[HN Gopher] Asteroid crater 520km in diameter buried in southeas...
___________________________________________________________________
Asteroid crater 520km in diameter buried in southeast Australia,
scientists say
Author : mafro
Score : 270 points
Date : 2023-08-17 10:39 UTC (12 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.australiangeographic.com.au)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.australiangeographic.com.au)
| botanical wrote:
| Wow that's a huge crater. It's bigger than the Vredefort impact
| structure in South Africa. The Vredefort dome is the second
| oldest at 2 billion years old that can be seen here:
|
| https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b5/Vredefor...
|
| And the full-sized version:
|
| https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/52/Vredefor...
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vredefort_impact_structure
| vidanay wrote:
| > The impact structure was formed during the Paleoproterozoic
| Era, 2.023 billion (+- 4 million) years ago.
|
| > The asteroid that hit Vredefort is estimated to have been one
| of the largest ever to strike Earth since the Hadean Eon some
| four billion years ago...
|
| Let that sink in (ugh) for a while. The Vredefort impact was so
| long ago, it's almost completely eroded away today. And yet,
| when it occurred the Hadean Eon was as ancient then as the
| Vredefort is to us today. The mind boggles.
| lordfrito wrote:
| Article says the center of the impact crater is (was?) around
| 30km deep. Curious how big they think the asteroid that caused
| this was. The article doesn't mention anything, and a lazy search
| online came up with nothing.
|
| Wondering just how big of an asteriod this was, and how capable
| we are of seeing candidate asteroids of this size.
| hu3 wrote:
| http://simulator.down2earth.eu/planet.html?lang=en
|
| According to this calculator you get a 446km diameter crater if
| you input:
|
| - 15km asteroid diameter
|
| - 90o Angle
|
| - 80km/s
|
| - Dense Rock asteroid
|
| - Hitting on Water at level 10m
| m3kw9 wrote:
| Would be wild if aliens had cameras on every planet and one
| day decides to show us what this looked like
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| Little grey dudes sitting us down in the slideshow room to
| show their holiday pictures from a few million years ago,
| lol. "And this is when [?]10[?][?] nearly got eaten by a
| dinosaur!"
| aintgonnatakeit wrote:
| FYI these are the maximums you can input to get the largest
| possible crater using this simulator.
| irrational wrote:
| We're going to need a bigger calculator.
| FireBeyond wrote:
| ... not great, not terrible.
| jacquesm wrote:
| Hehe. That's a great scene. Meanwhile, I think it was big
| enough to do the job.
| hu3 wrote:
| Yeah I had to max inputs on that calculator. Pretty wild.
| jvm___ wrote:
| 15kms at 80km/s
|
| So, for a quarter of a second or less it was touching the
| ground and almost double the height of Everest (8.8kms).
| jacquesm wrote:
| And it still only went down to about twice its diameter.
| Makes you really respect how tough the Earth's crust is.
| jvm___ wrote:
| The deepest borehole, about the size of a coffee can, is
| only 12km deep before the tooling started melting - can't
| drill with a liquid bit...
|
| So 30km down it would be hitting liquid rock and a lot of
| heat.
| jacquesm wrote:
| Yes, the mantle is about that thick. And much thinner in
| some places even. Which makes me wonder how they detected
| this crater and what the crater is formed _in_. This is
| the relevant bit from the article:
|
| "Between 1995 and 2000, Tony Yeates suggested magnetic
| patterns beneath the Murray Basin in New South Wales
| likely represented a massive, buried impact structure. An
| analysis of the region's updated geophysical data between
| 2015 and 2020 confirmed the existence of a 520km diameter
| structure with a seismically defined dome at its centre.
|
| The Deniliquin structure has all the features that would
| be expected from a large-scale impact structure. For
| instance, magnetic readings of the area reveal a
| symmetrical rippling pattern in the crust around the
| structure's core. This was likely produced during the
| impact as extremely high temperatures created intense
| magnetic forces."
|
| But they would not able to verify that at that depth
| without a lot of drilling and the end of the article
| suggests that they have yet to do so.
| tomatotomato37 wrote:
| It makes me wonder what an impactor like that would do if
| intercepted by the moon; that may be even enough mass to
| cause a temporary ring field just from the debris
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| I wonder if just the atmosphere would've caused it to
| explode already. At those speeds it'd go through the
| atmosphere within a second though.
| pmayrgundter wrote:
| Got me thinking, What happens, when and where.
|
| A column of air weighs ~1kg/cm^2 (handy!), and the
| example has a 15km span of "Dense Rock" which I've seen
| mean "Dense Rock Equivalent" in the Volcanic Explosivity
| Index, where it has a density of 2,500 kg/m^3. Assuming
| that, a column of the asteroid is
|
| 2500kg/cm^2/(100cm/m * 100cm/m) = .25kg/m * 15km =
| 3,750kg
|
| The kinetic energy per column of the impactor is 1/2mv^2,
| or 0.5 * 3750 * 80000m/s^2, or
|
| 1875 * 6.4e9m^2/s^2 = 1.2e13 Joules
|
| Which is about 20 gallons of gasoline equivalent. As you
| say, that's absorbed in ~1s (space is 100km up, so 80km/s
| is just about right). If so that warms up and starts
| melting the surface of the asteroid, but not much more I
| guess.
| pmayrgundter wrote:
| Whoops, I carried down the wrong number to the gasoline
| conversion.. I left off the 1875
|
| The _whole impact_ is like 40000 gallons of gasoline per
| cm^2 of surface, or I think like 2kt TNT.
|
| So then, not sure what the kinetics/kinematics is there.
| How much is released by the atmosphere impact vs then the
| surface stopping the asteroid.
| pmayrgundter wrote:
| Ok! ChatG4 is amazing!
