Huge Space Clouds May Have Caused Mass Extinctions

space.com...

Giant space clouds of gas may have changed the climate or atmosphere on Earth and fueled mass extinctions millions of years ago, scientists said Thursday.

In one scenario, the solar system passed through a dense cloud of interstellar material, causing Earth to ice over. In the other, the solar system passed through less dense clouds that destroyed the planet's protective ozone layer, raising levels of harmful ultraviolet radiation.

this is amazing...

a giant space cloud causing mass extinctions???

i read about this a LONG time ago is natural geographic magazine...

here is another article that makes it seem like this is happining right now:

Defenses Down, Galactic Dust Storm Hits Solar System

enjoy!!!

Interesting article.... I wonder how we can best prepare our planets
defenses to protect us from the G Cloud that we will soon enter. Makes
you think with all the forces out there waiting to destroy us, Asteriods, Comets
Gamma Ray Bursts, Black Holes, Cosmic and Solar radiation and Interstellar dust that indeed
it is a dangerous environment that we live in.

With all these factors involved it makes me think that life is indeed rare in
the universe and also short lived. It would seem that advanced
intelligence would have a hard time developing, when every 10 - 20 K years
an extinction level cosmic event occurs.

[edit on 6-3-2005 by TheHorseChestnut]

If mass extinction's occured every 10 to 20 thousand years, then how did those big reptile friends of ours last for so long on several different spans? And keep in mind, all they had to protect themselves was what they had on their body. Also, HomoSapiens would be long gone if this was the case.

www.cnn.com... There's a quick link to CNN's site, about the 'hobbits', an off shoot of Homosapiens, what it be I'm not sure. The skull was around 1 million years old, and that's what I wanted to make as my point. Man kind has plenty of time to advance, just as long as we can keep telling our butt's from a hole in the ground, we'll be fine.

humm....well we are going through such a space cloud at this moment, and according to NASA and Russian scientists this cloud is becoming denser and denser until our galazy passes the cloud around 2013 or 2015. I made a thread about this some time ago.

And it will happen again, someday. This just goes to show that sooner or later we are going to have to return to the caves and/or emigrate to other planets- or die as a species. Hope they dig us some better caves this next time around