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Realistically, considering how long the dinosaurs roamed the Earth, what are the odds of a meteor taking us out?

10 Answers

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  • ?
    Lv 6
    1 year ago

    Very low. In fact so low that compared to all the manmade factors that are stacking up against us pushing us ever closer to the brink, you can essentially ignore any threat from space.

  • Tom S
    Lv 7
    1 year ago

    Statistics can't tell you when anything will happen. 

  • Anonymous
    1 year ago

    A meteor that size has NOT hit the earth for 65 million years. Smaller ones have been hitting the earth though. A small comet hit North America 13,000 years ago and ended the last ice age. It killed most large mammals in North America, including horses, camels, bisons, mastodons, mammoths, short-faced bear, giant ground sloth, American lion, and even the human makers of the Clovis Point tools (none has been made since the end of the last ice age). They are all gone forever Another small one struck the Arizona desert and left a big crater a few thousand years ago, and one fell in Siberia and leveled forests in the early 1900s. Scientists were speculating about what happened there as recently as the 1970s.

    Scientists are now looking for possible disastrous meteors that may be heading our way. So, the possibility is real. Even a small one that is the same size as the comet that hit 13,000 years ago can potentially wipe out all of the living Americans. The threat is real. The impact generates a lot of heat and raises global temperatures. No human can survive ambient temperatures that are hotter than those in Death Valley in summer. The proposed solution, if one is spotted heading our way, is to hit it with a small rocket and change its trajectory so it will miss the earth. But of course if we make a mistake, then one that wouldn't have hit the earth may wind up hitting us. The one that hit the earth and wiped out the dinosaurs is about the size of Mt. Everest. It was the equivalent of a billion atomic bombs, and it turned the air temperature at ground level to "oven-like" (hundreds of degrees F). The dinosaurs never had a chance. The only reason we are still around is because our ancestors were shrews and they lived underground. Since heat rises, temperature below the ground surface was cool enough to survive.

  • ?
    Lv 7
    1 year ago

    Zero. Larger asteroids can be detected even while far from the Earth, and their orbits can therefore be determined very precisely many years in advance of any close approach. Thanks largely to Spaceguard cataloging initiated by a 2005 mandate of the United States Congress to NASA, the inventory of the approximately one thousand Near Earth Objects with diameters above 1 kilometer is as of 2017 for instance 97% complete. The estimated completeness for 140 meter objects is around one third, and slowly improving. Any impact by one of these known asteroids would be predicted decades to centuries in advance, long enough to consider deflecting them away from Earth. None of them will impact Earth for at least the next century. We are therefore largely safe from globally civilisation-ending kilometer-size impacts for at least the mid-term future, but regionally catastrophic sub-km impacts remain a possibility at this point in time.

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  • JimZ
    Lv 7
    1 year ago

    I think one of those asteroids hits every one in several 100 million years.  The odds would therefore be more than one in a million that it would hit in any give one hundred year human lifespan.  Those are pretty good odds. The chance of a supervolcano going off is greater than that but not worth losing any sleep over. 

  • ?
    Lv 7
    1 year ago

    The odds are astronomical. as it would depend on the size, type, speed, and angle of trajectory.  The location would also be important.  You also have to take into account the oceans cover about 70% of the earth's surface so it is more likely that the meteor would strike water. 

  • 1 year ago

    We humans could be taken out by a much smaller impact than the one which caused the demise of dinosaurs and all large land life.  Almost happened at least once already, actually, if you accept the genetic bottleneck evidence, although perhaps that was not the result of an impact event (the main culprit is a presumed super-volcano eruption).

    It appears that a world-destroyer level of impact (such as the Cretaceous event) is something which only happens about once every several hundred million years or that order of magnitude, on average.  If you accept the theory of an impact in North America at about 12,000 years ago (Younger Dryas event), it follows that population-destroying events are a lot more common than global life-destroying events and could happen on the order of once every several hundred thousand of years.  It is not obvious that such an event would kill all humans, but it definitely could put a major hurt on our numbers.  That supposed Younger Dryas event wiped out the Clovis culture of North America (and many large mammalians as well), apparently, and affected humans on the other continents through climate effects.

    So, what are the odds?  Somewhere between once every few tens of thousands of years to once every several hundreds of millions of years (on average), so basically pretty tiny, "realistically".  But we only need the one.  Someone does win the lottery even if the odds are ridiculously long.

  • 1 year ago

    The dinosaurs lasted roughly 150 million years before that asteroid.  Humans have been around about 0.2 percent of that time, and will be gone before that doubles.  So nothing to worry about on that score.

  • ?
    Lv 7
    1 year ago

    Not very likely I would suppose.  A meteorite did affect the dinosaur population, but it didn't wipe them out in a single strike.

    Humans are quite adept at creating habitable enclosures.  Even if the sky darkened for a year or two, people can still grow food indoors and heat their homes.

  • ?
    Lv 7
    1 year ago

    Well, its not really a question of if we'll see another planet killer, but when. Events like that happen fairly reguarly, and we're overdue for another one. Of course, we have an ability to develop potential planetary defenses that the dinosaurs never developed, and given another century or two, we may well be capable of detecting such objects and diverting them with ease

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