". . . we know of no asteroid hit on a dinosaur extinction level, after Chicxulub asteroid hit."
I understand that no other asteroid collision has caused a global mass extinction event.
On the other hand, an asteroid collision could well be a civilisation ending event, though even a large one would likely not be consequent enough to extinguish humanity.
The other global mass extinctions have been associated with changes in the earth's biota coupled with geologic changes triggering the mass extinction. I have seen suggestions that the global cooling over the past 70 million years has been a product of carbon removal from the atmosphere by flowering plants and grasses (and subsequent Carbon sequestration in sedimentary rocks) with the ice ages being triggered a million years ago when the world had cooled to the point when the milankovitch cycles began to have an effect. Not yet a global extinction event, though.
The Great Oxidation of the earth's sediments and atmosphere from about 2.5 to 2 Billion years ago by photosynthesising bacteria is the standout example of such a global mass extinction. More recently the greatest extinction event, at the end of the Permian era, was probably the culmination of changes to erosion and sediment deposition by driven by vascular plants covering the worlds land surface (with the extinction triggered by changes in plate tectonic activity, if I recall correctly).
> Falling tektites must have killed scores more But the greatest killer of all was undoubtedly the heat and the fires that the heat ignited.
Missed a period.
> Had the asteroid hit in the deep ocean, the mass of the water would h have taken the brunt of the impact energy.
Extra h.
> It was the end of the world as they knew it And they did not feel fine. In fact, 66 million years ago was a very bad day to be alive.
Oh! Anders wrote a post about prehistory. I'll read half of this right now. Then maybe later read it to my broken-footed wife, who has nothing better to do than enjoy the thrumming of my voice as I read about low-impact science.
Your target audience has *no idea* how badly they want to read this post. Based on some digging around we'd done months ago, my wife and I assumed that we were already around the point of protecting people from asteroids, provided civilization didn't collapse. Now, obviously, we are not so sure.
But if this had been in my news feed, the headline would have read: "Scientists: The Dinosaurs are gone. We're Next" and I'd have immediately clicked on it, even knowing to expect the kind of uneducated, semiconvincing discussion that would likely follow. I'm not saying you should turn your articles into click bait, but somewhere in the first few paragraphs you could mention that "Fools Ignore The Skies At Their Peril."
Thank you. Errors fixed (except the clickbait title).
Just out of curiosity: Why do you regard this article as something extraordinarily good? This is what I muster to write when I am severely pressed for time, writing up something about a book I read several months ago and not even having time to proofread correctly. Of course the subject is interesting but I do not think I add much to it. In my opinion this is lackluster journalism rather than the bold new thinking I would have liked to produce. Which makes it somewhat perplexing (and potentially alarming) when someone says it is the best I have ever produced.
Oh simple: You wrote about what you knew, to an audience that wanted to engage with it. You've written other pieces on Windows XP and the Paris Peace Conference which are subjects I'm not interested in at all. Then you've had some other pieces that I liked better on Israel or China, but you seemed like you were researching them. This article it was something I'm very interested in, it seems extremely important, and you already had everything at your fingertips.
Consider: There's a Veritassium video on entropy that has 6.7 million views.
It's a solid production, but anyone who's been through a course in thermodynamics knows (or goodness, *should* know) all the key elements he presented. Yet he was extremely successful because huge numbers of people don't know what he talks about.
Lastly, seriously, do think about making your titles reflect the meat of your article. I liked the title of this piece at first, because it seemed cute, but it led me to expect that the whole point of the article was the Chicxulub meteor. I'll bet there are many potential people interested in large scale risks who will get bored reading about the dinosaur extinction unless they expect it to tie into X-risks. In fact, you could probably make your way to the comments section of AstralCodexTen and link back to this article while talking about X risks to direct useful traffic this way.
Thank you. I will take this advice into consideration. Actually, Tove is also lambasting me for my indistinct and overly ironic titles. I sort of like being cute, though, so it is a difficult habit to drop.
I still think about that one. This post made me abruptly reopen the topic of asteroid strikes as an existential risk, but it didn't convince me they definitely are a threat because as you mentioned, you didn't support that position with research. Ideally I could just wait for you to do that, but... Tove is mean, and she says I can't trust what everybody else tells me, so... oh well.
