Asteroid Kills the Dinosaurs

[dryson]

Scientists re-affirm theory that giant asteroid killed dinosaurs.com

Here is an article that must be discussed and should open new thoughts. The article is about the confirmation of reassuring everyone that an asteroid did in fact strike the Earth and kill the dinosaurs. Two new questions I now pose in this determination.

I think that the fact that humanity was not around before the impact of the asteroid but evolved as a result of the dramatic change in the eco-sphere of the planet due to the impact should raise two new questions.

1. How did the asteroid change the microbial DNA into the celluar mechanism of microbials here on Earth into the first human beings?

2.If the change in the microbial DNA was not a result of Earth based microbials being affected and actually came along for the ride on the asteroid then from what direction did the astroid come from and how far away did it travel to get here? This could pave the way to possibly finding the remnants of another planet in the system that the asteroid came from that could have at one time sustained life and for some reason was destroyed .....or may still exist and was the inhabitants way of saying here we are.

All we need to do is calculate the telementry from the impact site back through the history of the asteroids path of travel. We then point Hubble in the direction of the asteroids path and see where it came from. Something that big would had to have come from a result of forces far greater than that that is roaming around the asteroid belt within our system.

 

[bdewoody]

The way I understand it, mammals were already evolved during the last great dinosaur age but were small and stayed in hiding most of the time. After the extinction event with the lower levels of oxygen in the atmosphere mammals ended up being the dominant animal life on the planet. I doubt that the asteroid introduced any new DNA to the mix.

 

[origin]

The way I understand it, mammals were already evolved during the last great dinosaur age but were small and stayed in hiding most of the time. After the extinction event with the lower levels of oxygen in the atmosphere mammals ended up being the dominant animal life on the planet. I doubt that the asteroid introduced any new DNA to the mix.

Yep, that is essentially the theory that is most reasonable and fits the data. Dryson tends to find an isolated piece of factual data and then he injects fantasy, fiction and mythology into the mix resulting in a ludicrous result, which is essentially the recipe for writting science fiction.

 

[CalliArcale]

I think that the fact that humanity was not around before the impact of the asteroid but evolved as a result of the dramatic change in the eco-sphere of the planet due to the impact should raise two new questions.

1. How did the asteroid change the microbial DNA into the celluar mechanism of microbials here on Earth into the first human beings?

2.If the change in the microbial DNA was not a result of Earth based microbials being affected and actually came along for the ride on the asteroid then from what direction did the astroid come from and how far away did it travel to get here? This could pave the way to possibly finding the remnants of another planet in the system that the asteroid came from that could have at one time sustained life and for some reason was destroyed .....or may still exist and was the inhabitants way of saying here we are.

Are you suggesting that humans evolved from microbes alive 65 million years ago? If so, the fossil evidence does not agree with you. Mammals evolved about the same time as dinosaurs -- our order is actually older than the bird order. Indeed, it is possible that we (or something like us) would have evolved much sooner had it not been for the dinosaurs. We evolved out of a group of reptiles called the synapsids. (Actually, we are still synapsids -- the term refers to the number of holes in our skulls.) The synapsids dominated the landscape in the Permian, and there were quite large ones roaming the surface of Pangaea. One of the more famous examples is the Permian apex predator Dimetrodon (which was not a direct ancestor of the mammal line, but related to it). The name is a bit of a hint -- "dimetrodon" means "two-size-teeth". One of the defining characteristics of mammals is that nearly all mammals have multiple types of tooth in the same mouth. That feature is rare outside of Mammalia (though there are some examples, e.g. venomous snakes, particularly vipers with their sophisticated fangs). But synapsids did not fare well in the Great Dying; few survived apart from the line that would ultimately produce mammals. Dinosaurs moved into most of the vacated niches. Later, when the large dinosaurs died out, leaving just the birds as their only surviving kin, mammals moved back in. And eventually, that led to us.

It's hard to compare modern DNA with Mesozoic DNA, mostly because we don't have much Mesozoic DNA to work with. We can show that humans are quite closely related to other living vertebrates; we share a great deal of DNA even with plants. So it seems unlikely that our line carries alien DNA added 65 million years ago. There was one interesting experiment involving Mesozoic DNA. Some soft tissue was found in a Tyrannosaurus femur. It was substantially degraded, but there was enough left to make some comparisons to modern chickens. It was very similar, so odds are that birds at least didn't get an injection of alien DNA. (Interesting sidenote: they also worked out that the T. rex in question was female, and preparing to lay eggs.)

All we need to do is calculate the telementry from the impact site back through the history of the asteroids path of travel. We then point Hubble in the direction of the asteroids path and see where it came from. Something that big would had to have come from a result of forces far greater than that that is roaming around the asteroid belt within our system.

