(August 28, 2010 at 1:48 am)lrh9 Wrote: I read one hypothesis that said large mass planets don't shield us from small body object impacts, but instead attract more small bodies into our solar system.
That depends on the body and the small objects. For example, it was a long pervading theory that the sun had a companion brown dwarf star called "Nemesis" that was so far out and only came as close as the Kuiper belt to periodically perturb the orbits of many of the comets and asteroids to shower the inside of the solar system with impacts, increasing the likelyhood of major impact for a certain and measurably predictable and repetative pattern of impact events.
The cause of this, however, has since been attributed with the solar system's oscillations as it travells in orbit around the galaxy that cause this and not a large body, but yes, that idea is certainly possible, but Jupiter and the Moon are attributed to actually reducing the frequency of impacts and not increasing it, to my understanding.
I'm sure this is a general idea and not necessarily a rule, because I'm certain there are exceptions when jupiter and the moon's gravitational influence may have pulled or pushed something in the wrong direction and made it more likely, but this happens less frequently.
If today you can take a thing like evolution and make it a crime to teach in the public schools, tomorrow you can make it a crime to teach it in the private schools and next year you can make it a crime to teach it to the hustings or in the church. At the next session you may ban books and the newspapers...
Ignorance and fanaticism are ever busy and need feeding. Always feeding and gloating for more. Today it is the public school teachers; tomorrow the private. The next day the preachers and the lecturers, the magazines, the books, the newspapers. After a while, Your Honor, it is the setting of man against man and creed against creed until with flying banners and beating drums we are marching backward to the glorious ages of the sixteenth centry when bigots lighted fagots to burn the men who dared to bring any intelligence and enlightenment and culture to the human mind. ~Clarence Darrow, at the Scopes Monkey Trial, 1925
Politics is supposed to be the second-oldest profession. I have come to realize that it bears a very close resemblance to the first. ~Ronald Reagan
Ignorance and fanaticism are ever busy and need feeding. Always feeding and gloating for more. Today it is the public school teachers; tomorrow the private. The next day the preachers and the lecturers, the magazines, the books, the newspapers. After a while, Your Honor, it is the setting of man against man and creed against creed until with flying banners and beating drums we are marching backward to the glorious ages of the sixteenth centry when bigots lighted fagots to burn the men who dared to bring any intelligence and enlightenment and culture to the human mind. ~Clarence Darrow, at the Scopes Monkey Trial, 1925
Politics is supposed to be the second-oldest profession. I have come to realize that it bears a very close resemblance to the first. ~Ronald Reagan
