Incredible depiction of the asteroid that wiped off more than 75% of Earth species

Jason Kottke shared some hard-to-wrap-your-head-around facts, extracted from the book The Ends of the World by Peter Brannen:

A rock larger than Mount Everest hit planet Earth traveling twenty times faster than a bullet. This is so fast that it would have traversed the distance from the cruising altitude of a 747 to the ground in 0.3 seconds. The asteroid itself was so large that, even at the moment of impact, the top of it might have still towered more than a mile above the cruising altitude of a 747. In its nearly instantaneous descent, it compressed the air below it so violently that it briefly became several times hotter than the surface of the Sun.

And this one:

[…] in the Yucatan it would have been a pleasant day one second and the world was already over by the next.

Stronger chance of me buying the book than to go to the theater watch yet another movie with featherless dinosaurs.