And it could happen again...:

"We think mass extinctions may be defined by catastrophes like impact and volcanism occurring synchronously in time," Dr Becker said.

"This is what happened 65m years ago at Chicxulub but was largely dismissed by scientists as merely a coincidence. With the discovery of Bedout, I don't think we can call such catastrophes occurring together a coincidence any more."

And to think that the only mass meteor extinction I knew about was the dinosaurs 65 million years ago. I guess there was another, more significant one 185 million years earlier. And if the problems I've had with my PowerBook (losing files, dropping it, and bad RAM) are any indication, these things usually happen in threes. Perhaps we're due for one more.

Personally, I wish we'd talk about these sorts of things more, and in venues other than bad movies. Getting struck by a meteor is everyone's problem, from Rummy to Osama to you and me. And the more we talk about meteors that wiped out life 250 million years ago, the less we can possibly talk about God having created the world in six days or Brahma laying a Cosmic Egg or whatever cockamamie shit you can think of. (Hell, even the idea of a Big Bang seems a little crazy to me.) After all, why would God do that, unless he wanted to try again, and that would negate the infallibility of God in the first place.

The less we can talk about God creating the heavens and the earth, the less we can talk about God determining how we have to live our lives. No more land grabbing in the name of Jesus/Jehovah/Allah, no more "evildoers" or "infidels" or "sodomizers." Sure, with no more God, there would be an obvious time of turmoil when we kill off a lot of each other because there's simply no God anymore to stop us, and Hell is other people. I believe, eventually, we'll realize that we have a limited time on this earth before we're buried in it, and perhaps we can work together to enjoy it while we can.

Unfortunately, all that hippie bullshit is simply moot since we have no way to prevent the next meteor/asteroid/comet collision. So I guess I'll see you all in Hell.