hmm interesting question... are you referring to the fact that asteroids are thought to come from the Oort Cloud ? well in that case, possibly :) if we had anything intersecting our path and causing our extinction, I guess you could blame the Oort Cloud for that.

shhhhh...youre scaring the children chris. they have enough to worry about without near earth objects as well. lol. i dont think its out of the realm of possibility, but i wouldnt bet the farm on it. no confirmed observations of the oort cloud have been made, and im always somewhat skeptical of a theory until i see some empirical evidence. some astronomers believe it to be the source of all long period and halley & jupiter-like comets & centaurs entering the inner solar system. these are some alternate hypotheses and problems with the oort cloud theory: 1. many astronomers believe almost all individual comets would be unobservable from so far away. makes sense to me. 2. comet collisions over billions of years would have destroyed most of them by now, leaving a combined mass for the entire oort cloud of only a few times the total earth mass. this low mass is unlikely to have supplied the inner solar system with comets over that time period. so oort astronomers are now speculating that the oort cloud must have another stash somewhere far off in the universe. hmmm...so is it one or the other guys? 3. comets have 20x times the concentration of deuterium found in the inner solar system. based on those models, if the material in the oort cloud came from inside the solar system, this wouldnt make any sense. 4. the suggested formation mechanism for comets is the accretion of water vapor from the solar nebula. its plausible that this could be stopped by simple brownian motion(i.e. particle theory). 5. some scientists are now proposing that the solar system is much younger than billions of years. in this model, attrition of comets would not have destroyed many of them. therefore, no source of replacement comets would be necessary. i dont know about this theory either... but who knows? what im curious about is the reaction of the governments of the world ~ would they let the world know if there were a near earth object headed towards us. im guessing the government would not even tell us until it was really, really close to avoid unimaginable chaos & panic. i also wonder who would they would elect to save in underground bunkers? another cataclysmic major meteor or asteroid colliding with earth bound to happen, its just a matter of when.