|
| https://chat.openai.com/share/25e4cef6-321a-43f7-8d13-40d
| 1fd...
|
| Summary: my initial math checks out for the total KE of
| the asteroid, and then we used that to look at the
| surface heating by the compressed atmosphere and then the
| Fourier heat analysis of conduction into the asteroid
| surface
|
| Answer: Tho the atmosphere would be heated to 100k
| degrees and that's 1000x more than needed for
| vaporization of e.g. granite, the duration of ~1s means
| that only a few millimeters of surface would be vaporized
| by the time of impact.
| serf wrote:
| does it give the same answer repeatedly? every time i've
| tried to solve problems like that with chatgpt i've been
| given beautifully worded garbage that doesn't commpute by
| hand, and won't be repeated if I retry the prompt.
| pmayrgundter wrote:
| That's my experience with ChatGPT 3.5. But with 4.. well,
| as far as I'm concerned, this is AGI.
|
| I just did a compacted single-shot request in a new
| session and got the same answer!
|
| It basically elided the simplifying analysis, went
| directly for the heat diffusion equation and based its
| conclusion on that. Impressive.
|
| https://chat.openai.com/share/0c857ebd-779a-4f40-93a9-c35
| cd2...
| Filligree wrote:
| It would be exploding for the duration, but at that size
| you just can't get through much of the asteroid before it
| touches the ground.
| dylan604 wrote:
| That's why "dense rock" setting was used. Imagine if they
| had selected "solid iron". I don't know what settings are
| available for the calculator used, but "loose bunch of
| rocks" would probably fall apart in the atmo, dense rock
| would hold together until impact, and solid iron would
| just keep burrowing further
| kijin wrote:
| A 15km chunk of solid iron, now that's the kind of bunker
| buster you throw around in an interplanetary war.
|
| Would it do more damage to the surface than a rocky
| asteriod of comparable mass, though? If it burrows
| deeper, it means it transfers more of its energy to the
| mantle and core of the Earth, and less to the crust. It
| will be like a full metal jacket bullet that goes
| straight through the target and transfers most of its
| energy to the wall on the other side, versus a regular
| bullet that tumbles and expands as soon as it hits the
| target.
| davidwritesbugs wrote:
| Throwing Meteors as interplanetary weapons was a
| storyline from The Expanse books/TV series if I recall.
| mekkkkkk wrote:
| Yeah. Bad guy mounted thrusters on large asteroids from
| the belts. Not technically meteors, but close enough.
|
| Neat sci-fi.
| jvm___ wrote:
| Deorbiting a multi-million dollar satellite as a weapon
| was the plot of of a Tom Clancy book. The bad guy was
| going to launch a nuke from his ship and the only thing
| that could get there in time was the super special
| satellite.
| jacquesm wrote:
| Much too large for that. Under 50 meters or so you can
| get airbursts, after that it is direct impact.
| RetroTechie wrote:
| For such a size impactor, atmosphere does nothing. Might
| as well be vacuum.
|
| Sure, milliseconds before impact the atmosphere might be
| super-compressed (and super-heated). Perhaps even exert
| considerable force. But compared with kinetic energy of
| that size impactor, at such speed: negligable.
|
| Small objects 'feel' the atmosphere much stronger.
| Surface area vs. volume.
| jacquesm wrote:
| Whatever parts of the atmosphere were involved in the
| direct vicinity of the impactor would be heated to
| plasma. It is just too much energy, you're talking about
| the equivalent of a massive number of H-Bombs all going
| off at roughly the same time.
| jvm___ wrote:
| It would probably punch a 15km wide hole in the
| atmosphere, no? Which would then rapidly collapse from
| the sides and collide with whatever was ejected... would
| be fun to watch while parked somewhere safe in orbit.
| jacquesm wrote:
| Better not be LEO... I wonder how high the ejecta would
| go and how far they would reach across the planet.
| TacticalCoder wrote:
| Well the article and the title here on HN both says "520km in
| diameter", which gives an idea (although there's more than the
| diameter to estimate the damaged caused by an asteroid, but
| 520km in diameter is quite something).
| ceejayoz wrote:
| That's the crater diameter, which'll be much larger than the
| impactor.
| ChoHag wrote:
| [dead]
| moomoo11 wrote:
| This kinda discovery is why I hold out hope there were super
| advanced ancient civilizations on earth. They just happened to
| figure out Stargates and peaced out entire cities to safer off-
| world locations.
| TearsInTheRain wrote:
| Do you think a stargate is easier to figure out than
| redirecting an asteroid?
| moomoo11 wrote:
| Yes. One shot vs n.
|
| Besides, Earth isn't the only planet suitable for us :)
| layer8 wrote:
| They obviously didn't do the latter, so it must have been the
| former. ;)
| phkahler wrote:
| I have always thought Lake Michigan/Huron look mighty round if
| you follow from the north end down through Green Bay and the Fox
| river to the west, and cut into Canada along the Niagara
| Escarpment [1] on the East. There seem to be signs of a round
| structure all the way down in Ohio. But while this does form a
| roundish structure, the history is quite different than an
| impact:
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Niagara_Escarpment
|
| Still I wonder, what if this other stuff happened in this shape
| because of a giant impact crater billions of years ago before all
| that?
| jacquesm wrote:
| There is the Sudbury crater.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sudbury_Basin
|
| Just North-East of Lake Huron.
| throwaway5752 wrote:
| It's not related to the escarpment, that is a glacial feature.
| Their origin is not impact related, either, it is tectonic (the
| rift valley from a failed continental rift):
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Midcontinent_Rift_System
| sdflhasjd wrote:
| There's also the "Nastapoka arc"[0] of Hudson Bay that looks a
| bit cratery, but is apparently of a different origin.