How about investing in large amounts of led light bulbs and greenhouse modules when the disaster is approaching? It sounds like more fun to grow some potatoes and vegetables while waiting for the impact winter to disappear than just sitting there eating bread and rice and beans. Has someone estimated the possibilities of food production during an impact winter?
Fossile fuels are not really possible to stockpile the way you can stockpile nuclear fuel. I suspect most of the infrastructure for extracting fossile fuels would be destroyed in an impact event and would be difficult to rebuild during an impact winter.
Then littering the landscape with nuclear power stations is the thing? Or concentrating most human business, including power stations, to areas close to the equator?
Asteroid impacts are quite low probability events. If safeguarding humanity is the objective I suggest planning for the usual apocalypses: war, disease and famine. Statistically speaking one of them will be the main culprit when society comes crashing down.
Do you really think war, disease, or famine have the same potential to eradicate our species that an asteroid does? I don't mind being prepared for eventualities, but existential risks are of far greater interest to me than scenarios where the lucky ones survive.
And asteroid impact winter preparation doesn't even deserve a small corner in the famine preparation chapter? As far as I can see, it has a few similarities to any ice age coming over us for any reason.
I also have faint memories of the dinosaurs disappearing 65m years ago rather than 66m. But established wisdom these days definitely states 66m so I guess the chronology has been updated somewhere along the line.
I'm reminded of the 2010 "Anthropic Shadow" paper by Cirkovi´, Sandberg, and Bostrom: https://nickbostrom.com/papers/anthropicshadow.pdf -- the Chixhulub crater is actually called out in a graph as an outlier possibly approaching the area where if there had been an impact that big that recently, no one would be around to know it now.
That's a good point: One reason why we are here today is that such a disaster didn't happen for x million years. And us being here is kind of a coincidence in itself. A coincidence that might end with a simple meteorite.
Good post Anders.
". . . we know of no asteroid hit on a dinosaur extinction level, after Chicxulub asteroid hit."
I understand that no other asteroid collision has caused a global mass extinction event.
On the other hand, an asteroid collision could well be a civilisation ending event, though even a large one would likely not be consequent enough to extinguish humanity.
The other global mass extinctions have been associated with changes in the earth's biota coupled with geologic changes triggering the mass extinction. I have seen suggestions that the global cooling over the past 70 million years has been a product of carbon removal from the atmosphere by flowering plants and grasses (and subsequent Carbon sequestration in sedimentary rocks) with the ice ages being triggered a million years ago when the world had cooled to the point when the milankovitch cycles began to have an effect. Not yet a global extinction event, though.
The Great Oxidation of the earth's sediments and atmosphere from about 2.5 to 2 Billion years ago by photosynthesising bacteria is the standout example of such a global mass extinction. More recently the greatest extinction event, at the end of the Permian era, was probably the culmination of changes to erosion and sediment deposition by driven by vascular plants covering the worlds land surface (with the extinction triggered by changes in plate tectonic activity, if I recall correctly).
This was your best post ever, with three caveats.
> Falling tektites must have killed scores more But the greatest killer of all was undoubtedly the heat and the fires that the heat ignited.
Missed a period.
> Had the asteroid hit in the deep ocean, the mass of the water would h have taken the brunt of the impact energy.
Extra h.
> It was the end of the world as they knew it And they did not feel fine. In fact, 66 million years ago was a very bad day to be alive.
Oh! Anders wrote a post about prehistory. I'll read half of this right now. Then maybe later read it to my broken-footed wife, who has nothing better to do than enjoy the thrumming of my voice as I read about low-impact science.
Your target audience has *no idea* how badly they want to read this post. Based on some digging around we'd done months ago, my wife and I assumed that we were already around the point of protecting people from asteroids, provided civilization didn't collapse. Now, obviously, we are not so sure.
But if this had been in my news feed, the headline would have read: "Scientists: The Dinosaurs are gone. We're Next" and I'd have immediately clicked on it, even knowing to expect the kind of uneducated, semiconvincing discussion that would likely follow. I'm not saying you should turn your articles into click bait, but somewhere in the first few paragraphs you could mention that "Fools Ignore The Skies At Their Peril."
Thank you. Errors fixed (except the clickbait title).
