Not one big enough to cause another great extinction, but small enough to just turn a whole small country and parts of neighboring ones into a huge crater. Will the people who was evacuated out after NASA stated a warning try to rebuild the country after everything has settled down or do they’d become citizens of another country?
Edit: after reading the comments, maybe turning a small country into a crater is too much, what about just level the place, or in any way that make it uninhabitable for a period of time?
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One small enough to destroy a small country is enough to destroy the world.
What do you think happens to all the rock that was inside the crater before the crater was formed?
It doesn’t just disappear, it’s violently thrown out of the crater, some of it all the way into space where it rains back down on the earth, creating hundreds or thousands of smaller craters, it’s called “ejecta”Now, when all of this ejecta is thrown back to Earth and generates a lot of heat as it moves through the atmosphere, that heat has to go somewhere, so it warms the surrounding air raising atmospheric temperature. But, it’s not the only thing doing so, remember all of those smaller craters?
Each impact releases enough energy to create a small firestorm, you now have thousands of small fires burning for thousands of miles from the initial impact. These will be the largest and most violent forest fires in recorded history. They will warm the atmosphere and release billions of tons of soot, this will be a problem in a few weeks.
As the fires consume everything and burn out things begin to cool down. The water boiled off from plants, rivers, and streams begins to condense into clouds and then rain. Acid rain falls across the world, poisoning areas that were lucky enough to survive the first few days. People, crops, and livestock start to die off in areas that were previously survivable. This lasts for a few weeks while the soot in the upper atmosphere cools the planet.
It continues cooling the planet until we enter a state of impact winter, which is the same as volcanic winter or nuclear winter but with a different mechanism behind it.
Depending on how big the impact and firestorms were, this could last between decades to centuries, then things start to return to normal.
If any humans survive at this point, we’ll probably be starting over from the bronze age.
!If any humans survive at this point, we’ll probably be starting over from the bronze age. !<
Eh, if there are human survivors then data (digital and analog) and technology will survive, as well as localized means of generating power. Between that and knowledge of post-bronze age technology existing in the minds of survivors (it doesn’t have to be an understanding of how technology works, merely the idea that it exists is a huge head start since initially imagining a thing is the first huge hurdle towards creating it), I would bet on survivors not needing to reinvent so many wheels if we are also assuming the basic conditions necessary for a small number of humans to survive and reproduce indefinitely exist in this post-apocalyptic scenario. Bonus points if any of the survivors happen to be experts in a modern domain or two, but even the knowledge of basic maths that many people retain from adolescent education is a huge advantage over our distant ancestors. Just knowing that something is possible is enough to drive humans to figure out how to do it, and there would be scraps of all sorts of materials and things around to remind/inspire survivors.
That all isn’t to say that I think day to day life would be at all functionally similar to life as it is now. Technology aside, just the sheer loss of population and infrastructure would mean modern convenience would be gone and life would initially be a brutal hands-on echo of the 19th century in many regards.
I don’t really subscribe to the whole if civilization collaspes there will be no technology in anyone’s lifetime again thing. You aren’t going to go back to ordering shit off amazon from your smartphone or anything. However the knowledge that things like refrigeration, radio transmission, internal combustion engines, water treatment and such are possible is going to drive people to eventually find out how to get it by any means necessary.
How quickly this happens is a question of whether the majority of people adopt a “technology is too dangerous/a sin against God” idealogy or not.
One of the things missing from this step are all the incremental progress that is the best we can do at given levels of technology. I know LED lights exist and will help us extend our limited energy - but how does that help us with the necessary materials science, integrated circuits, fabs, or even how to build a reliable incandescent light in the meantime
Bonus points if any of the survivors happen to be experts in a modern domain or two
Ok, I’m a programmer. What now? I will starve and die of dysentery long before I could help reinvent computers
One small enough to destroy a small country is enough to destroy the world.
Not really. You could blow up all of Lichtenstein with 2x 350kt explosions. Definitly not world ending.
Unless you’re a Liechtensteiner.
Meteor
Meteor impacts are typically expressed by converting their kinetic energy into its TNT equivalent.
This is a great description! I agree, a meteor large enough to destroy a small country is massive!
I mean you could probably wipe out Lichtenstein or Vatican City with conventional munitions that wouldn’t endanger the planet.
Can you imagine if Vatican City were specifically wiped out by a meteor? I think religiosity would skyrocket worldwide.
“God is totally real, and He’s PISSED at Roman Catholics.”
We’d have people claiming it’s because the pedophilia, others claiming it’s because the Pope was too woke. Lutherans would just be like, “We’ve been saying it since 1517, you guys.”
An asteroid that is small enough to contain the impact to Vatican City would probably burn up in the atmosphere and wouldn’t hit. It would have started off at about the size of a car.
The asteroid that created Barringer Crater was probably about the size of a football stadium, that’s the kind of asteroid that is needed to destroy your average sized small country.
What about after burning up was still enough to destroy the country. It doesn’t have to be a country size chunk. Just enough to destroy it. I’m sure there is a size that post burn is enough to level the place.
be starting over from the bronze age.
all the easy bronze, copper, tin and iron have been thoroughly exploited already. good luck with that lol
Do you seriously think that once they’re taken out they’re gone forever? All’s we’ve done is make them easier to access by bringing them to the surface. Even the average landfill has a higher mineral content than most mines do, if anything it’ll be easier to get than when we dug it out the first time.
valid point - concentrations, sure - the boneyard will be fodder for decades of exploitation and archeology. Worldwide, I don’t know how much will end up accessible in the waste stream as so much is dumped into the seas.