|
| [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nastapoka_arc
| dboreham wrote:
| Craterish?
| layer8 wrote:
| crater-like
| IIsi50MHz wrote:
| The Crater-ion Collection [cue logo, cue greyscale film
| of various impact events]
| webnrrd2k wrote:
| Crateroid?
| foota wrote:
| Apparently arcuate is the preferred term
| evah wrote:
| It's very distinctive on an elevation map.
|
| https://mrgris.com/projects/oilslick/
|
| I remember thinking there's no way that's not a crater.
| greggsy wrote:
| Thought to be formed as a result of lithospheric flexure
| during the Trans-Hudson orogeny, apparently.
| zhengiszen wrote:
| More important than the size, I think, is the angle of impact...
| Still huge numbers we could just fathom....
| spenczar5 wrote:
| Composition matters a lot too (rubble pile vs monolith). Many
| things affect whether it will be a bolide, and at what
| altitude.
|
| But size is the most important feature because it is unbounded.
| You can't be more direct than a perpendicular impact, but
| asteroids can always be bigger. And a 10km rock at pretty much
| any angle is much more energetic than a 10m rock, no matter
| what you do.
| baq wrote:
| yeah at that size it's going to be a huge-ass almost
| literally earth-shattering explosion no matter the
| composition...
| throwbadubadu wrote:
| Depends, but in general would say no.. energy is speed times
| mass, and mass is cubic in the size, while speed is linear.
|
| Angle is complicated, I mean unless it is very shallow all will
| still go into earth? I wonder if and at which angle it could
| impact earth's rotation, but for that then direction is also
| relevant (:
|
| *: Ah, interesting, the neal.fun/asteroid-launcher also gives
| same energy for different angles except very shallow ones.
| alexpotato wrote:
| I believe that all other factors kept the same, angle does
| matter b/c of the amount and time you spend going through the
| atmosphere.
|
| e.g. a shallower angle means you pass through more atmosphere
| which leads to more heating time which in turn means to
| "icier" asteroids burning off more of the ice.
|
| I can also imagine a scenario where the asteroid passes so
| close that it passes through the atmosphere but doesn't
| actually hit the earth.
| pmayrgundter wrote:
| Doesn't the ratio of mass of asteroid to atmosphere
| dominate? The larger the asteroid, the proportionally less
| momentum it loses to the atmosphere. Not sure how much a
| column of air the radius of a mountain weighs, but seems
| relatively very small?
| irrational wrote:
| I think the hypothesis is Uranus is tilted 90 degrees because
| of a collision. Crazy to think of a similar thing happening
| to the earth.
| adolph wrote:
| _Uranus is the only planet whose equator is nearly at a
| right angle to its orbit, with a tilt of 97.77 degrees -
| possibly the result of a collision with an Earth-sized
| object long ago. This unique tilt causes the most extreme
| seasons in the solar system. For nearly a quarter of each
| Uranian year, the Sun shines directly over each pole,
| plunging the other half of the planet into a 21-year-long,
| dark winter._
|
| _Uranus is also one of just two planets that rotate in the
| opposite direction than most of the planets (Venus is the
| other one), from east to west._
|
| https://solarsystem.nasa.gov/planets/uranus/in-depth/
| ridgeguy wrote:
| Energy is (1/2) _(mass)_ (speed)^2. That ^2 term is
| important.
| Jyaif wrote:
| > energy is speed times mass, and mass is cubic in the size,
| while speed is linear.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kinetic_energy#Kinetic_energy_.
| ..
| CoastalCoder wrote:
| This sounds like the starting point for a cringey song
| about physics.
| mastax wrote:
| Looking at that map, it's wild how many "confirmed impact
| structures more than 100km wide" there are _just in Australia_.
| There must be dozens of mass extinction events that we don 't
| know about because the fossil record is so unclear past 500Mya.
|
| [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extinction_event
|
| [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicxulub_crater
|
| [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth#Natural_history
| greatpostman wrote:
| Every 26k years we pass through an asteroid belt with a high
| probability of impact
| echelon wrote:
| Is there a source for this? I wasn't aware of that, and it
| sounds interesting.
| eesmith wrote:
| 26,000 years sounds more like the period for Earth's axial
| precession. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Axial_precession .
|
| What you describe doesn't make sense. The Earth's orbit is
| effectively constant at that timescale, as are the asteroids
| in the main asteroid belt - otherwise interactions with
| Earth's would have changed the orbit.
|
| There are conjectures of regular extinction events on 30-60M
| year intervals, but the data for that isn't strong. https://e
| n.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extinction_event#Patterns_in_f...
| blahburn wrote:
| Google "Chicxulub crater" for a fun animation
| [deleted]
| jader201 wrote:
| For the lazy:
| https://www.google.com/search?q=Chicxulub+crater
| hindsightbias wrote:
| So New Zealand might not be the best place to bug out to if
| Australia is a meteor magnet.
| eesmith wrote:
| Not that meteor magnets exist, but https://en.wikipedia.org/w
| iki/List_of_impact_craters_on_Eart... says there are more
| known impact craters in Europe than Australia.
| Tronno wrote:
| That's fun to think about, but Precambrian life was generally
| microscopic. Many impact craters across the world date from
| that era, so any extinctions they caused would not be visible
| to the naked eye.
| jandrese wrote:
| Also imagine how many hit the oceans. A water hit can be even
| more catastrophic than a land hit, especially on shallow water
| like the continental shelf.
| cubefox wrote:
| Given that land mass is smaller than oceans, there was probably
| an even bigger asteroid which fell into the ocean.
| echelon wrote:
| We might have found the biggest one, which could have led to
| the formation of the moon:
|
| https://www.express.co.uk/news/science/1606365/science-news-...
