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Re: Millions of comets coming--Yeah? Where are they?

Hello Lou and list - 

    While these folks' hypothesis that "millions of
comets are coming" some millions of years down the
road is exactly that, a hypothesis, unfortunately it
is starting to look like extremely large numbers of
people have been killed entirely all too frequently
over the last 5,000 years or so by impact events. 
While the work with small impactors is about where
work was with the dinosaur killer about 20 years or
so, given the total number of suspected small impact
events so far, even if some of them turn out to be
false, there will be enough left to cause real
concern.  In simple terms, they're not rare.
    This is not a story which is going to go away, as
the movies "Deep Impact" and "Armageddon" fade. 
Instead what is going to happen is that slowly, over
the next 20 years or so, each and every year, more
evidence, both for and against each event, is going to
come into play, causing another round of media
coverage.
     I don't really have time to go into this too much
here, and I sure don't have the time to go into the
psychology of individual's reactions, except to
comment that most of them have been seen before.
 
EP
 
--- Louis Varricchio <varricch@aero.und.edu> wrote:
> My overall reaction to the current spate of comet-
> and asteroid-impact
> hysteria is that it is mostly just that--hysteria
> and hyperbole!  The
> "Discovering Archaeology" piece--finding comets and
> asteroids at every bend
> and twist of history--is a real stretch of an
> overactive imagination!
> 
> Impacts of any significance are very rare events. 
> The popular culture of
> the 1990s--fueled by a few scientists who are
> humping their theories and
> seeking grant funding for various projects from near
> earth asteroid tracking
> to space defense systems--have replaced the threat
> of atomic annihilation in
> the popular imagination with death by
> extraterrestrial (ET) means.  
> 
> Oh, sure, mass extinctions happen--some (but
> certainly NOT all) caused by
> ET means.  But all this media hype still doesn't
> help the public's
> understanding of the dynamics of the Earth-Moon
> system, the rarity of
> planet-threatening impacts, and the many influences
> on extinction events. 
> But fueling the fear does keep a few astronomers
> employed as Chicken
> Littles.  (My opinion.)
> 
> 
> LOUIS VARRICCHIO
> Environmental Information Specialist/Research
> Associate
>  Upper Midwest Aerospace Consortium
>  Odegard School of Aerospace Sciences
>  University of North Dakota
>  Grand Forks, N.D. 58202-9007
>    Phone: 701-777-2482
>    Fax: 701-777-2940
>    E-mail: varricch@umac.org (in N.D.)
>               morbius@together.net (in Vt.)
> 
> "Climate is what you expect, weather is what you
> get."--Robert Heinlein 
> 
> 
> 
> LOUIS VARRICCHIO
> Environmental Information Specialist/Research
> Associate
>  Upper Midwest Aerospace Consortium
>  Odegard School of Aerospace Sciences
>  University of North Dakota
>  Grand Forks, N.D. 58202-9007
>    Phone: 701-777-2482
>    Fax: 701-777-2940
>    E-mail: varricch@umac.org (in N.D.)
>               morbius@together.net (in Vt.)
> 
> "Climate is what you expect, weather is what you
> get."--Robert Heinlein 
> 
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