Another note from Victor, 1998:

Hi Gene and List:

I will have to listen to the Shoemaker VCR tape a few more time to remember the details.

Shoemaker said that a paper in, I think it was, "Nature" magazine in 1995 got him started and I think the author was Ken Burns and he mentioned several others scientist. The paper which I am sure was his main visual aid at the lecture reported to show increases in cosmic dust
particles of a certain size or range of sizes which increased during these past 70 million years and how the cosmic dust directly related to increased impact flux rates. Shoemaker was excited about the paper and contacted the scientist involved and decided to do his own research in Italy which ultimately confirmed the same chart information with geological data of
shocked quartz in strata over the same period.

Shoemaker confirmed that he thought ultimately the impact rate over the last 3.2 billion years was related to the travel of the solar system (Sun and/or Earths) travel around the galaxy. He made special note of the z motion of the Sun in relation to other G type suns, and how the our sun only moves 75 parsecs through the galactic plane, and other stars of similar type the z motion was 300 parsecs(z motion = up and down motion). Gene indicated that this shorter z motion put our solar system in the area of dense star clusters for a longer time, and this may strip the Oort cloud of its outer shell of material causing increased cometary activity some period
of time following the passage by other stars."

Victor now starts in with his reply to Gene Roberts

"On the plus side, comets are *usually* easier to spot than asteroids" as you said but on the negative side it comes on with shorter lead time, usually at a considerable greater speed and cause considerable more damage on impacts. Let's not get too optimistic that we can stop a comet because I think you will find that the difficulty in deverting a comet is a few magnitudes
higher than an asteroid given the same amount of lead time.

Maybe in 50 million years some other form of intelligent life will be escavating mankinds bones calling them "long pigs which walk on two legs". These intelligent creatures would say "Oh they all died in the eocene period of gelogical time and I wonder what caused these pigs demise perhaps desease, famine, flood, or climate change (EL NINO) etc etc....

We will know the truth was that mankind would have survived had mankind had it's priorities right.

On our tombstone reads "Mankind died of stupid"

Cheers,
Victor