|
| https://phys.org/news/2021-03-theory-large-blobs-material-ea...
|
| https://www.science.org/content/article/remains-impact-creat...
| autokad wrote:
| you can find large asteroid impacts by looking at Vulcanic traps
| and looking on the opposite side of the globe during that time.
| coryfklein wrote:
| I know it's buried deep, but it's kind of weird for the reporting
| to not even show an image of the area? Perhaps a map with a
| little pin indicating where the Deniliquin structure is?
|
| They say it's near the city of Deniliquin, which is here [0].
| Oddly, that spot doesn't even show on the map of yellow dots of
| likely impact structures! Did they forget to mark their newly
| discovered largest-impact-crater-in-the-world on the map?
|
| [0] https://goo.gl/maps/shvRY2CiEs3eR8iw5
| teddyh wrote:
| > _I know it 's buried deep, but it's kind of weird for the
| reporting to not even show an image of the area?_
|
| It's something I have seen becoming the _norm_ nowadays.
| Articles about art or photographs without a single image.
| Political articles about borders without a single map. Articles
| about some thing some scientist has done, maybe with a picture
| of the scientist, but not of the actual thing. And it's not a
| technical limitation of the medium; most articles _will_ have
| numerous (but _irrelevant_ ) images.
|
| I suspect that SEO measurement has told people that it doesn't
| matter _what_ images an article has, as long as it has _some_
| images, optimally interspersed with the text. Spending any
| money on getting _relevant_ images thus becomes an unnecessary
| expense. Readers will still click on the article (because of
| the click-bait headline), and will still read (or at least
| scroll through) the article if the text is broken up by images
| by an optimal amount.
| fragmede wrote:
| I think you're right. We know ChatGPT-4 can do image
| analysis, so all Google has to do is say that they're down
| ranking articles that don't have relevant images, and we'll
| be back to having useful images in artichokes again.
| CamperBob2 wrote:
| Could be as simple as the fact that images make the page take
| longer to load. Google penalizes that, as I understand it.
| foota wrote:
| Maybe it's not yet considered likely?
| progrus wrote:
| Seems like maybe our ability to find and divert these asteroids
| might make all that burning of energy worth it, no?
| CoastalCoder wrote:
| Well, maybe. It really comes down to the specific numbers. (At
| least for the objective part of the consideration.)
| thelittleone wrote:
| How realistic it to divert an asteroid of this size?
| sebzim4500 wrote:
| If you know find out years in advance then you barely have to
| change it's velocity to make it miss Earth. Probably a
| kinetic impactor would be sufficient, otherwise thermonuclear
| warheads exist.
| dylan604 wrote:
| when did we learn it was heading our way, and how far away is
| it at detection? hours, days, months, years before impact?
| that's key things to know.
| hoorayimhelping wrote:
| Capable with current technology if intercepted early enough.
| I think most people visualize an asteroid hitting earth like
| a ball hitting the ground when dropped at arm's length. In
| reality, orbits of celestial objects are elliptical, and
| they're constantly moving. A small force, like that produced
| by an ion thruster, applied to an asteroid 15km in diameter
| for months or years would be enough to change it's orbit such
| that it wouldn't impact earth.
| SkyPuncher wrote:
| It doesn't necessarily need to be diverted entirely. Simply
| breaking it up into smaller components significantly reduces
| it's impact force.
|
| Smaller pieces burn up more readily in the atmosphere and
| create smaller impacts (I believe exponentially smaller)
| HeyLaughingBoy wrote:
| Now you're begging the question of how hard it is to break
| it up!
| thfuran wrote:
| Significantly harder than diverting it slightly.
| gremlinsinc wrote:
| some of these asteroids we only have days warning. that's
| the scary part. To divert an asteroid you need to do it
| before it comes near so it has a long path to begin
| drifting in a new direction. ie it's only gonna nudge it
| slightly. Slightly adds up over many millions of miles, not
| so much when its a week out.
| Capricorn2481 wrote:
| Not really, since there are only a few known instances of
| asteroids hitting earth in hundreds of millions of years, but
| climate change is an immediate threat within the next 50. The
| odds we live to see an asteroid hit us are slim.
| slibhb wrote:
| > The odds we live to see an asteroid hit us are slim.
|
| Presumably this is based on a belief that humans are likely
| to go extinct. I don't agree; I think we're extremely
| unlikely to go extinct and, following from this, an impact is
| definitely something worth worrying about.
|
| It doesn't even have to be a "planet-killer," a smallish
| impactor could wipe out a city.
| suby wrote:
| The question is really how likely are we to be hit within
| the relevant time period. Had we taken a slower growth
| curve, we'd avoid climate change at the cost of an extra 50
| or 100 years before being able to divert asteroids. That
| seems like a good bet. I am much more worried about climate
| change and irreversible destruction of ecosystems than
| getting hit with an asteroid in a very limited time period
| progrus wrote:
| [flagged]
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| Slim, but not zero; we can and probably should do both.
| bryanmgreen wrote:
| Lets say the same asteroid hit the same place in Australia
| today....
|
| How many people would both directly from impact/shockwave and
| indirectly die (infrastructure collapse, tsunamis on beach towns,
| climate change, etc) from this, do we think?
| not2b wrote:
| This was bigger than the dinosaur-killer, which killed almost
| all land animals; only a tiny fraction survived. So almost
| everyone would die, all over the world. The shock wave would be
| extremely hot and kill pretty much anything that's outside, and
| the fires would be massive.
| dmbche wrote:
| No sunlight for years, no photosynthesis - same pronostic of
| 95% loss of life id guess
| ourmandave wrote:
| _I think it may have triggered what's called the Hirnantian
| glaciation stage, which lasted between 445.2 and 443.8 million
| years ago...