This is much easier said that done. We don't even know what direction the impactor came from, and even if we did, with our current understanding of celestial mechanics, the motions of small bodies cannot be predicted that far out; 65 million years from now, we have absolutely no idea where the asteroids will be. (Okay, we can guess that most of the main belt ones will still be in the main belt, but that's not very specific.)

 

[3488]

Yes, the larger synapsids where killed off in The Great Dying, buut the smaller ones survived by remaining close to the coastal areas of Pangea, but even here life was pretty tough, there were certainly rivers & fresh water springs that were able to be maintained by the coastal rains, but anything larger than a doormouse would have been rendered unviable in the desert interior.

I agree, that most if not all of the larger asteroids in the Asteroid Belt such as 1 Ceres, 2 Pallas, 4 Vesta, 10 Hygeia, etc, will probably remain in more or less their current orbits during the next 65 million years & possibly for far longer.

The Dinosaur killing asteroid is now thought to be a fragment from the parent body of Asteroid 298 Baptistina, now a 40 KM wide asteroid, broken apart roughly 160 million years ago by a massive impact, shattering the original 170 KM wide Type C asteroid. One fragment MAY have been the KT impactor, another could have formed the Tycho Crater on the Moon, some 55 million years ago, there may also be craters on Mercury, Mars, 1 Ceres, 2 Pallas, 4 Vesta, etc also related. There may also still be Apollo & Amor asteroids still orbiting the Sun from this impact.

However some recent doubts have arisen in that the chemical signature is not quite the same, the KT layer has aslightly greater carbonaceous content then Asteroid 298 Baptistina.

Andrew Brown.

 

[Couerl]

we share a great deal of DNA even with plants.

Around 11% that of wheat in fact. :lol:

The article doesn't mention anything about DNA or microbes so there's little point addressing them. There are still some very puzzling questions that remain assuming that the asteroid did in fact do the dinosaurs in (which, I concur with in general). The fossil record indicates a general dying of species well before the KT, which points more to an overall climate shift/change instead of a singularly focused mechanism. One dubious fact is that the asteroid seems to have been very selective in terms of what lived and what died with no solid explanation. I.E. Alligators, frogs and turtles lived and indeed horseshoe crabs (400 million years, two great extinctions and still going strong) vs. Ammonites, Belemnites and dozens of species with similar biological needs and habitats to those of the amphibians and mammals all died. It wouldn't surprise me a bit to discover that dinosaurs were on their way out with or without any asteroid and that the great inland sea covering Utah and Colorado and upwards to Canada sequestered vast amounts of salt, reducing oceanic salinity and playing a larger role than the asteroid itself. I think the rock was at best only the last straw for an already heavily burdened ecosystem and that they were going with or without it.

 

[dryson]

It would still be interesting to see what trajectory the actual asteroid impacted at so that we can use a laser pointing system to point in the general direction that the asteroid came from. It might not have come from the asteroid in question but may have come from a different source. Sometimes I wonder how science survives by only taking the obvious to the head instead of looking for the obvious and asking maybe this happened. If crazy questions are not asked then how are we to know what to look for outside of the box?

 

[MeteorWayne]

What part of the fact that we can have no idea of what path (orbit) of an asteroid that impacted 65 million years ago was on do you not understand?
Jeez...what profound ignorance

 

[robnissen]

It would still be interesting to see what trajectory the actual asteroid impacted at so that we can use a laser pointing system to point in the general direction that the asteroid came from.

You are missing the most basic point of celestial mechanics as well as basic science. To steal from the medical world...when you see hoofprints, think horses, not zebras. The odds are MUCH, MUCH, MUCH higher that this object came from within this solar system, not from outside of it. Thus, it was in orbit around the sun and then approx. 60M years ago its orbital path crossed that of earth's. Therefore, even if we could somehow tell the direction of impact (which we can't) that would tell us nothing but a tiny little piece of the orbital path. Now, you appear to be speculating on the infinitley smaller possibility that the object came from outside the solar system, shot like a rifle and hit earth. But again thas shows your woeful ignorance of celestiral mechanics. Even assuming we could somehow tell the direction of impact, that would still tell us nothing. There are only two possible scenarios for an extra solar object to hit earth. 1). The extra-solar object entered the solar system, got caught by the sun's immense gravity well, and went into orbit around the sun. In which case, to us it would just look like a solar system object. Or 2) the object was too big and too fast to be captured by the sun's immense gravity well, which is pretty strong at 1 AU. Now from the size of the impact, we know that relatively speaking the object was not that large. So unless it was traveling with immense speed (othes here can say what that speed would need to be), it would have been captured by the sun. But even assuming its speed was too great to be captured, the sun's gravity would change the orbit to some part of a parobala, so again it would be impossible to draw a straight line back to where the extra-solar object came from.

 

[dryson]

Here is another theory I have on how the dinosaurs became extinct.

