“Much of life on Earth gets regularly wiped out every 27 million years, according to boffins. It had been thought that this was caused by a dark star named “Nemesis”, but apparently that was wrong. The next globo-extinction event is due in about 16 million years’ time.
According to Bambach, there’s no doubt at all that every 27 million years-odd, huge numbers of species suddenly become extinct. He says this is confirmed by “two modern, greatly improved paleontological datasets of fossil biodiversity” and that “an excess of extinction events are associated with this periodicity at 99% confidence”. This regular mass slaughter has apparently taken place around 18 times, back into the remote past of half a billion years ago.
This had previously been noted by other scientists – though not confirmed so far back into the past – which had led to theorising on what could have caused such long-separated, regular disasters.”
Read more at The Register
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…every 27million years? Ph’nglui mglw’nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn…
dont worry in 16 million years from now our robot ancestors will have developed into indestructible gods
I think you mean our robot descendants
i was wondering, not about the possibility but about the timeline…guess this gives us some breathing room!
We live in a tiny bubble of improbability, a glimmer of hope, a infinitesimal fraction of time and space that we call home.
We then fill it with crap and complain about it.
We are a spark of starstuff. A quick flash and we are gone.
I, for one, welcome our indestructible robot descendants.
(As long as they carry the memory of the brief but wonderful explosion of human creativity and experience that we think will last for ever but which will be over in a galactic heartbeat)
Love to you all. Give love to your children. xxOOxx
Noah…can you spell ark?
Lol that just makes me laugh! a) there is nothing that I can think of that could make us extinct so frequently
b) why every 27 million years? Does the extinct – making – thing have an alarm clock then?!
and… c) how do they know that this is what has happened? They can’t exactly prod some soil to get those figures, so how did they get them?
If only it would wipe away all evil starting now.
agreed mark!
Isn’t this called mass extinctions and they happen all the time. We had to learn them in order for biology. There is a climate change and a new (normally recently evolved) phylum/class (ex mammals right now) becomes the “dominate” ones.
The key is the difference between the title “Life on Earth gets wiped out every 27 million years, say boffins” and the fist line of the article “MUCH OF life on Earth gets wiped out every 27 million years, say boffins”
What I think they are saying is that there are periods of mass extinction every 27 million years give or take 20 million skip a few. That is not exactly every 27 million years, otherwise they would produce a nice graph showing clear 27 million year intervals rather than an earthquake readout with some pingpong balls plopped on there to mark the “significant” events that are not discernable to the untrained person. But if exactly every 27 million years even give or take 3 million years all life gets wiped out thats actually staggering. But so staggering that they would make a better job of putting across this awesome fact. If this is the case please kindly email my ignorant self.
My bad, they are saying that life is being wiped out exactly every 27 million years with a maximum probabillity of this being a fluke of 2%. I still maintain the graph is confusing with reguards to multiples of 27 and discrimination of significant results, and the statistics they use are well beyond anything I have ever studied, (because I don’t study statistics). But I respect the scientific community, so if this is without rebuke amongst astrophysicists thats actually quite staggering. Once every (exactly every) 27 million years aliens terraform the planet, or … post your theory here.
‘The next globo-extinction event is due in about 16 million years’ time.’
No it’s not, it’s due in two years time….FEAR THE MAYAN PROPHECY!
I think it would help if people googled Mass Extinction Events. There are many postulated possibilities that would cause such a regular periodicity. I think that the dark star Nemesis has not been completely discounted by experts. Another possibility is that the solar system moves up and down in the galactic plane, and every 27 million years we encounter a very busy region of space that is full of comets and asteroids. Some of the mass extinction events are marked in the fossil layer by the presence of extra-terrestrial minerals, such as would occur if an asteroid hit us and spread its contents all over the Earth.
Another remote possibility is a release of massive amounts of methane from below the sea. Firestorms racing across the earth, tsunamis, etc…
fun fun fun.
Oh dear we’ve only got 16 million years & I thought we had 200 million years until the sun burnt out !
On the bright side, the extinctions are gradually getting less servere.
I’m sure by then humans will have found a way to make sure they survive.
After all cream always rises.
Mind you so does scum !