I think the title explains itself
In: 4
A lot of people are mentioning the Earth’s atmosphere here, and it just isn’t that big of a factor for *sizable* impactors over history. Yes, it keeps dust-sized particles from making a constant stream of micro-craters, and stops the fist-sized rocks from making small craters, but even Venus with 90 times Earth’s atmosphere doesn’t stop any craters bigger than about 2 km from being formed.
Okay, we wouldn’t be seeing many craters bigger than the atmospheric cutoff being formed *today* because the influx of such objects is currently very small, but if we could have had the protection of our atmosphere while somehow turning off erosion/volcanism/tectonism for the past 4.5 billion years, then we would look (from a distance) as cratered as the Moon does–only when looking at small scales would we notice the difference.
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