Experts Concluse that Asteroid Impact Wiped Out Dinosaurs

1Dinosaurs were a bad idea to begin with

2They had gone on quite long enough.

David M. Raup is a University of Chicago paleontologist. Raup studied the fossil record and the diversity of life on Earth. Raup contributed to the knowledge of extinction events along with his colleague Jack Sepkoski. They suggested that the extinction of dinosaurs 65 mya was part of a cycle of mass extinctions that may have occurred every 26 million years.

In addition to his time at the University of Chicago, Raup has taught at Caltech, Johns Hopkins, and the University of Rochester. He was also a curator and Dean of Science at the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago as well as a visiting professor in Germany at Tübingen and on the faculty of the College of the Virgin Islands. Raup was heavily involved through his career in joint programs with biology and in promoting training of paleontologists in modern marine environments. In 1994, he retired to Washington Island in northern Lake Michigan. Currently, he assists the Santa Fe Institute to develop methods and approaches to dealing with the evolutionary exploration of morphospace.

The spacecraft navigation technology for impacting a small body was successfully demonstrated when the Deep Impact spacecraft purposely rammed comet Tempel 1 on July 4, 2005, to scientifically examine its composition.

Back to Brandon's original query - there's an early warning system for tracking asteroids that might intersect earth's orbit >
http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/asteroidwatch/overview.cfm
> and it's linked to astronomers around the world. There are countermeasures, even:

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The spacecraft navigation technology for impacting a small body was successfully demonstrated when the Deep Impact spacecraft purposely rammed comet Tempel 1 on July 4, 2005, to scientifically examine its composition.

Although Hollywood has created some colorful methods for stopping an object that is on a collision path with Earth, no government agency, national or international, has been tasked or accepted the responsibility to stop such an asteroid, should one be discovered. But there have been a number of academic and some technical studies, not to mention numerous movies, on how a devastating asteroid impact might be avoided. Since asteroids outnumber comets 100 to 1 in the inner solar system, the asteroids, rather than comets, represent the majority of the nearer-term threat to our planet.

Because of the wide range of possible sizes, trajectories and warning times for Earth-threatening asteroids, there will be a corresponding wide range in the levels of challenge in providing an appropriate response. Unless there are a few decades of warning time, hazardous asteroids larger than a few hundred meters in diameter will require enormous energies to deflect or fragment. In the rare case of a large threatening asteroid, nuclear explosions that could push or fragment the object might provide a sufficient response.

...Like I said, we'll probably party until something awful is staring us in the face, at which point, it will likely be too late.

Thinking about it, who says they are extinct ? Ever eaten a chicken ? It seems the T-Rex's closest living relative (based on DNA) is the chicken

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Thinking about it, who says they are extinct ? Ever eaten a chicken ? It seems the T-Rex's closest living relative (based on DNA) is the chicken

WHO THE HELL HAS T-rex DNA??

WHO THE HELL HAS T-rex DNA??

I'm starting to feel a little bit that way.