Dwarf planet Ceres is a really icy place, NASA’s Dawn spacecraft shows. Think of an asteroid, and a dry, rocky body may spring to mind. But Ceres, king of the asteroid belt, is helping to throw cold water on that stereotype.

Ceres is the smallest of the bodies current classified as dwarf planets with a diameter of 950km….Ceres Dwarf Planet Profile.

A ‘Megasatellite’ Orbiting Ceres Would Make a Fine Home For Humans, Scientist Says. Given all the logistics involved, it’s unlikely that humanity will ever see our way outside the Solar System to colonise exoplanets. But the possibility of settling elsewhere inside the Solar System isn’t so far-fetched.

According to NASA, Ceres is about 413 million kilometers from the Sun and inhabits the asteroid belt region between Mars and Jupiter. Thankfully, this gigantic asteroid is very far from Earth and is not in danger of colliding with the planet.

On Earth, we are protected by a magnetic field and our atmosphere, but asteroids lack this defense. One possibility for defense against this radiation is living inside of an asteroid. It is estimated that humans would be sufficiently protected from radiation by burrowing 100 meters deep inside of an asteroid.

The circled streak in the center of this image is asteroid 2020 QG, which came closer to Earth than any other nonimpacting asteroid on record. It was detected by the Zwicky Transient Facility on Sunday, Aug. 16 at 12:08 a.m. EDT (Saturday, Aug. 15 at 9:08 p.m. PDT).

Humans could be living in a ‘floating asteroid belt colony’ in 15 years’ time, scientist says. In a research paper published this month, Dr Janhunen says humans could be living on floating orbs in the asteroid belt located between Mars and Jupiter within the next 15 years.

They are comprised of small pieces of debris, typically no larger than a grain of dust or sand, which continually crash into the Earth’s atmosphere. As that debris plunges deeper and deeper, friction with the atmosphere causes it to ablate – burning up from the outside in.

An estimated 25 million meteoroids, micrometeoroids and other space debris enter Earth’s atmosphere each day, which results in an estimated 15,000 tonnes of that material entering the atmosphere each year.

Credit: The University of Texas at Austin/ Jackson School of Geosciences. The dust is all that remains of the 7-mile-wide asteroid that slammed into the planet millions of years ago, triggering the extinction of 75% of life on Earth, including all nonavian dinosaurs.

Chicxulub crater

If the object is very large but is still a loosely-held-together rubble pile, a solution is to detonate one or a series of nuclear explosive devices alongside the asteroid, at a 20-meter (66 ft) or greater stand-off height above its surface, so as not to fracture the potentially loosely-held-together object.

If the comet is 10 kilometers across or larger (that is, if the impact carries an energy of more than about 100 million megatons), the resulting global environmental damage will be so extensive that it will lead to a mass extinction, in which most life forms die.

Birds. Most paleontologists regard birds as the only surviving dinosaurs (see Origin of birds). Only a small fraction of ground and water-dwelling Cretaceous bird species survived the impact, giving rise to today’s birds.

In an evolutionary sense, birds are a living group of dinosaurs because they descended from the common ancestor of all dinosaurs. Other than birds, however, there is no scientific evidence that any dinosaurs, such as Tyrannosaurus, Velociraptor, Apatosaurus, Stegosaurus, or Triceratops, are still alive.

about 65 million years ago

The age immediately prior to the dinosaurs was called the Permian. Although there were amphibious reptiles, early versions of the dinosaurs, the dominant life form was the trilobite, visually somewhere between a wood louse and an armadillo. In their heyday there were 15,000 kinds of trilobite.

The most commonly suggested causes of mass extinctions are listed below.

• Flood basalt events. The formation of large igneous provinces by flood basalt events could have:
• Sea-level falls.
• Impact events.
• Global cooling.
• Global warming.
• Clathrate gun hypothesis.
• Anoxic events.
• Hydrogen sulfide emissions from the seas.

Tardigrade

The World Wide Fund for Nature’s 2020 Living Planet Report says that wildlife populations have declined by 68% since 1970 as a result of overconsumption, population growth and intensive farming, which is further evidence that humans have unleashed a sixth mass extinction event; however, this finding has been disputed …

Invasive species, many of which are introduced by humans, are also threatening ecosystems all over the world. Introduced species compete with local species for resources and often diminish the quality of biodiversity in the area, sometimes causing extinction. We are definitely going through a sixth mass extinction.

We Are to Blame. Human activities have caused the world’s wildlife populations to plummet by more than two-thirds in the last 50 years, according to a new report from the World Wildlife Fund.

In one study published in Nature in 2004 found that between 15 and 37% of 1103 endemic or near-endemic known plant and animal species will be “committed to extinction” by 2050.

Here are the 15 extinct species:

• Barbodes disa—last seen in 1964.
• Barbodes truncatulus—last seen in 1973.
• Barbodes pachycheilus—last seen in 1964.
• Barbodes palaemophagus—last seen in 1975.
• Barbodes amarus—Last seen in 1982.
• Barbodes manalak—Once a commercially valuable fish, last seen in 1977.

Estimates of koala populations have historically varied wildly. In 2016, scientists estimated there were over 300,000 koalas in Australia. In mid-2019, the Australian Koala Foundation estimated that fewer than 80,000 remained in the country, and said the number could be as low as 43,000.

What are the consequences of extinction? If a species has a unique function in its ecosystem, its loss can prompt cascading effects through the food chain (a “trophic cascade”), impacting other species and the ecosystem itself.