Re: Comet impact in the Eastern United States - Feasibility of Evacuation

Bryan Derksen <bryan.derksen@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote in
news:7PBBj.71734$w94.70993@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
 

> Richard R. Hershberger wrote:
>> On Mar 9, 1:37 pm, jdnic...@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
 (James Nicoll) wrote:
>>>         Sterilization events that any half-way competent SF
>>>         writer 
>>> should know about include the Sun's progressive brightening,
>>> something that should kick the Earth over into runaway
>>> greenhouse in the next billion years or so, and gamma ray
>>> bursters, which in theory could have much the same effect on
>>> the Earth as putting it in a (very large) microwave oven.

>> How many of these are sterilization events in the strict sense?
>>  Would that gamma ray burst kill off creatures at deep-ocean
>> vents or microbes living in rock?

> Runaway greenhouse would probably do it, since the entire crust
> would wind up hotter than the boiling point. Earth would be
> Venus Lite.

Would the temperature be such that extremophiles might survive to 
evolve a new, high-temp ecosphere, at least for a while?  (And is 
the time scale before things get completely impossible long enough 
that they might manage to reinvent multicellularity, and spread out 
into the newly vacated territory?)  Not much comfort to us, but 
interesting in an abstract sense.

Mike

-- 
Michael S. Schiffer, LHN, FCS
mschiffe@[EMAIL PROTECTED]