An impact event is the collision of a large meteorite, asteroid, comet, or other celestial object with the Earth or another planet. Throughout recorded history, hundreds of minor impact events (and exploding bolides) have been reported, with some occurrences causing deaths, injuries, property damage or other significant localised consequences. There have also been major impact events throughout the Earth's history which severely disrupted the environment and caused mass extinctions.
Impact events have been a plot and background element in science fiction since knowledge of real impacts became established in the scientific mainstream.
Read more about Impact Event: Sizes and Frequencies, Geology of Impacts, Pleistocene Impact Events, Holocene Impact Events, Impact-caused Extinction Events, Non-terrestrial Impacts, End of Civilization
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“The question confronting the Church today is not any longer whether the man in the street can grasp a religious message, but how to employ the communications media so as to let him have the full impact of the Gospel message.”
—Pope John Paul II (b. 1920)
“Surely one of the peculiar habits of circumstances is the way they follow, in their eternal recurrence, a single course. If an event happens once in a life, it may be depended upon to repeat later its general design.”
—Ellen Glasgow (1873–1945)