3265: Asteroid Threat

Asteroid Threat

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Title text: Paleontologists have long worried that the dinosaurs blasted into space 66 million years ago will one day complete their orbits and fall back down.

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Explanation

This is one of 40 incomplete explanations: This page was created by a reentering dinosaur. Don't remove this notice too soon. If you can fix this issue, edit the page!

It's generally agreed by scientists that most dinosaurs went extinct primarily as a result, either directly or indirectly, of the Chicxulub asteroid impacting the Earth near the Yucatán Peninsula 66 million years ago. This comic posits that another asteroid is soon going to hit the Earth again. Because the impact location will be on the exact opposite side of the planet (the antipode), the comic takes the absurd notion that it will act the 'opposite' way, reversing all the original effects and bringing dinosaurs back from extinction.

The general consensus is that most dinosaurs that weren't in the immediate vicinity of the impact itself went extinct as a result of the environmental effect it had. Other factors have been proposed to explain the extinction, and the relative contributory effect of these has been a matter of some debate. The title text suggests that the initial Chicxulub event actually resulted in the dinosaurs' disappearance because it involved the dinosaurs launching, or being launched, alive into space. Either the shock of the asteroid strike somehow threw them loose from the planet, or the geology has been misinterpreted and is actually the result of the dinosaurs intentionally engineering a massive rocket blast. They have since been on a long path, most likely circling the Sun, that will some day intersect with the Earth again, and they will land still alive and take control again.

This is ridiculous, for a number of reasons. Firstly, they would they have to somehow survive, and potentially arrange, the initial event. There is no evidence that the dinosaurs developed rocketry techniques,^{[citation needed]} while an impact strong enough to have knocked them into space would have subjected them to violent forces that they were not adapted to withstand. Secondly, they would need to sustain a breeding population in the vacuum of space through to the present day. Again, dinosaurs do not seem to have had the technology for space travel,^{[citation needed]} and such a long journey would require extra complications in that they would need to also breed and grow food for the duration, requiring them to maintain an entire ecosystem. Lastly they would need to survive their presumably meteoric re-entry through the Earth's atmosphere and the impact with its surface - a thoroughly impossible feat.

Because Earth rocks have been found on the Moon, there has been some speculation that fossils from the era of dinosaurs or earlier may have landed on the Moon, but these are much more likely to be tiny organisms such as diatoms, rather than identifiable fragments of dinosaur remains. No such fragments have been collected.

This could also be seen as a joke referencing the second law of thermodynamics, that entropy can only rise (i.e. you cannot undo destruction by doing the original action in reverse).

The comic might be a contribution to Asteroid Day which is held on the day after this comic was published.

Transcript

This is one of 30 incomplete transcripts: Don't remove this notice too soon. If you can fix this issue, edit the page!

[Two images of Earth are shown. At the top left is a small one, centered on southern West Africa, showing the Atlantic Ocean and the east coast of South America, with a dotted line through the Earth entering at the Yucatán Peninsula and exiting at the east-central Indian Ocean. Taking up most of the rest of the panel is a large Earth image centered on the Indian Ocean and containing a target symbol, comprising a circle and four spokes, aimed at a location in the east-central Indian Ocean.]

[Caption below image:]

Dire news: An asteroid is on course to hit the earth exactly opposite the Yucatán Peninsula, bringing back the dinosaurs.

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Discussion

I must be getting old; when I was a kid, the Chicxulub impact was said to have been only 65 million years ago, and now it's 66?! --Itub (talk) 21:25, 29 June 2026 (UTC)

No! (But these will also make you feel old)(Seriously, though, probably just different estimation.) K9Dragon23, or RainWingSquares (talk) (talk) 21:42, 29 June 2026 (UTC)

Reassured to see I'm not the only one. I went to check, and apparently a study from 2013 estimated the Chicxulub crater to be 66.038 ± 0,011 million years old. 77.159.181.114 09:22, 30 June 2026 (UTC)

Can anyone think of a reason to link this to the What-If comic "Cassini"? And how do we do that on this platform? Oh, wow. Hey, on Cassini-Earth, it looks like the Chicxulub crater (21°24′N 89°30′W) would happen near Tunguska (60°54′11″N 101°54′35″E). Or not. 158.173.67.90 00:10, 30 June 2026 (UTC)

You might link to it with {{what if|10|something like this}}, using the {{what if}} template in lowercase, which looks something like this and sends you to the appropriate bit of the table on this site's catalogue page. Or else {{What If|10|something like that}}, using {{What If}} template in TitleCase, which looks something like that and sends you to the actual what-if site original.

