Will life as we know it, end?

Question

Will life end when and if an asteriod hits Earth? What do you guys think about this? You do realize this is what killed the dinosaurs!!!!

Answer 1

If a big enough asteroid were to hit the Earth, life as we know it would indeed cease to exist. If, however, by the time it got through the Earth's atmosphere it was about the size of a football or a Chevy Suburban Vehicle, we would have nothing but a humongous scare on our hands.

Asteroids vary in size and composition. Some are dirty ice and others are huge rocky substances of irregular shape. Sizes vary from 600 miles in width to only 3 yards wide. Some 200 asteroids have orbits which cross the Earth's orbit and some ten times that number have yet to be found. Collision by one or more will surely occur at some point in time. There are only about 4 - 5 more billion years left for those collisions to occur.

Answer 2

exactly what David said, but don't forget that the asteriod that killed the dinosaurs didn't kill everything on the planet. So i would say not all life, but a substantial amount.

Answer 3

What the others have said are all possible scenarios. Other causes of mass extinction could be the greenhouse effect (either natural or induced by us, it doesn't matter how), severe volcanic activity, die-off of the blue-green algae in the oceans and/or die-off of sufficient numbers of oxygen producing plant species on land, and others.

But if life as we know it is destroyed by any of these means - which aren't very likely, by the way - so what? The life on Earth has a totally insignificant effect on the rest of the Universe.

The Universe got along just fine without us for billions of years before we existed; it will continue to do so after we are gone.

Forget about "life as we know it" ending. Enjoy YOUR life as YOU know it now. It is all you will ever have and all any of us will ever have.

Big Al Mintaka

Answer 4

Yes if an asteroid of sufficient size hits us, it will either knock us back into the stone age or do us in totally. It just depends on the size and speed of the object...even at what angle it hits. This is the best reason we have for maintaining a well funded space exploration and science effort, because it is our best defense, and it is not a matter of if but WHEN we will need to defend ourselves.

Answer 5

We will probably destroy ourselves before something else does. About 3.5 billion years from now our sun ( an average star ) will have become a "red giant". This will destroy Mercury, Venus, Earth, and probably Mars as well. I've also read there's a chance that we may collide with another galaxy in a couple billion years. Andromada? Not sure of the spelling...Either way, the earth is doomed...

Answer 6

We have plenty of telescopes monitoring the sky for killer asteriods, and programs to deflect any we might find. Seeing how the frequency is something like one every 100,000 years, we're not all that worried.

Answer 7

Yes I realize it is what killed the dinosaurs. But we are mammals, and smart ones too, so we will survive, just like the mammals did after the dinosaurs were killed.

Answer 8

An asteroid didnt kill the dinosaurs, jeff goldblum did. Dont worry though, if an asteroid comes to earth, we have bruce willis to blow it up. then aerosmith and us can ROCK OUT!

Answer 9

well, according to the ancient Mayan studies, life will end on December 23, 2012, but yet again they also said it would end in the year 2000, but were still here and alive, so I'm not sure.

Answer 10

If there was so big an asteroid that no bombs or efforts could blow it up, i'm sure that we could always run into the subways like the homeless