Calling an asteroid a stone, while technically true, is akin to calling the planet it struck a rock-covered ball bearing.
I mean, the planet is likely smoother than a lot of ball bearings
The highest point and the lowest point aren’t very far deviated. Less than 6 miles up and less than 6 miles down. Basically a little less than 0.001% deviation.
Edit: After doing a bit of digging it looks like Earth would be comparable to a 1 inch grade 1000 ball bearing. Grade 1000 are not remotely close to the highest grade, in fact it’s one of the lowest grades of ball bearings.
God damn ball bearings get down to some crazy tolerances at the really high grades.
I’m happy I dig some digging into it.
It’s only natural that it would be rougher than most grades of ball bearings – as we already established its covered in rocks!
New ball bearings are still likely significantly smoother than the earth. Old worn out ball bearings might be rougher.
After doing a bit of digging it looks like Earth would be comparable to a 1 inch grade 1000 ball bearing.
God damn ball bearings get down to some crazy high tolerances.
I’m happy I dig some digging into it.
Edit: Grade 1000 is a really low grade ball bearing, thought I should clarify that.
So you’re saying the earth is a very smooth ball bearing. This despite being classified as an oblate spheroid.
The difference in diameter between the pole and the equator is only about 26 miles.
7926 miles vs 7900 miles
So a difference of about 0.03%
Yeah I’d say that’s pretty spherical
Edit: Rereading this it comes of a bit rougher than I intended. Basically what I’m saying is something can be spherical without being a perfect sphere, infact if to be a sphere (in common usage of the word) only applied to perfect examples of a sphere than nothing would be a sphere. Definitions are pretty wishy-washy a lot of the times, especially when it comes to describing the world as it is.
Earth is an oblique spheroid, technically. But calling it a sphere is true enough to observers that I’d say it still counts.
“Sir, how high are you?” “Yes.”
This belongs in shower thoughts
It depends… If we consider earth, which is a rock, in this calculation. Earth would be the biggest killer
But is it Earth itself that kills the birds? Seeing as it is the rock quality of the Earth we’re after, how many birds die from being struck by it? Does flying into the ground count as being struck by the Earth, if it is the bird that launches itself against it?
If you restrict it only to being struck by a rock then actually, while still probably the title holder, the meteor actually probably has a much lower body count than one might first assume. In fact I wonder if there’d be any way to calculate the average number of birds/avian creatures in the space occupied by the meteor at the time who could have been directly hit by the meteor not just killed off from second order effects.
Once again: dinosaurs are not birds and birds are not dinosaurs.
That’s akin to saying that beloved character actor Margo Martindale is a prehistoric fish or that a prehistoric fish is beloved character actor Margo Martindale.
First off, Yes, dinosaurs are birds. Unlike the word “fish”, which was in used long before terms or concepts like “monophyletic” were invented, “dinosaur” is a scientific term that arrived around the time scientists were developping cladistic classification, and the scientists have made the choice of defining it as a clade (a theoritical last common ancestor+ all of its descendants). Therefore, any descendant of a dinosaur is a dinosaur.
For older words, the scientist definition doesn’t need to be taken into account in general use, for example, the scientific definition of “berry” is famously different from it’s popular definition, but you don’t use the scientific definition in everyday life. But for “dinosaur”, a word coined by scientists referring to something that is only known through science, it makes less sense to ignore the scientific definition.
As for dinosaurs not being birds, that is true for most, but if birds are dinosaurs, then there were some dinosaurs that were birds. There’s actually two conflicting definitions of birds: If it’s a theropod that could fly or is descended from one that could, and is closer to any modern bird than to deinonychus, then birds (=Aves) appeared either in mid Jurassic or in and were already quite diverse before the K-T extinction, including the enanthiornithes and hesperornithes groups, that disappeared during the extinction.
If you define it as the common ancestor of all modern birds and its descendants (=Neoornithes), then they appeared in the late creataceous.
Using either definition, it is clear that they all look more at birds than like anything else, and a layman seing one if them out of context would immediately think of them as a bird (tho maybe a strange one) rather than as a dinosaur. So unlike for berries or fishes, there would be no conflict between either the scientific definition of “bird” and the popular one. Either way, only 3 separate lineages among them survived, so the meteorite did kill whole bird species.
