A Quote by L. Neil Smith

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

L. Neil Smith

Quote Topics

Asteroid Dinosaurs Like Million Million Years Overdue Planet Strike Years

Quote Author

L. Neil Smith
American - Writer
Born: May 12, 1946

Global warming, along with the cutting and burning of forests and other critical habitats, is causing the loss of living species at a level comparable to the extinction event that wiped out the dinosaurs 65 million years ago. That event was believed to have been caused by a giant asteroid. This time it is not an asteroid colliding with the Earth and wreaking havoc: it is us.

Al Gore

Imagine if the dinosaurs had tried picturing the rulers of their planet 100 million years hence. They'd undoubtedly envision these creatures as... dinosaurs! Conceiving of aliens as polished versions of ourselves is appealing, but unconvincing.

Seth Shostak

When you look at Earth from that one picture, the one from space, it's really a rather attractive thing. I have nothing against the planet per se. I root for the big comet or asteroid as a way of cleansing the planet. The comet or asteroid 65 million years ago is probably what gave us our opening to replace the reptiles. The greatest entertainment I have in my life is chronicling internally, not necessarily for the public, the slow dissolution of order.

George Carlin

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.

Sam Kean

We live in a time where we have more extinction happening on our planet than since the dinosaurs were wiped out 50 million years ago.

Jeff Corwin

In fact, one of the arguments for searching for intelligent life in space, elsewhere, is that we have no evidence that intelligence has any survival value. The most successful creatures on this planet are the cockroaches. They've been around, what is it, 100 million years or so and I suspect they'll still be there 100 million years in the future. Maybe intelligence is an evolutionary aberration which dooms its possessors in the way armor may have doomed some of the dinosaurs.

Arthur C. Clarke

The chunks of comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 were so large, and were moving so fast, that each hit Jupiter with at least the equivalent energy of the dinosaur-killing collision between Earth and an asteroid 65 million years ago. Whatever damage Jupiter sustained, one thing is for sure: it's got no dinosaurs left.

Neil deGrasse Tyson

What if an asteroid were to strike planet Earth? What could we possibly do to prevent it? However many guys we have working on this problem, it can't possibly be enough.

Timothy Noah

Scientists are complaining that the new dinosaur movie shows dinosaurs with lemurs, who didn't evolve for another million years. They're afraid the movie will give kids a mistaken impression. What about the fact that the dinosaurs are singing and dancing?

Jay Leno

Sooner or later, we will face a catastrophic threat from space. Of all the possible threats, only a gigantic asteroid hit can destroy the entire planet. If we prepare now, we better our odds of survival. The dinosaurs never knew what hit them.

Michio Kaku

Certainly what happened to the dinosaurs was not good - that was a terrible day for the dinosaurs, very sad. But I have to say, there are a lot of threats we face as people and, as someone who lives in Los Angeles, I'm personally more likely to die from driving on the freeway than I am from an asteroid, so you have to put that risk in perspective.

Carrie Nugent

There's no doubt if you could go 5, 10, 15 million years into the future and dig down to 2016, you would be able to find the geological evidence that humans occupied the planet.

Kenneth Lacovara

We made and spent at least 10 million dollars. The thing is, we heard that the planet was going to end in 2012. We thought, We have got to spend this money before the asteroid hits.