I was reading an article on the Oort Cloud and its size. I then had a flashpoint (a synaptic response to a question triggered by another question being asked)of how life came to be in the Sol System. The Oort Cloud is comprised of Ice Dwarfs and Frozen Cometary Nuclei. These objects reflect light and are constantly breaking into smaller pieces due to colliding with each other. When they do they create smaller frakments of theirself that continue to populate the Oort Cloud. Light Photon's that are emitted at the speed of light from the Sun come into contact with these bodies in the Oort Cloud, when this happens they are reflected to new locations, or absorbed, or come into contact with the particles until they are reflected away from the Oort Cloud. When this happens the photon's energy is kept within the Sol System where it incubates places like Earth where the temperature is kept at a constant rate that keeps the Sol System in a life sustaining zone. Basically the Oort Cloud is like the surface of your oven or microwave where it reflects the Sun's photons around and cause your loaf of bread to be baked. When we find a way to detect other clouds like the Oort Cloud in space then we can at least say that at the center of the cloud similar to the Oort Cloud there might be a 75% chance of life existing on a planet similar to Earth where lifeforms similar to us may be living wondering if there is anyone out there.
This idea then led me to an understanding that if there was a large enough hole in the Oort Cloud that the photons would escape through the hole allowing the necessary heat in our oven to leak out. This loss of heat in the Sol System would could have caused the Earth to cool drastically thu causing the Ice Age on Earth. Until the hole had been repaired
the Earth stayed in a ice age. After the hole had been repaired by it's own calamity the heat would have built back up and melted the Earth back to a level of sustaining life.

 

[MeteorWayne]

Here is another theory I have on how the dinosaurs became extinct.

I was reading an article on the Oort Cloud and its size. I then had a flashpoint (a synaptic response to a question triggered by another question being asked)of how life came to be in the Sol System. The Oort Cloud is comprised of Ice Dwarfs and Frozen Cometary Nuclei. These objects reflect light and are constantly breaking into smaller pieces due to colliding with each other. When they do they create smaller frakments of theirself that continue to populate the Oort Cloud. Light Photon's that are emitted at the speed of light from the Sun come into contact with these bodies in the Oort Cloud, when this happens they are reflected to new locations, or absorbed, or come into contact with the particles until they are reflected away from the Oort Cloud. When this happens the photon's energy is kept within the Sol System where it incubates places like Earth where the temperature is kept at a constant rate that keeps the Sol System in a life sustaining zone. Basically the Oort Cloud is like the surface of your oven or microwave where it reflects the Sun's photons around and cause your loaf of bread to be baked. When we find a way to detect other clouds like the Oort Cloud in space then we can at least say that at the center of the cloud similar to the Oort Cloud there might be a 75% chance of life existing on a planet similar to Earth where lifeforms similar to us may be living wondering if there is anyone out there.
This idea then led me to an understanding that if there was a large enough hole in the Oort Cloud that the photons would escape through the hole allowing the necessary heat in our oven to leak out. This loss of heat in the Sol System would could have caused the Earth to cool drastically thu causing the Ice Age on Earth. Until the hole had been repaired
the Earth stayed in a ice age. After the hole had been repaired by it's own calamity the heat would have built back up and melted the Earth back to a level of sustaining life.

Sorry dryson, but this is a bunch of meaningless word salad not fit for this forum.

First, Oort cloud objects do not break into pieces from collisions, they are far too distant from each other for that to be a realistic process.

PS, it's fragment.

Reflections of photons from the Oort cloud have NO discernable effect on the objects in the inner solar system; the solar radiation directly from the sun overwhelms it by many, many orders of magnitude.

Unfortuantely, your understanding of real physics is profoundly lacking.

 

[3488]

Hi Wayne, I guess that Dryson is thinking that the purported Oort Cloud is acting like a kind of natural Dyson Sphere.

Members of the Oort Cloud (if it exists) will be very widely spaced apart, probably by several AU??? A spacecraft passing through it would be unaware of its existence unless it happened to pass close to a member, like spaceprobes passing through the Asteroid Belt.

Likewise the Kuiper Belt too. New Horizons will pass the first ever known & second largest KBO with Pluto (Eris is the largest known).

It will certainly not be acting as a barrier.

Andrew Brown.

 

[dryson]

NASA's information says different.
http://solarsystem.nasa.gov/planets/pro ... erviewLong

According to NASA approximately 2 trillion icy bodies inhabitat the Oort Cloud

Occasionally, giant molecular clouds, stars passing nearby, or tidal interactions with the Milky Way's disc disturb the orbit of one of these bodies in the outer region of the Oort Cloud, causing the object to streak into the inner solar system as a so-called long-period comet.

