Re:What made Earth a giant snowball 700M years ago? Scientis...
by slashdev on Wednesday February 14, 2024 @01:58PM
(#39373668)
It came pretty close, remember life slowly bounced back afterward. Something a little larger would almost do the trick. You just clean up what survives.
Re:What made Earth a giant snowball 700M years ago? Scientis...
by digging on Thursday February 15, 2024 @11:22AM
(#39384599)
No I don't think it did. I'm not sure you're understanding the scale of things here. I don't believe it came close at all, if "close" means that a ground team could have sterilized the planet afterward. Even if 99% of life were destroyed, that doesn't mean there's one little tide pool with some barnacles surviving, that means there's extremely hardy single-celled organisms living in the deepest nooks and crannies all over the planet.
We can't even "just clean up what survives" in the cleanest rooms on Earth, using techniques specifically intended to do that. Life is incredibly tenacious, I really don't think you're going to wipe it off a planet's surface without destroying the surface (and atmosphere, probably) of the planet in the process. And if that's acceptable - again, why wouldn't you just pick a barren planet.
Have you seen Earth? We've been hit with a big rock, we've turned out atmosphere into poison, and had several other mass extinctions, none of which sterilized the Earth.
Unless you mean a Theia-level rock to turn the entire surface into lava, but you risk changing the mass, composition, and satellite system of the planet. At that point it's a different planet entirely, so I don't know why you would expend all that energy. Just find another planet to live on.