Just out of curiosity: Why do you regard this article as something extraordinarily good? This is what I muster to write when I am severely pressed for time, writing up something about a book I read several months ago and not even having time to proofread correctly. Of course the subject is interesting but I do not think I add much to it. In my opinion this is lackluster journalism rather than the bold new thinking I would have liked to produce. Which makes it somewhat perplexing (and potentially alarming) when someone says it is the best I have ever produced.
Oh simple: You wrote about what you knew, to an audience that wanted to engage with it. You've written other pieces on Windows XP and the Paris Peace Conference which are subjects I'm not interested in at all. Then you've had some other pieces that I liked better on Israel or China, but you seemed like you were researching them. This article it was something I'm very interested in, it seems extremely important, and you already had everything at your fingertips.
Consider: There's a Veritassium video on entropy that has 6.7 million views.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DxL2HoqLbyA
It's a solid production, but anyone who's been through a course in thermodynamics knows (or goodness, *should* know) all the key elements he presented. Yet he was extremely successful because huge numbers of people don't know what he talks about.
Lastly, seriously, do think about making your titles reflect the meat of your article. I liked the title of this piece at first, because it seemed cute, but it led me to expect that the whole point of the article was the Chicxulub meteor. I'll bet there are many potential people interested in large scale risks who will get bored reading about the dinosaur extinction unless they expect it to tie into X-risks. In fact, you could probably make your way to the comments section of AstralCodexTen and link back to this article while talking about X risks to direct useful traffic this way.
Thank you. I will take this advice into consideration. Actually, Tove is also lambasting me for my indistinct and overly ironic titles. I sort of like being cute, though, so it is a difficult habit to drop.
Tove is mean! Don't listen to her!
Also thinking about it, this probably wasn't *actually* your best post - your best one was probably on Montaillou: https://woodfromeden.substack.com/p/the-history-of-montaillou
I still think about that one. This post made me abruptly reopen the topic of asteroid strikes as an existential risk, but it didn't convince me they definitely are a threat because as you mentioned, you didn't support that position with research. Ideally I could just wait for you to do that, but... Tove is mean, and she says I can't trust what everybody else tells me, so... oh well.
How about investing in large amounts of led light bulbs and greenhouse modules when the disaster is approaching? It sounds like more fun to grow some potatoes and vegetables while waiting for the impact winter to disappear than just sitting there eating bread and rice and beans. Has someone estimated the possibilities of food production during an impact winter?
Better build your greenhouses close to a nuclear power plant since any meaningful amount of led lighting will require enormous amounts of electricity.
How about fossile fuels? Wouldn't it be ironic if those dead dinosaurs could save us?
Fossile fuels are not really possible to stockpile the way you can stockpile nuclear fuel. I suspect most of the infrastructure for extracting fossile fuels would be destroyed in an impact event and would be difficult to rebuild during an impact winter.
Then littering the landscape with nuclear power stations is the thing? Or concentrating most human business, including power stations, to areas close to the equator?
Asteroid impacts are quite low probability events. If safeguarding humanity is the objective I suggest planning for the usual apocalypses: war, disease and famine. Statistically speaking one of them will be the main culprit when society comes crashing down.
Do you really think war, disease, or famine have the same potential to eradicate our species that an asteroid does? I don't mind being prepared for eventualities, but existential risks are of far greater interest to me than scenarios where the lucky ones survive.
And asteroid impact winter preparation doesn't even deserve a small corner in the famine preparation chapter? As far as I can see, it has a few similarities to any ice age coming over us for any reason.
When I was in school we learned that this disaster happened 65m years ago, not 66. Have I misremembered or has this fact been updated?
I also have faint memories of the dinosaurs disappearing 65m years ago rather than 66m. But established wisdom these days definitely states 66m so I guess the chronology has been updated somewhere along the line.
I'm reminded of the 2010 "Anthropic Shadow" paper by Cirkovi´, Sandberg, and Bostrom: https://nickbostrom.com/papers/anthropicshadow.pdf -- the Chixhulub crater is actually called out in a graph as an outlier possibly approaching the area where if there had been an impact that big that recently, no one would be around to know it now.
That's a good point: One reason why we are here today is that such a disaster didn't happen for x million years. And us being here is kind of a coincidence in itself. A coincidence that might end with a simple meteorite.