It would all depend on what your preference is. (Going to the former gives you a further jumping-off point to going to the latter, but also to any youtube videos noted to be about it, etc.):I'm not actually convinced that there's any reason to link to what if? 10, in this case, but that's how you would do it, FYI. Knock yourself out, or just remember enough about it to work it out from scratch the next time you really think you ought to. 81.179.200.152 00:51, 30 June 2026 (UTC)

Thanks! Anyway, it looks like Cassini's Chicxulub event would happen somewhere on the 1100-km stretch between Tunguska and Norilsk. I haven't figured out the math yet, just compared maps. 158.173.67.61 01:07, 30 June 2026 (UTC)

The maths for the projection can be found here, which translates from 'our' Lat/Long values into a flat x/y map. But for conversion Lat/Long to Cassini-world Lat/Long (not quite sure why you're thinking of doing that, for this comic) you instead take our Earth's locations as defined by degrees North/South (numbers go up in magnitude until ±90° at the North/South Poles) and treat those as degrees West/East (±90° are at the 'West/East Poles'). Then the Earth's degrees West/East (up to ±180°), that on Earth rotate around the equator/line-of-latitude lines/poles, are now rotations around Cassini's own West/East Poles. For locations that are equatorial and prime-meridian(+'dateline'), that's a simple swap (North=>West, East=>North, South=>East, West=>South), and anything on the '90 degrees west/east' great-circle is moved 90 degrees (anything on 'West 90' you move 90-degrees more south, and if it's now >90 degrees south you need to take that excess number of degrees away from 90 to get the 'southness' on the 'East 90' line; whereas old '90 East' positions are now +90 in a North direction, with >90 ones being 90-minus-that-excess degrees North on the 'West 90' line), but it's a bit more complicated those places significantly off those two lines.

You might want to plug it through a two step process of polar-cartesian-polar conversion. Start with lat/lon (as θ/φ), make it into x/y/z (say 'x' is back-to-front, 'y' is west-to-east, 'z' is south to north), then rotate it (z is used for what is the new -y, y is use for the new z, with x preserved), then back-convert that to 'new' θ/φ. Any simplification into a one-step (albeit trigonometrically nested) process is left up to you. ;) 81.179.200.152 22:16, 30 June 2026 (UTC)

Me again. Thanks! I guess it's because I've been reading several alt-history novels lately, some of which include astronomical elements (Pratchett & Baxter's "Long Earth", etc.), leaving me wondering how astronomical events would be different if there were a change on Earth. The asteroid striking inland Eurasia rather than the Gulf of Mexico would certainly make things... different. Crud, although I forgot to account for plate tectonics; I'm looking at where both landmasses are today, rather than 66 MYA. That also raises the question of how inaccurate today's comic is, and whether its asteroid should hit the antipode of where Chicxulub is today or where it was 66MYA [[1]] . 158.173.67.105 13:13, 1 July 2026 (UTC)

I just wrote my own reply (below, lesser indent level, same timestamp, letting it stand), but you posted before I finally bothered to submit it (distracted by an Atlas that I had picked up...). It may answer your thoughts in other ways. But, direct reply to this, then...

Alternate Earths is an interesting approach, noting "The Gap" in The Long Earth series, but no hint of that in the comic.

I went into boloids/etc hitting Europe, below (in 2018, I was plotting a path of imminant strikes that next went slightly to the south of Smolensk, I think, but only facetiously).

I think it's clear the comic has a strike now that, being exactly opposite the (current location of the) point of ancient impact, 'pops' it back out. Presumably including the dinosaurs it directly buried alive(!) now being back at the surface again. And either especially angry or just... you know... dinosaurs. (See also the Godzilla mythos, or the even the various appearances of the Silurians from Doctor Who.)

