[lopmotr]

I didn't get through the whole thing, but if there are big meteor impacts, wouldn't we see them on other planets in the solar system? They mention Hale-Bop for instance. Surely we can work out a probability distribution from the evidence we have besides Earth.

[stevenwoo]

The two largest impact craters we know of are on the Moon and Mars, and those happened about four billion years ago. Of course we'll never know for the gas giants. Not doing the math, but this makes the odds seem pretty low after the initial "flurry" of our solar system's birth, barring Jupiter perturbing an existing asteroid into a collision into earth. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_craters_in_the...