..and somtimes these bodies collide with other bodies in the Oort and make even more icy bodies in the Oort Cloud instead of being pulled towards the Sun where they form comets. If there were not such collisions in the Oort that did not result in more bodies being created that did not become comet's then we would see more comets around the interior of the Solar system but since we do not then the majority of these collisions and their results must remain within the Oort Cloud. Since these bodies are icy and dusty like clean or dirty snow is during the winter then these bodies and particles would reflect the Suns photons back around inside of the Solar System. If this wasnt true then why do people get snow burns during the winter time? Is it because of the heat? No it is because of the reflective nature of the snow and ice that the photons are being reflected off of . I also know this to be true because I am a welder and deal with UV rays and fusion on a daily basis where the process is no more than five inches away from my face. Did you know that when you weld you can get flash burn to your eyes and skin merely by being in an area where the photons reflect off of the white walls or other light colored surface? Now why is this? If snow and ice do not reflect photons then a welder should never get a flash burn as a result of the color of walls in the room that is being welded in but we do.

 

[origin]

NASA's information says different.
http://solarsystem.nasa.gov/planets/pro ... erviewLong

According to NASA approximately 2 trillion icy bodies inhabitat the Oort Cloud

Occasionally, giant molecular clouds, stars passing nearby, or tidal interactions with the Milky Way's disc disturb the orbit of one of these bodies in the outer region of the Oort Cloud, causing the object to streak into the inner solar system as a so-called long-period comet.

..and somtimes these bodies collide with other bodies in the Oort and make even more icy bodies in the Oort Cloud instead of being pulled towards the Sun where they form comets. If there were not such collisions in the Oort that did not result in more bodies being created that did not become comet's then we would see more comets around the interior of the Solar system but since we do not then the majority of these collisions and their results must remain within the Oort Cloud. Since these bodies are icy and dusty like clean or dirty snow is during the winter then these bodies and particles would reflect the Suns photons back around inside of the Solar System. If this wasnt true then why do people get snow burns during the winter time? Is it because of the heat? No it is because of the reflective nature of the snow and ice that the photons are being reflected off of . I also know this to be true because I am a welder and deal with UV rays and fusion on a daily basis where the process is no more than five inches away from my face. Did you know that when you weld you can get flash burn to your eyes and skin merely by being in an area where the photons reflect off of the white walls or other light colored surface? Now why is this? If snow and ice do not reflect photons then a welder should never get a flash burn as a result of the color of walls in the room that is being welded in but we do.

Lets just use some rough numbers. Lets assume that the average distance to the oort cloud is 20,000 AU. Lets also assume that the oort cloud is a sphere. So calculating the surface area of the sphere and putting in the upper limit of oort cloud objects at 5 trillion then we get 1 orrt cloud object for each 2,000,000,000,000 square miles. You are not going to get much of a reflection from that!

edited to add: When I was in the navy this kid was watching a guy weld and we told him he can injure his eyes looking at the arc, so he later got a mirror to watch - what genius! Luckly there was not permanent damage he was just out of commision for a couple days...

 

[dryson]

http://solarsystem.nasa.gov/planets/pro ... erviewLong

The average distance to the Oort Cloud is 5000 AU and the farthest 100,000 AU for a medium range of being 95,000 AU in diameter.

 

[3488]

That may be so dryson, but the distance between the individual members of the purported Oort Cloud will still be many AUs.

A spacecraft passing through would not even be aware of it's existence, unless it happens to pass close by an Oort Cloud comet nucleus.

Andrew Brown.

 

[MeteorWayne]

http://solarsystem.nasa.gov/planets/profile.cfm?Object=KBOs&Display=OverviewLong

The average distance to the Oort Cloud is 5000 AU and the farthest 100,000 AU for a medium range of being 95,000 AU in diameter.

The thicker you make it, the further apart the individual objects are... origin only calculated the surface are of a sphere, not one 95,000 Au thick. That's volume.

PS, I think you meant median, not medium, since it certainly would not be the mean.

 

[origin]

http://solarsystem.nasa.gov/planets/profile.cfm?Object=KBOs&Display=OverviewLong

The average distance to the Oort Cloud is 5000 AU and the farthest 100,000 AU for a medium range of being 95,000 AU in diameter.

I saw a lot of different numbers for the distance that is why I included the 20,000 AU for you to review. Notice I used 5 trillion instead of 2 trillion because the 2 trillion is based on 1km or more in size, I wanted to use a larger number that takes the smaller pieces into account.

So if we use 5000 AU, we get:

1 oort cloud object for every 135,800,000,000 square miles. Still means the reflection of photons would be insignificant.

Agreed?

 

[Fleuve]

the KT layer has aslightly greater carbonaceous content then Asteroid 298 Baptistina.

I've been fortunate to see the K-T boundary up close in Drumheller, AB.
There isn't a doubt in my mind that this was a major, if not THE factor of the mass extinction!
I guess they just finally decided to make it official!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K–T_boundary

 

[Boris_Badenov]