The title text version is different, a "what goes up, must come down" sort of thing. Which, given that the Earth is spinning, wobbling and rearranging its surface in more tectonic ways, plus precisely vertical launches wouldn't become perfect vertical returns if far enough out to enter ('temporary') solar orbit. Even an antipode re-arrival would be an unlikely possibility (even before the spinning/precessing/tectonicising), though I think the title text is what people had imagined ("Dinosaurs Lost In Space" returning... again, there's both Godzilla and Doctor Who versions of that too) before the 'undo the old impact' of the drawn comic scenario became the main concern.

But it's something you'd need Randall to tell you which details he had in mind, and perhaps which more practical bits he fudged over for the sake of Rule Of Funny.

If it is many parallel (but differing) Earths, conceivably there could be just about any practical relationship between any given two, including relative geological layouts being as of any 'baseline era' you wish, as well as alternate orientations. Fun to think about, and I'm perfectly willing to talk about it. Tbough not sure it's touched on in the comic. 82.132.239.82 14:47, 1 July 2026 (UTC)

I have an old Earth-to-CassiniEarth converter, for some reason (maybe in light of the what if? 10, can't remember), and dug it out for you.

By my reckoning, if you looked for Chicxulub's geographical location (Earth: 21.4°N 89.5°W) on CassiniEarth, it would now be around 68.6°S 88.7°W. The antipode (Earth: 21.4°S 90.5°E) would on CassiniEarth be about 68.6°N 91.3°E.

If the question is where on Earth would be the point that, when 'Cassinified', would now match the original Earth coordinates, 68.6°N 88.72°E (basically Siberia, 'Tunguska'ish indeed, but a little bit off) would move to where the impact point (unaffected by the rotation of the Earth under it, presuming Earth's actual daily/annual movement is effectively as it was) ended up being. For the antipode, that's 68.6°S 91.28°W (Antarctic 'west coast' sea area, nearish "Peter 1st Island", by an Atlas.

Or maybe, because it's a long time since I used it, the two conversions (which feature Coses and Sines combined/etc and then Arctanned, in a way I will have tested and understood at the time, but I apparently left myself not enough clues in the comments or related output labels) are the other way around, but it looks about right from sight.

Yet, apart from the rather vague Chix/Tung relationship, I'm not sure there's a link to this comic. Not anything better than my old musing that Tunguska (1908), Celyabinsk (2013) and Kursk (2018) seemed like someone trying to adjust their cosmic aim for Europe as they came closer to Earth (eventually, but the fourth shot (and more) should have happened by now). 82.132.239.82 14:47, 1 July 2026 (UTC)

Only 3 million more years to go! RG (talk) 00:16, 30 June 2026 (UTC)

Absurd?? You're laughing. Dinosaurs could be back any century now and you're laughing. --37.19.210.20 03:42, 30 June 2026 (UTC)

I think there's a typo in the comic: it says "dire" instead of "exciting". 94.249.207.231 06:46, 30 June 2026 (UTC)

Bringing back the dinosaurs? The Avian Anti-defamation League could have something to say about this. "We're not going back to the Cretaceous, and you can't make us!" Beware of protests and direct actions organized by the ravens and parrots, with hummingbirds conducting lightning raids, the passerines being anything but passive, the raptors as heavy bombers, and the vultures cleaning up the mess. 2605:59C8:160:DB08:EC43:FFC6:18F5:1D73 14:07, 30 June 2026 (UTC)

"What do we want?"

"What do we want?"

"When do we want it?"

"When do we want it? Ark! Polly want a cracker!" 82.13.184.33 15:00, 30 June 2026 (UTC)

I'm imagining asteroid hitting the other side, and then the Chicxulub crater cartoonishly popping out and a bunch of dinosaurs flying out from it. Fephisto (talk) 20:43, 30 June 2026 (UTC)

I was listening to Steven Wright while reading this. 72.174.128.4 (talk) 03:03, 1 July 2026 (UTC) (please sign your comments with ~~~~)
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