--- On Thu, 7/23/09, der Mouse <[email protected]> wrote:
> I don't think so. We couldn't destroy the planet if we tried. We might be
> able to sterilize the ecosystem on the surface, but even that would be hard.
> (We could, fairly easily, kill off major fractions of the large creatures on
> the surface; this is a long way from sterilizing it and a long _long_ way
> from destroying it. See http://qntm.org/?destroy for more.)
Gosh, you folks are cheery! :~)
Just to throw a monkey wrench into the dark dreamings, I caught part of an
interesting documentary on this topic just recently. To actually sterilize the
planet requires doing much more than simply boiling the oceans, you have to
raise the temperature of the crust from surface to mantle high enough to
eliminate every remaining bacterium, and this would require impact by a
planetesimal-sized rock. No mere comet or asteroid is at all likely to do the
job.
Nor, imo, would the average comet or asteroid even fully eliminate mankind.
Set us back a few centuries or maybe even millennium, but that's about it.
-chris
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