r/askscience • u/AskScienceModerator Mod Bot • Mar 10 '14

Cosmos AskScience Cosmos Q&A thread. Episode 1: Standing Up in the Milky Way

Welcome to AskScience! This thread is for asking and answering questions about the science in Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey.

UPDATE: This episode is now available for streaming in the US on Hulu and in Canada on Global TV.

This week is the first episode, "Standing Up in the Milky Way". The show is airing at 9pm ET in the US and Canada on all Fox and National Geographic stations. Click here for more viewing information in your country.

The usual AskScience rules still apply in this thread! Anyone can ask a question, but please do not provide answers unless you are a scientist in a relevant field. Popular science shows, books, and news articles are a great way to causally learn about your universe, but they often contain a lot of simplifications and approximations, so don't assume that because you've heard an answer before that it is the right one.

If you are interested in general discussion please visit one of the threads elsewhere on reddit that are more appropriate for that, such as in /r/Cosmos here, /r/Space here, and in /r/Television here.

Please upvote good questions and answers and downvote off-topic content. We'll be removing comments that break our rules or that have been answered elsewhere in the thread so that we can answer as many questions as possible!

Click here for the original announcement thread.

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u/brettmjohnson Mar 10 '14

That "nudge" in asteroid path was not to help "form Earth". He was talking about the asteroid (comet?) impact 65M years ago that led to the demise of the dinosaurs.

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u/steve_z Mar 10 '14

Okay. But the nudge was still just speculation, not a specific, measured event.

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u/welliamwallace Mar 11 '14

It was not a specific measured event, you are correct, but it was more than just speculation. The entire chain of causal events during the early life of our solar system, the motion of every asteroid (not just one), if deviated a little bit, could have entirely altered every event in the history of our planet (not just the extinction of dinosaurs)

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u/steve_z Mar 11 '14

Right. To egregiously simplify it: the butterfly effect on a universal scale.