of 20 years. Another example of the incompetence of the science press, with a reporter content to publish a press release as “news” rather than to investigate the difference of opinion on a subject and report upon that.
Do we have at least one historical example of a medium to large federal agency which at one time spent most of its money in a dumb way and was later somehow reformed to spend most of its money in a smart way?
My gut is that there probably is not, but I’m hoping I’m wrong. Anybody?
Jeff-
Can you hear the crickets chirping? :\
And here we go again. Go for energy independence, and be serious about it – and get safety from one of the threats to Earth as a bonus; and get a weapon against the 1300-year enemy as a bigger one; and get enough resources to plate the USA a metre deep in steel as a bigger one still.
The answer to all these problems could have been used starting in maybe 1985. 24 years later, we’re still spending the money on pork-barrel projects instead of on the future of humanity. Time to get started, before it’s too late!
It’s like a defense attorney arguing that his client didn’t murder someone because the victim bled to death rather than dying from being shot by the defendant a full five minutes earlier.