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Stuff and Nonsense About Meteor Strikes
There’s a really stupid article on Fox right now, claiming that scientists don’t know know why more asteroids have been striking Earth over the past 290 million years when compared to the 4.21 billion years before that.
We also don’t know how many meteor strikes we have experienced during those 4.21 billion years because the entire surface of the planet has been rearranged numerous times, obscuring much of the evidence for previous strikes. There are many holes in the ocean that were probably meteor strikes, and there are probably many previous meteor strikes that have been obscured by subsequent ones.
There is a built-in assumption in this study that there’s any kind of statistical norm for asteroid strikes, which indicates that the scientists in question have not been introduced to the concept of randomness.
Randomness is hard to achieve. No computer can generate truly random numbers because every program ever written to generate random numbers must operate according to a “rule for randomness,” which reduces the randomness to predictability.
Nature, however, has no difficulty generating random events. That happens all the time in the real world.
The assumption that there is an underlying rule to how many meteor strikes should take place over any given period of time is…