A Civilization Resetting Event Is Far More Likely Than a Mass Extinction. That Is the Real Threat.

Randall Carlson draws a distinction that reframes the entire conversation about cosmic threats. At the top of the scale sits the KT boundary event that ended the dinosaurs - wiping out three quarters of all life on Earth. Above even that sits the Permian-Triassic extinction - the most catastrophic event in the fossil record, eliminating approximately 90% of all species. These are real historical events. They are also extraordinarily rare. Randall argues we do not need to be worrying about a six mile asteroid arriving in the next few centuries. That threat, while real in geological time, is not the pressing concern.

The pressing concern sits much further down the scale - an event capable not of ending life on Earth but of resetting human civilization. That category of event is dramatically more common, more likely, and more plausible than the extinction scenarios that capture public imagination. A meteor storm - 100 Tunguska scale objects - is not a theoretical worst case. It is, Randall states directly, very real and very possible. There is nothing implausible about it. And the scale of what 100 Tunguska events represents is not abstract - Randall provides a reference point that makes it immediately concrete. It would be the rough equivalent of a major nuclear war. Not an extinction. A reset. And unlike a six mile asteroid, it is something the near Earth environment is entirely capable of delivering.