Quotes About Asteroid

Threats that could wipe out the bulk of life on earth abound. Planetary catastrophe could come in the form of a killer asteroid impact, the eruption of massive supervolcanoes, a nearby gamma ray burst that sterilizes the earth, or by human-driven environmental collapse.

In my Ph.D. thesis, written in 1989, I discussed the fact that when a civilization develops the technology to prevent catastrophic asteroid impacts, it marks a significant moment in the evolution of the planet.

We are involved in technology development for, you know, missions that we hope to plan that would take us to an asteroid and eventually to Mars.

Dess took a deep breath, feeling a rush of relief now that the proclamation had been made. It was sort of like being the first astronomer to spot one of those big dinosaur-extermination-sized asteroids on its way toward Earth. Sure, this was majorly unpleasant news for everyone, including Dess personally, but at least she got to announce it.

T. Rex and the Crater of Doom, shows an angry-looking tyrannosaurus reacting with horror to the impact.)

the asteroid blasted into the air more than fifty times its own mass in pulverized rock.

Walter [Alvarez] dubbed the formation the "Crater of Doom." It became more widely known, after the nearest town, as the Chicxulub crater.

Chicxulub crater.

Sooner or later, we will face a catastrophic threat from space. Of all the possible threats, only a gigantic asteroid hit can destroy the entire planet. If we prepare now, we better our odds of survival. The dinosaurs never knew what hit them.

Certainly what happened to the dinosaurs was not good - that was a terrible day for the dinosaurs, very sad. But I have to say, there are a lot of threats we face as people and, as someone who lives in Los Angeles, I'm personally more likely to die from driving on the freeway than I am from an asteroid, so you have to put that risk in perspective.

Noise proves nothing. Often a hen who has laid an egg cackles as if she had laid an asteroid.

One hemisphere was a giant bull's-eye, a series of concentric rings where solid rock had once flowed in kilometer-high ripples under some ancient hammer blow from space.

Is he not the celebrated author of The Dynamics of an Asteroid, a book which ascends to such rarefied heights of pure mathematics that it is said that there was no man in the scientific press capable of criticizing it?

We are involved in technology development for, you know, missions that we hope to plan that would take us to an asteroid and eventually to Mars.

If we found a hazardous asteroid, we could nudge it out of the way.

Most people have already seen a cosmic collision. If you've seen a shooting star ever, you've seen a cosmic collision, because a shooting star is not a star. It's a tiny dust or pea sized fragment of an asteroid or a comet hitting our atmosphere and burning up as it hits in, as it comes in.

If you think it is hard to get humans to follow traffic laws, imagine convincing an asteroid to move along an ellipse.

An asteroid collision would be something against which we have no defence. The last big such collision with us was about sixty-six million years ago and that is thought to have killed the dinosaurs, and it will happen again. This is not science fiction; it is guaranteed by the laws of physics and probability.

We were not then powerful enough to erase all evidence of the Precursors, to destroy their star roads and citadels and other artifacts. And so we left at least one Precursor behind, to live out dreams of vengeance and hatred, to lay down plans in cold and darkness at the heart of a lost asteroid—over millions of years.

and the stars, and even the galaxies of stars. And if we were to get wiped out in a cosmic explosion, like an asteroid impact or something, some other expression of our level of complexity would emerge, because that's what the universe does. And this is likely to be going on all over the universe. How am I doing so far?

An asteroid impact in the worst case scenario is a terrifying thing. It seems very uncontrollable: in popular culture, it's often a metaphor for human powerlessness over the world.

The chances that your tombstone will read 'Killed by Asteroid' are about the same as they'd be for 'Killed in Airplane Crash.'

Our physicists have confirmed the practicality of using an altered asteroid for transport

A meteoroid is a bit of debris, usually planetary, hurtling through the solar system. If it's bigger than a boulder, than it's an asteroid. If any part of a meteroid makes it to Earth intact rather than burning up as it barrels through Earth's atmosphere, then it's a meteorite. A meteoroid's visible path through the atmosphere is a meteor. An astronaut struck by a meteoroid is a goner. A meteroid the size of a tomato seed can pierce a space suit.