Not one big enough to cause another great extinction, but small enough to just turn a whole small country and parts of neighboring ones into a huge crater.
…That’s a global extinction level event right there. The Chicxulub crater is about 120 miles in diameter, and and 12 miles deep. That’s the meteor that resulted in the die-off of all the dinosaurs. To put that in perspective, Slovenia–which is a pretty small country, geographically and culturally speaking–is about 70 miles north to south, and 140 miles east to west. An meteor that turned most of Slovenia into a crater, and parts of Croatia and Austria would also end up causing the same kind of global extinction that was caused 66M years ago. The resulting explosion from that kind of impact would immediately wipe out around 1/4 or Europe from the pressure wave. The vaporized rock would fill the atmosphere, and cause an immediate ice age; you could expect to see global famines due to crop failures, and an immediate drop in global temperatures of >3C.
Any meteor that turns an entire country (aside from countries like The Vatican, Monaco, etc.) into a crater is going to cause a global extinction event.
The Vatican it is then!
Chicxulub crater
I wanted to know more about this so I googled it and stumbled upon a nice little Easter egg. Can recommend.
Ha, that’s cool, thanks for the heads up :-)
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Depending on the countries destroyed, the Internet might suck a whole lot more.
It depends on how small the country is.
The Vatican? Italy is pretty hosed for a while and there will be a lot of devastation in the areas.
A crater the size of any small country or large city is going to have massive worldwide weather impacts. the one 65 million years ago has a crater about the size of Belgium. Luxemburg is like 1/10th the area and 1/10 of the damage that wiped out the vast majority of life is going to wipe out a very significant chunk of life. Depending on where it hit, it would most likely cause mass die offs downwind for sure and probably drop the world average temps for years.
I’ll bet there is a website that calculates this stuff, but I don’t time to check one out at the moment.
I don’t think anyone would care about rebuilding a crater while the rest of the world collapses.
I’ll bet there is a website that calculates this stuff…
There is. Have fun!
Thanks!
That same website also tracks how long it’s been since various sized meteors have hit earth.
It’s an interesting question and would require a sophisticated model. As others have pointed out, the size, velocity, and density of the object and the amount of warning time are all critical variables. The target location is also a critical variable. Some countries have friendly neighbors who would want to help. Other countries have hostile neighbors. Some countries have a culture and infrastructure that would have a chance of executing a swift and semi-orderly evacuation. Many would not. Many populations would panic and there would be mass chaos.
This would be a fascinating thing to train an AI on to see what sorts of answers/hallucinations it comes up with. Apply for a grant and get on it!
There will not be an evacuation, since we don’t usually know space rocks are coming. It has only happened a couple of times we’ve seen a rock before it hits the Earth (with all of them being small and burning up in the atmosphere). One time I got an alert because the thing was coming down near me (and I’m a total nerd being subscribed to such a thing), I went outside and looked up and even though it was clouding I saw a big shooting star.
We’ve mapped a lot of stuff in the solar system, so we can be fairly sure anything big coming near Earth isn’t going to hit in the coming decades. But there can always be something we miss, something large enough to take out a city. We are getting better at spotting it, but lead times are hours not days or weeks.
If you are talking about evacuating a city, that’s a tall order in a couple of days in the best conditions. Evacuating an entire country (small country, say 15-25 million people), I don’t know if that’s even possible, that’s never been done.
After everything is said and done, recovery will take years. Something that big will cause a mini ice age with lower temperatures for a couple of years, this wrecks food production around the world. We’ve learned the last 10 years how vulnerable our logistical processes are. Something like a big meteor impact will be much much worse. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Ice_Age
Because it takes say 20-30 years to get to some kind of recovery, most people will have to live somewhere else and get rooted there in that time. But knowing humans, we will probably claw back the land. Look at Hiroshima for example, completely wasted, now a beautiful city. Something on the scale of an entire country has never been done, but it can be done. New people would settle the land during the recovery, but most likely the original culture and ethnicity gets diluted and maybe lost with people spreading out.
Depending on what exactly happens there will be less refugees than say for example a big war. If a big city is hit directly, it can easily kill everyone in the city, comparable to a nuclear strike. It hard to say, because if the meteor is big enough to destroy the entire country, that’s an ELE. Most likely there’s something that destroys like a city and the rest of the country will have issues with the fallout, but that’s manageable.
It also really depends on where the strike hits, if it’s a country like Australia with densely populated cities and a whole lot of nothing, a strike can kill a lot of people and leave the country relatively unaffected or even hit and kill nearly nobody. If the strike is in for example Luxembourg, the country simply stops existing and every inhabitant is dead.
Ooh, where do you get your notification of meteor showers from?
I’m sad to say Xitter, so I will need a replacement for that soon hate that site.
Understandable. But is there a particular account you follow or is just #alerts or what?
I’ve barely ever been on Twitter so I don’t know how it works much.
Yeah general accounts like minor planet center, nasa and esa of course. And specific accounts like the international meteor organization and nasa asteroid watch. But also hashtags like #fireball or #meteor
Thanks.
Ever since I started putting bouillon cubes in my shower head, I’ve been having meatier showers at home.
A very very very big explosion
There is a country expected to be submerged in the near future. They are trying to aquire some new space for thier country to exist. I imagine similar if there were enough survivors.