|
| This huge glaciation and mass extinction event eliminated about
| 85% of the planet's species.
|
| It was more than double the scale of the Chicxulub impact that
| killed off the dinosaurs._
| barbariangrunge wrote:
| What percent of species have humans killed so far? Are we going
| to eventually outcompete an asteroid causing over a million
| years of ice age?
|
| https://www.un.org/sustainabledevelopment/blog/2019/05/natur...
|
| https://amp.theguardian.com/environment/2018/oct/30/humanity...
| someplaceguy wrote:
| Imagine an asteroid causing a glaciation event on Earth that
| lasts 1.4 million years.
|
| That's mindblowing.
| jacquesm wrote:
| You can expect one of the really big (Chicxulub-size) impact
| every 100 million years or so (there is enough uncertainty
| here that experts all have their own ideas on the exact
| frequency but typically 25 to 500 million years seems to be
| the agreed upon range. We keep finding new craters though and
| then have to increase the estimate).
|
| https://www.thespacereview.com/article/761/1
|
| https://skyandtelescope.org/astronomy-news/how-often-do-
| chic...
|
| And endless papers on the subject. TEOTWAKI is a fun rabbit
| hole to dive in to.
| someplaceguy wrote:
| > You can expect one of the really big (Chicxulub-size)
| impact every 100 million years or so
|
| Still, the Chicxulub asteroid is estimated to have caused a
| global cooling of the surface by around a decade, not
| 1,400,000 years.
| jacquesm wrote:
| Sure, ask the dinosaurs how that went. The point is: that
| was _only_ a decade and only a relatively small asteroid
| and the effect was that the dominant species of the time
| was wiped out. Size is inversely correlated with
| frequency, so those smaller ones happen far more
| frequent. Anything larger than that and it is definitely
| game over.
| _joel wrote:
| I think it goes to show just how short of a blink of the
| cosmic eye, that humanity has really existed for and the need
| to spread our bets by exploring the universe.
| localplume wrote:
| [dead]
| dsign wrote:
| [flagged]
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| Only if you want the species to survive, if you're more
| nihilistic like me, it just doesn't seem to matter. Or if
| you're optimistic, WE don't matter because there's loads of
| other life and societies out there.
|
| It does make you wonder whether life as we know it was a
| preceding civilization that launched life into the wider
| universe for the continued existence of life. But on
| tectonic timescales, any traces that e.g. a carrying vessel
| would have left behind are long gone.
| networkchad wrote:
| [dead]
| _joel wrote:
| Probably one of the best episodes of Trek imho -
| https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0708803/
| gloria_mundi wrote:
| Another related Trek episode - the one I expected you to
| link: VOY's "Distant Origin" -
| https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Distant_Origin
| CaptArmchair wrote:
| > Only if you want the species to survive
|
| Paradoxically, "survival" assumes adapting to ever-
| changing circumstances, which means that homo sapiens,
| given enough time, is bound to evolve into one or
| multiple new species given enough time. Regardless of
| that happening elsewhere or on Earth.
|
| Arguably, a species is just a mode of survival for a
| genome; a convenient vessel through time as the genome
| reproduces. The language we use is, ultimately, a social
| construct, but biological speaking by and large
| inconsequential in so far that language is a trait that
| fosters survival. Evolution isn't opinionated, it just
| 'is'.
|
| The fate of the Neanderthal people feels apt here. While
| the species is extinct, our Sapiens genome still caries
| 1-4% of Neanderthal genes to date. Some of that
| influences traits in modern humans, some of that just
| doesn't. (Evolution is messy, in that regard) Now, maybe
| Neanderthals wondered - just like us today - what would
| become of them aeons in the future. Little did they know
| that we, Sapiens, are distant relatives to them.
|
| In the same vain, our written record and collective
| memories spanning no longer then a few millennia, distant
| relatives in the far future may look back at our detritus
| in the soil and in their genes and maybe wonder the exact
| same thing.
|
| Maybe the Great Filter isn't some civilization destroying
| event. Maybe it's just evolution. Maybe become a space-
| faring species might be the biggest mistake we could
| make. I think more then a few sci-fi authors coined the
| notion of the arrival of malevolent alien species in a
| distant future which turned out to be our distant
| relatives from space-faring humans who left Earth eons
| ago. Of course, that's just speculation. But there's some
| poetic food for thought there, it's a probability one
| can't readily exclude.
| stOneskull wrote:
| circle symmetry like petals round a flower a galaxy's
| earths
| samus wrote:
| There's plenty that could have gone wrong in the last
| century that could have led to humanity's extinction. The
| next challenge is how to deal with exceeding the capacity
| of the planet to sustain our civilization. You're
| definitely on to something with your last paragraph.
| Andrex wrote:
| > It does make you wonder whether life as we know it was
| a preceding civilization that launched life into the
| wider universe for the continued existence of life.
|
| There's data out there about the First Ancestral Race but
| AFAIK they've never released the unredacted version of
| the Secret Dead Sea Scrolls, so it's hard for the public
| to say.
| VHRanger wrote:
| That's a question in geology and archaeology called the
| Silurian Hypothesis: Could we even detect a millions-of-
| years old civilization in the geological record?
|
| 1. https://arxiv.org/abs/1804.03748
| pacoverdi wrote:
| Related science fiction novel: The Ice People (La Nuit
| des Temps) by Barjavel
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ice_People_(Barjavel_no
| vel...
| NoMoreNicksLeft wrote:
| An Earth-originating civilization would have left our
| species bereft of the natural resources to industrialize
| with.
|
| Coal was only made once. Maybe if abiotic theory of
| petroleum is true, you get that back over immense
| timescales, but you don't get a second shot at coal.
| Without coal, you can't even do metallurgy at scale. Is
| there some gotcha that I'm missing?
