George Carlin Quotes

An asteroid can literally destroy 80 or 90 percent of the species that are alive on Earth. These are big events. I mean, this is called extinction.

This planet is 15 million years overdue for an asteroid strike like the one that killed the dinosaurs.

Threats that could wipe out the bulk of life on earth abound. Planetary catastrophe could come in the form of a killer asteroid impact, the eruption of massive supervolcanoes, a nearby gamma ray burst that sterilizes the earth, or by human-driven environmental collapse.

If a gigantic asteroid were barreling toward impact with our planet, you can bet there would be at least a few members of Congress who would insist on leaving it alone, either because they would see it as a warning shot from the Almighty or because a mining company with a savvy team of lobbyists had laid claim to the big rock.

It was not an asteroid or comet, because it would have killed everything.

the day the asteroid hit the Yucatan Peninsula and wiped out the dinosaurs, making room for our little primate ancestors to grow big and brainy and to take over the planet.

With respect to phenomena like mass extinction, somebody might say why worry about it because in a geological perspective mass extinctions aren't so bad, they wipe out some things and then 10 million years down the road we get new and interesting objects.But I tell you mass extinctions are really awful for folks caught in the midst of them.

The dinosaurs never saw that asteroid coming. What's our excuse?

While we didn't know the dinosaurs personally, we do know that they were wiped out by an asteroid impact.

We haven't seen a real volcanic event at least in 74,000 years - [Mount Toba] in Indonesia, in Sumatra, where the crater itself is 100 kilometers across. It was so monumental, what happened, that for a very long time the entire atmosphere of our planet was darkened. It's not the lava and the heat per se; it's the obscuring of the entire atmosphere, and it made it very difficult for the human race to survive.

There is good reason to believe that we have already entered the Sixth Extinction, a period of destruction of species on a massive scale, comparable to the Fifth Extinction 65 million years ago, when three-quarters of the species on earth were destroyed, apparently by a huge asteroid.

Because our lungs regularly deal with carbon dioxide, they see nothing wrong with absorbing its cousin, SiO2, which can be fatal. Many dinosaurs might have died this way when a metropolis-sized asteroid or comet struck the earth 65 million years ago.

Asteroids have us in our sight. The dinosaurs didn't have a space program, so they're not here to talk about this problem. We are, and we have the power to do something about it. I don't want to be the embarrassment of the galaxy, to have had the power to deflect an asteroid, and then not, and end up going extinct.

Americans who read the papers or watch Jay Leno have been aware for some time now that there is a slim but real possibility - about 1 in 45,000 - that an 850-foot-long asteroid called Apophis could strike Earth with catastrophic consequences on April 13, 2036.

There is a one-in-300 chance that Earth will be struck on March 16, 2880, by an asteroid large enough to destroy civilization and possibly cause the extinction of the human race. But, on the bright side, Prince could re-release his hit song with the new refrain 'We're gonna party like its twenty-eight seventy-nine.'

If the Earth gets hit by an asteroid, it's game over. It's control-alt-delete for civilization.

The dinosaurs became extinct because they didn't have a space program.

Some 5 billion years from now, there will be a last perfect day on Earth... then the sun will begin to die, life will be extinguished, the oceans will boil and evaporate away.

What happens if a big asteroid hits Earth ? Judging from realistic simulations involving a sledge hammer and a common laboratory frog, we can assume it will be pretty bad.

Now small fowls flew screaming over the yet yawning gulf; a sullen white surf beat against its steep sides; then all collapsed; and the great shroud of the sea rolled on as it rolled five thousand years ago.

All the higher life forms scythed away, just like that. [ . . . ] Nothing but dust and fundamentalists.

At that time [90th in Lagos], if you drove through the city, you drove through a foreground that always seemed to be incredibly dramatic and incredibly agonised - smoking, burning, incredible compression. In the first year we stayed on the ground and went everywhere. But then in order to discover whether this was the whole story, we rented a helicopter. And we began to understand that this is not chaos but a highly modern system that had been abandoned, then at some point went into reversal, then slowly came out of it.

An asteroid could hit us at any moment. This is not - and also, the most successful kind of life on this planet is not us, it's microbes. They're the ones who greatly outnumber us, and may eventually destroy us.

The rock is gonna fall on us," he stood and told the class The professor put his chalk down and peered out through his glasses But he went on and said; "I've seen it, high up on the hill If it doesn't fall this year then very soon it will!