Thank You Russia

[herman2]

Leave it to the Russians to Save The World!. I can’t believe that the USA is not taking this asteroid thing more serious. We could become doomed like the dinausaurs! This is breaking news and I am personally scared. What will happen if the earth is squashed like a peanut by this looming comet?!! Will we go into the dark ages? Will the polar caps melt. This is serious business and we must invest money and time into preventing this NOW. If we wait to long we will all perish like the saber tooth woolly mamouth!!:shock::shock:

http://www.torontosun.com/news/world/2009/12/31/12310661-sun.html
MOSCOW – Russia’s space agency chief said yesterday a spacecraft may be dispatched to knock a large asteroid off course and reduce the chances of earth impact, even though U.S. scientists say such a scenario is unlikely.
Anatoly Perminov told Golos Rossii radio the space agency would hold a meeting soon to assess a mission to Apophis. He said his agency might eventually invite NASA, the European Space Agency, the Chinese space agency and others to join the project.
When the 270-meter asteroid was discovered in 2004, astronomers estimated its chances of smashing into Earth in its first flyby, in 2029, at 1-in-37.
Further studies have ruled out the possibility of an impact in 2029, when the asteroid is expected to come no closer than 29,450 km from Earth’s surface, but they indicated a small possibility of a hit on subsequent encounters.
NASA had put the chances that Apophis could hit Earth in 2036 as 1-in-45,000. In October, after researchers recalculated the asteroid’s path, the agency changed its estimate to 1-in-250,000. NASA said another close encounter in 2068 will involve a 1-in-330,000 chance of impact.
Without mentioning NASA’s conclusions, Perminov said he heard from a scientist that Apophis is getting closer and may hit the planet. “I don’t remember exactly, but it seems to me it could hit the Earth by 2032,” Perminov said.
“People’s lives are at stake. We should pay several hundred million dollars and build a system that would allow us to prevent a collision, rather than sit and wait for it to happen and kill hundreds of thousands of people,” Perminov said.

[herman2]

Heres my proof! in case those of you don’t know about this stuff! Now we better start doing somethung about it!~~:shock:

http://www.enchantedlearning.com/subjects/dinosaurs/extinction/Asteroid.html
About 65 million years ago, at the end of the Cretaceous, a large fraction of plant and animal families suddenly went extinct. In this Cretaceous-Tertiary or K-T mass extinction (K is for Kreide, meaning chalk in German, which describes the chalky sediment layer from that time; T is for Tertiary, the next geologic period), all land animals over about 55 pounds went extinct, as did many smaller organisms.
The K-T mass extinction obliterated the dinosaurs , pterosaurs , plesiosaurs, mosasaurs, ammonites, some families of birds and marsupial mammals, over half the plankton groups, many families of teleost (bony) fishes, bivalves, snails, sponges, sea urchins and others.
This catastrophe eventually led to the Age of Mammals.

THE ALVAREZ ASTEROID IMPACT THEORY
There are a lot of theories about why this K-T (Cretaceous-Tertiary) extinction occurred, but a widely accepted theory (proposed in 1980 by physicist Luis Alvarez and his son Walter Alvarez, a geologist), is that an asteroid 4-9 miles (6-15 km) in diameter hit the Earth about 65 million years ago. The impact would have penetrated the Earth’s crust, scattering dust and debris into the atmosphere, and causing huge fires (generated by hot debris thrown from the crater), tsunamis , severe storms with high winds and highly acidic rain , seismic activity, and perhaps even volcanic activity . The impact could have caused chemical changes in the Earth’s atmosphere, increasing concentrations of sulfuric acid, nitric acid, and fluoride compounds. The heat from the impact’s blast wave would have incinerated all the life forms in its path.