| px43 wrote:
| Maybe that is what happened, and we somehow managed to
| make due without energon deposits and vibranium.
| [deleted]
| jacquesm wrote:
| On those timescales plenty of natural resources would be
| replenished, but not all. 500 million years is a long,
| long time.
| thfuran wrote:
| Coal probably wouldn't and is pretty significant.
|
| Edit: actually it seems like the coal resulting from lack
| of tree-consuming microbes theory isn't so widely
| supported these days.
| goatlover wrote:
| But life hadn't evolved on land 500 million years ago.
| jacquesm wrote:
| Yes, that was sort of the point. So you get 100's of
| millions of years during which things can rearrange
| themselves. Whoever - or even whatever - inherits the
| Earth after the next big impact will find it changed
| dramatically compared to how it is today. By the time
| they evolve intelligence (optional) have toolmaking needs
| (optional) and are living on land (optional) they will
| have plenty of time to figure out where it is going to
| come from, the earths crust will be rearranged enough
| that you can expect all kinds of stuff to have risen to
| the surface that is now inaccessible.
|
| Heck even the Himalayas have formed only 50 million years
| ago.
| Retric wrote:
| Coal was only made once because the earth basically ran
| out of carbon to turn into coal. There's 1,100,000
| million tons of economically viable coal and we're
| running into environmental issues by burning ~1/1,000th
| of it.
|
| Most projections suggest coal use is going to plummet
| over the next 50 years, both because we have better
| options and because we have little choice.
|
| There's enough coal in the ground to make earths
| atmosphere actively lethal to humanity. At ~70,000 ppm
| people are rendered unconscious in minutes and there's
| enough coal go well over 100,000 ppm. There's no way for
| humanity to use up the worlds coal as fuel, perhaps we
| could ship it into space as carbon source but that seems
| unlikely.
| NoMoreNicksLeft wrote:
| > Most projections suggest coal use is going to plummet
| over the next 50 years, both because we have better
| options and because we have little choice.
|
| Sure. Already industrialized civilizations have better
| options. But if you're starting from scratch, you don't
| get to jump immediately to photovoltaics or whatever.
|
| > and we're running into environmental issues by burning
| ~1/1,000th of it.
|
| But which 1/1000th? We didn't dig out the deepest coal
| first. "Economically viable coal" by 21st century
| standards isn't the same "economically viable coal" by
| the standards at the dawn of the industrial revolution.
| Retric wrote:
| > But which 1/1000th? We didn't dig out the deepest coal
| first. "Economically viable coal" by 21st century
| standards isn't the same "economically viable coal" by
| the standards at the dawn of the industrial revolution.
|
| Across geologic timescales what's accessible changes. It
| makes a huge difference if deposits are above or below
| sea level for example. The Industrial Revolution kicked
| off in a small geological area which would have looked
| very different even 100k years before.
|
| Even beyond that we're actually more selective not less
| when it comes to coal mines. Unlike say
| copper/silver/gold/etc there's so much coal that what
| would have been a perfectly viable mine 150 years ago
| simply isn't today. Larger equipment means fewer workers
| but it also requires thicker coal seams. Similarly we're
| a lot more picky about sulfur content etc.
|
| That's also somewhat true of stuff copper, gold, etc. The
| minimum concentration required to make ore viable has
| decreased dramatically, but only when there's huge
| quantities of ore. Plenty of potential mines could be
| worked by hand, but can't complete with industrial scale
| mines or be used as one.
|
| PS: It's worth remembering even if things aren't quite as
| efficient they can be viable. Building canals takes more
| effort than rail lines but they can still transport bulk
| goods on the cheap using minimal technology. Similarly
| solar smelting can reach extreme temperatures, just not
| 24/7. Wood plus just about any rock can get you to steel
| with enough effort and know how. It might take slightly
| longer but our history isn't the only way to get to
| transistors and spacecraft etc.
| jacquesm wrote:
| Carbon sink? (instead of source...) Depends on your
| perspective I guess.
| DenisM wrote:
| If they wanted to be remembered they would encode a
| message in the DNA.
|
| Or left it on the moon, I guess.
| samus wrote:
| DNA sequences are undergoing frequent changes if there is
| no evolutionary pressure on them. The message would
| quickly be scrambled. They would have to encode it into
| highly conserved gene sequences, i.e., completely
| reinvent life as we know it.
|
| The moon is a harsh environment and (like most places in
| the solar system) exposed to significant danger from
| meteorites over geological timescales.
| goatlover wrote:
| Make use of the horseshoe crab genome then.
| Jibbedeyeah wrote:
| [dead]
| xwdv wrote:
| Before social media I thought yes this was something we
| should do.
|
| But now after being exposed to the true collective nature
| of mankind, it doesn't matter. This species is a net
| negative for the universe. Just a bunch of monkeys
| squabbling over stupid things.
| goatlover wrote:
| The universe doesn't care one way or another. There's no
| such thing as a net negative for the universe itself.
| It's amoral and has no values.
| NoMoreNicksLeft wrote:
| > This species is a net negative for the universe.
|
| We're not important enough to be net negative, nor have
| we been around long enough. I am still hopeful that 10
| million years from now, we'll have rampaged across the
| supercluster, spreading despair and wickedness in our
| wake.
|
| Then, and only then, will we have achieved net
| negativity. Do your part, help us become that.
| shakna wrote:
| We're certainly setting a record at destroying this planet.
| rapht wrote:
| > We're certainly setting a record at destroying this
| planet.
|
| In the grand scheme of things, I'm tempted to say: if
| that's the price to pay to expand beyond it, then so
| what? It's not like it's the only planet in the Universe.
| hutzlibu wrote:
| "It's not like it's the only planet in the Universe. "
|
| But so far it is the only known planet with conditions
| where we can live.
