Bailouts could doom the airline industry!
 

If you look at the history of the railroads, you'll understand why:


https://fee.org/articles/railroad-history-suggests-federal-bailouts-could-spell-doom-for-airlines/

On the flip side, has ANYONE alive today ever heard of the Great Northern Railroad?

Asteroid COULD destroy the Earth
 

The one that took out the dinosaurs was actually only medium sized...

Fortunately we're cataloging the dangerous ones. I'd feel better if we had a defense capability on the shelf, but at this point I think we have enough advance notice on any extinction size objects.

Interestingly, I recently learned that the Chicxulub Asteroid impact caused such mass extinction more so because of its angle of arrival, rather than its mass. I recall that it impacted at about a 30 deg angle, which caused it to "skip" several times, before coming to a stop, and that this caused much more heat to be released into the atmosphere than a 90 deg impact angle would have.

Of course none of this is first hand knowledge:D

Near earth supernovas and Gamma Ray Bursts are another one, but I don't think we'll be close enough in our galactic orbit for at least tens of millions of years to be near any stars that are massive enough to go supernova.

Of course. The much more efficient railroad built by James J. Hill, whose namesake train, the Empire Builder is named after. (I knew this without reading the article.)

That article used terrible selective history.
Maybe we shouldn’t publish every thought out there.

Speaking of railroads, Jay Gould discovered that he could pay half of his employees to kill the other half for his benefit. Crandall used a slightly more civilized method.

Here's a wakeup call...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2009_Jupiter_impact_event

This asteroid impact disturbance is the size of the Pacific Ocean. It occurred 11 years ago.

The image you're looking corresponds to an impact energy measured in Billions of tons of TNT (the largest fusion bomb ever tested was about 50 million tons). An impact like that might well end human civilization.

Railroads declined because of airplanes and automobiles, not because of mismanagement.

Airlines will go the same way once teleportation becomes readily available to the masses, and is no longer the jealously guarded purview of starfleet elites.