Chicxulub crater

Pero no, no ese Big Bang.

Un asteroide que medía diez kilómetros de diámetro y que ahora llamamos Chicxulub atravesó el espacio y luego nuestra atmósfera hasta su destino final, donde hoy queda la península de Yucatán, en México.

El impacto de este descomunal pedazo de roca espacial liberó una energía comparable a la de cien billones de toneladas de TNT.

Fue como si miles de millones de bombas atómicas, como las lanzadas por Estados Unidos al final de la Segunda Guerra Mundial, explotaran a la vez.

La civilización humana, en lugar de desarrollarse en comunidades gigantescas, estaría dispersa en pequeños grupos nómadas alrededor del planeta, viviendo de la recolección y la caza.

La evolución es un rompecabezas complejo cuya solución solo la conoce el tiempo.

Si reservamos el curso de tan solo un evento como la colisión del Chicxulub, básicamente nos enfrentamos a un número infinito de posibles versiones de nuestro presente.

[música tranquila] ¿Cómo sería ver a un Tyrannosaurio rex en la vida real? Si solo este asteroide mortal no hubiera impactado la Tierra, ¿todavía estarían vivos los dinosaurios? ¿Habrían evolucionado? ¿Habrían sobrevivido tanto tiempo los humanos? ¿Podríamos haber aprendido a coexistir? Esto es Qué pasaría si y esto es lo que sucedería si los dinosaurios no se hubieran extinguido.

Wrote extinction dates in the margins.

Next to the passages about the stars falling and the mountains moving, I'd write the date of the Chicxulub impact.

66 million years ago.

The one that got the dinosaurs.

And then in 1991, geologists searching for oil accidentally stumbled across it.

Named the Chicxulub crater and nicknamed Crater of Doom, it is one of the most important geological discoveries ever made.

Not because of its size, but because of what it contains.

Every stage of this catastrophic asteroid impact left a physical signature in the rock layers.

Had it hit at a shallower angle, much of its energy would have been spread out across the surface.

Had it struck head-on, well, two to three times less material may have been blasted upwards.

Instead, the Chicxulub asteroid hit the planet with a deadly precision which maximized the amount of climate-altering debris that scattered around the globe.

In that instant, a deadly chain of events was set in motion, and Earth entered one of the most extraordinary and, until recently, unknown chapters in its history.

So the crater is 2,500 kilometer.

You compare that with Chicxulub that extinguished the dinosaur at, uh, 100, uh-

80, yeah

... yeah, 180 kilometer.

I just feel like there's so many things here where it could all come together and it doesn't.

It's like you have something as cool as the gunpowder jar, but then no one tells people, oh, if you drop it, you basically do the Chicxulub crater on yourself.

Then you have these guys building the world's biggest, most comically oversized siege engines, but they're like, you should probably let the Navy know so that they don't get A, shot to pieces, or B, washed up on the rocks.

And it's like in the end, they have this basically able to do a sort of late 16th century Normandy landing.

The Age of the Dinosaurs came to an end 65 million years ago.

It is thought that a giant asteroid six miles across smashed into the Earth where the town of Chicxulub in Mexico now sits, triggering tsunamis and dust clouds that blotted out the sun.

Plants could not grow.

Animals were cold and hungry and began to die.

Se venissimo colpiti da particelle che viaggiano al 99% della velocità della luce, la Terra verrebbe sterilizzata.

Oppure cosa succederebbe se non avvistassimo un asteroide in arrivo? Un vagabondo interstellare come 3I/ATLAS che schizza nel nostro sistema ad altissima velocità? Quel coso viaggiava a quasi 7 km/s e se avesse colpito la Terra avrebbe fatto molti più danni dell'asteroide di Chicxulub.

E Chicxulub, che ha centrato la Terra 65 milioni di anni fa, ha spazzato via i dinosauri, ha incenerito foreste, sparato trilioni di tonnellate di gas e lava nell'atmosfera e creato un inverno nucleare.

Quel tipo di impatto cancellerebbe gran parte delle conquiste umane in brevissimo tempo.

Quindi è possibile che un asteroide ci faccia sparire insieme a gran parte delle nostre infrastrutture.