|
| And I doubt we can make the jump to another planet we
| first have to find and then somehow survive getting there
| - when we cannot take care of our own planet.
|
| (Btw. no matter how much we mess up earth, it will
| allways be way more hospital than mars)
| goatlover wrote:
| Are we though? We're altering the planet's weather and
| ecosystem, but that's not the same as destroying. Plus
| there have been several large impacts in the past that
| acted quicker to alter the planet, and life found a way.
| Loughla wrote:
| We're certainly setting a record at destroying
| _ourselves_.
|
| It's seems like a pedantic distinction, but it's
| important. Earth doesn't care if we're here or not. The
| universe doesn't care if we're here or not. We are the
| only ones who should care, and we seem not to.
|
| The planet will be fine, eventually, after we die out.
| Life will continue after we're long gone.
|
| But we'll be long gone, and it's like we've all decided
| that's okay.
| SamPatt wrote:
| Destroying ourselves, as measured by population, which is
| the highest in the history of our species?
|
| Or measured by longevity, or leisure time, or other
| living standards, all of which are drastically higher
| than they were only a few generations ago?
| krisoft wrote:
| Those are all true! And they are important to remember.
| It is also important to remember that if you are driving
| a car to a brick wall, almost every metric will be
| perfect right until you hit it.
| SamPatt wrote:
| It's also important to remember that history is full of
| people claiming we're about to run into a brick wall
| (Malthus, Erlich and company), yet things just keep
| getting better.
|
| Perhaps humans are better drivers than you think?
| samus wrote:
| Malthus was essentially correct, but wrong about the when
| and how. Industrializing societies can play whack-a-mole
| with constraints that limit their population growth,
| successfully so far.
|
| What saved us was the surprising phenomenon that those
| societies tend to have quite low birthrates. Multiple
| possible reasons for that:
|
| * high cost of living and raising children,*
|
| * availability of birth control,
|
| * waning social pressure of getting many children,
|
| * no immediate economic benefits of raising children (in
| agrarian societies, they are essentially free labor on
| the farm, and a huge young population makes it easier to
| bootstrap an industrial economy). Of course, eventually
| there will be a problem when a huge percentage of the
| population is too old to work.
|
| We will be fine as long as we can sustain agriculture:
|
| * oil must be a-plenty to run farming equipment. It will
| be a long time before electricity has taken over
|
| * we need farmland with intact soil and water
|
| * we need fertilizer (phosphorus is running low soon, and
| oil is required as well)
|
| * we need pollinators for many crops. Hand-pollinating is
| expensive
|
| * We must not run out of pesticides to maintain yields
|
| And probably some more requirements. If any of them is
| not fulfilled, society collapses and things can get ugly
| quickly. These things partly contribute to recent wars in
| Africa, the Middle East, and other places.
|
| Edit:
|
| *: low child mortality makes it necessary to actually
| support most children all the way to adulthood
| SamPatt wrote:
| >What saved us was the surprising phenomenon...
|
| It's only surprising if you (like Malthus and Erlich) had
| the intellectual arrogance to believe you could predict
| the future.
|
| I cannot predict humanity's future, but I can look at our
| past, and our progress looks excellent so far. Betting
| against our continued success seems to require serious
| mental gymnastics.
| DesiLurker wrote:
| I've always hated this smartass retort from Carlin (who
| was awesome otherwise). this is indeed a pedantic
| distinction. there may be billions of planets like earth
| around but what make it special is the life on it & we
| are destroying that for some imaginary 'capital' that
| wont matter in large scheme of things anyways.
|
| The other significant problem with this punchline is that
| it is still heavily human centric. we are not gonna go
| away without a major fight in/against biosphere. and
| guess what since we dont ascribe any value to it other
| than how its useful to us its going to take the brunt of
| destruction. at this point if we hold our population &
| resource utilzation where we are and eventually settle
| down to a smaller size I'd be okay with it as long as we
| give the rest of biosphere a chance but we all know thats
| not going to happen. We _need_ to keep growing, thats the
| system we are in. And sure there will be some targeted
| geoengineering & green energy hopium for us to hang our
| concerns on but at the end of day we'd end up in the same
| place.
|
| there was a line I read somewhere that made me realize
| our current predicament, it goes -- if a distant
| civilization just looks at the rise in atmospheric
| greenhouse gas composition of the planet, they wont be
| able to tell if its a intelligent species consuming
| fossil fuels or a bacteria that just learnt metabolize
| fossils and just growing exponentially. its the same
| curve largely. So much for human discretion &
| intelligence.
|
| /rant end.
| oceanplexian wrote:
| > We're certainly setting a record at destroying
| ourselves.
|
| I know things are bad but historically, I don't know how
| you can say that. In the 60's, 70s, and 80's we actually
| were, no-bullshit, on the brink of turning the world into
| a radioactive glass hellscape.
|
| Despite all the turmoil in the world, I think things are
| looking up for humanity.
| hutzlibu wrote:
| "In the 60's, 70s, and 80's we actually were, no-
| bullshit, on the brink of turning the world into a
| radioactive glass hellscape"
|
| Have you watched the news lately?
|
| I think there was something war related and people
| arguing about first strike and red lines.
|
| Just because we are now used to the threat, does not mean
| it went away.
| jklinger410 wrote:
| > and the need to spread our bets by exploring the
| universe.
|
| I would like for us to get our house in order before we
| start this process.
| prox wrote:
| I feel this is a why-not-both thing. We should fix our
| house and explore. We have enough people and capability
| to do both if we are politically and mentally willing.
| bradgessler wrote:
| Yeah. If anything, not having our house in order is even
| more motivation to create offsite backups.
| d12345m wrote:
| Which problems do we need to solve before you would deem
| our species worthy of survival?
| mulmen wrote:
| This is such a tired and simplistic take. The space
| program has been helpful in tidying our home. It's not an
| either or choice.
| JumpinJack_Cash wrote:
| That is a lie that is conveniently told to preserve the
| legacy of the Apollo program and the morale of the
| Nation, as well as the legacy of one of the most beloved
| figures in the history of the Nation: JFK , who by the
| way, when you start to dig deeper emerges to be just a
| younger Trump.
| mulmen wrote:
| We literally have satellites in space that monitor the
| atmosphere and detect greenhouse gas emissions.
| JumpinJack_Cash wrote:
| > > We literally have satellites in space that monitor
| the atmosphere and detect greenhouse gas emissions.
|
| So monitor stuff that you can't do nothing about. Great
|
| As far as weather goes you don't need satellites.
| Baloons, planes, radars, drones, buoys do exist and paint
| a picture which is 99% the same.
|
| The Apollo program failed to repay itself, plain and
| simple. Unlike the Manhattan project and the rocket
| designs stolen from the Nazis and developed by Von Braun
| which kept us safe for 50 years now.
| javajosh wrote:
| We can and should do both. Our emphasis should indeed be
| on not shitting the bed. But we should also look for new
| beds. The big problem is that Mars at its best is worse
| than Earth at its worst. The Earth in "The Road", or
| almost any post-apocalyptic story, is still infinitely
| more livable than Mars!
| short_sells_poo wrote:
| I agree with you and I'm saddened by the nihilist (and
| defeatist!) outlook that many people seem to have here. I'm
| fundamentally a humanist. I want humanity to survive and
| thrive.
|
| I never understood the defeatism. It seems to arise from
| having the intellect to recognize that humans can (and do)
| have impact on their environment, and in the same breath
| resign on that impact being only negative and thus
| declaring that humans as a species should go extinct.
|
| But there's so much good in this world that people do,
| isn't that worth saving? We know our capabilities are only
| limited by our own imagination, so why not strive for a
| grander human civilization that can span at least the solar
| system, if not the galaxy?
|
| We can try, and we may still fail. Nothing is certain,
| except the way to ensure our demise by accepting that our
| fate is to go extinct and do nothing about it.
| NoMoreNicksLeft wrote:
| > I never understood the defeatism. It seems to arise
| from having the intellect to recognize that humans can
|
| It actually correlates really well with the advent of
| teaching young children to be guilty about the
| civilization which gave birth to them. Maybe we shouldn't
| be slamming first graders with the ideas that everyone
| who came before them were supervillains and that they
| must shoulder the burden of correcting long dead
| injustices.
|
| In any event, doesn't much matter. Every week there's a
| new article about how one nation or another has below-
| replacement fertility that doesn't seem to have any real
| prospect for reversing (tied to, more than anything else
| I think, what was described above). We are probably
| already a dying species, or at least heading into a post-
| civilization phase, and just don't know it yet.
| [deleted]
| lazide wrote:
| Eh, frankly it's giving too much rational basis to
| emotional states IMO.
|
| People posting on web forums, especially engineers, like
| to poke holes in things and aren't big into expansion and
| exploration at the moment. Probably a bit depressed from
| sitting in front of their computers all day too.
|
| Ask someone who just spent a month on the pacific coast
| trail, or who is about to go to Antarctica the question,
| and you'll get a different set of answers.
| oceanplexian wrote:
| I think it's more than the web but the way media is being
| curated. I'm one of those people who's really optimistic
| about society. However being a positive person is
| actually a lot of work.
|
| I basically have to tune out all modern movies,
| television, news. Every new TV show is about some
| dystopia or the end of the world or a Zombie apocalypse
| or whatever. I watch mostly old TV shows from the 50s and
| 60s and read science fiction. In rare cases I'll watch a
| new show that's actually positive. You have to be careful
| though, even long-running franchises can quickly turn
| toxic when Hollywood gets a hold of it; Star Trek was
| headed that way until Strange New Worlds came out.
| tuyiown wrote:
| I think you are over-reading it. The nihilistic mindset
| is not necessarily defeatism, it's just accepting that it
| does not matter in the universe-wide grand scheme of
| things.
|
| I personally think that it's the most pragmatic view, if
| not the most rationale: with such an approach, only
| actions that are truly achievable retains attentions, if
| we try something, let's do the things that matters in the
| long run instead of trying literals shot in the stars.
|
| Also, given the systematic and very damaging polarisation
| of all debates, I like being able to distance myself: it
| does not matter in the long run, so if the toxics
| annihilation has to happen, I won't be part of it, and
| it's probably the best I can actually _do_.
| safety1st wrote:
| Nihilism is a nuanced concept that many great thinkers
| have grappled with but "web forum nihilism" isn't.
| Internet nihilism usually just reads like someone who is
| suffering from some sort of depressive or anxiety
| disorder and expressing their symptoms, like
| catastrophization, over the 'net.
|
| What I submit is that we are living in a society with a
| record level of depression, anxiety and other mental
| illnesses (the US for example is prescribing record
| levels of antidepressants). This record level of mental
| illness is simply spilling over onto the Internet. Why so
| many people in our society are ill is left as an exercise
| for the reader.
| bornfreddy wrote:
| > (the US for example is prescribing record levels of
| antidepressants)
|
| I would argue that this is mostly very (too) efficient
| marketing and sales though, cynical as it sounds.
| w10-1 wrote:
| > it may have triggered what's called the Hirnantian glaciation
| stage
|
| Maybe. but per the Brittanica article cited:
|
| > No concentration of iridium has been identified near the
| extinction that would suggest a bolide (meteorite or comet)
| impact like the one identified at the end of the Cretaceous
| Period.
| [deleted]
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