Asteroid hits Earth!

[pacman]

So what would happen if an asteroid really hits Earth? How would the world change? What would you do!?

[30_Units]

i'd get a job at the new convention center setting up stages for janet jackson

[ggpr]

apparently from what i saw in "Earth: The Biography"(good watch by the way), if a big enough asteroid hit, It could rain fires of molten rock across the planet from its explosion settling. This would cause fires of a huge magnitude which would change the atmosphere enough to kill off most life. This is what the show claimed hit the Yucatan Peninsula in mexico around 65 million years ago, killing the dinosaurs and almost all life on earth.

They also claimed that disasters such as these help to stimulate evolution and advance life. That asteroid hitting earth was probably the only reason we walk the earth today rather than advanced dinosaurs or something lol.

At any rate, everyone should check out the show, it was pretty good. There are five parts. Volcanoes, Ice, Atmosphere, Oceans, Rare planet. It kinda jumped on the whole global warming bandwagon but i think it was still pretty good.

[Captain Cannabis]

Near-Earth Asteroids
Potentially Hazardous Asteroids (PHAs) are space rocks larger than approximately 100m that can come closer to Earth than 0.05 AU. None of the known PHAs is on a collision course with our planet, although astronomers are finding new ones all the time.
On September 10, 2008 , there were 979 potentially hazardous asteroids.

[Captain Cannabis]

Near-Earth Object Groups

[ggpr]

Jupiter is what protects us for the most part apparently, pulling in most space rocks headed our way.

[bmac]

If I knew a asteroid was going to hit earth and we were doomed, I would do every drug I could get my hands on and watch it come down.

[SpankyMcLankey]

Originally Posted by bmac

If I knew a asteroid was going to hit earth and we were doomed, I would do every drug I could get my hands on and watch it come down.

Dude, that's exactly what I have thought.


Like people that are going to commit suicide, aren't even interested in doing drugs before they go. I don't know why either. Like fuck, if I for some reason decided I was going to kill myself. I had a friend way back that told me he was going to kill himself, I really didn't believe him and that's a different story, but I did ask him why he doesn't just go out with a boom. He said no. I didn't understand.

[SpankyMcLankey]

I like to think of...

what if the sun was burnt out for no reason. Or else taken out of our solar system by an even bigger star/asteroid. Like, the earth would freeze over within a week. So what would you do in those couple days you could?

[№1]

Fortunately its all pretty much a moot point since we'll have just about as much warning as the dinosaurs did...








By the way, with any luck I'll be under the mother fucker when it comes down.

[Antediluvian]

^wouldn't matter much if we did ,Carl Sagan made that pretty clear in a series he did ....nuclear winter and all that.


Near-Earth Object Groups

felt like I was reading a script from deep space 9 .

I have no idea from that chart if the were refering to asteroids or chevrolets ,

something is less than 200 ,that's probably not good.

[highanddry]

If it hit earth, then it wouldnt be an asteroid right? It would suck..

[№1]

You are right, it would be a meteorite.



We'd be just as fucked but grammatically correct.

[The Rev]

What if it was a huge nug...the size of Texas? Sure, it would still kill us all, but the whole world would get stoned first as it burned up in the atmosphere.

Mmmmm.... Giant Earth-killing bud....



The Rev

[Tai-pan]

Originally Posted by pacman

So what would happen if an asteroid really hits Earth? How would the world change? What would you do!?

What kind of asteroid? Iron-Nickle? Solid Rock? Dirty Pepple?

How big?

Where does it strike? (not that it matters if it's large enough)

Rocks from space hit the earth every day. Some microscopic, some the size of basket balls. Most hit the oceans or remote areas. Very few ever hit near population centers.

The big rocks can hit us (like what happened with the airburst over russia so many years ago) but they are even rarer than the smaller ones that hit near a city.

Point is, depending on the rock, it could be survivable. Depending on it's size and where it hits, the strike could be anywhere from a cloud of dust you cough at to a Multi-Gigaton explosion (thousands of megatons) that instantly vaporized you before it even hit the ground. Heck a big enough rock traveling at super-sonic speeds could make a shock front large enough and with enough power to instantly turn you into jello as it passed over head.

Quote about the movie "Deep Impact":

Bad:
The first comet roars slowly across the sky, trailing smoke and fire. Thousands watch and listen as it heads towards its ocean impact.

Good: The Comet was moving at something like 40 kilometers per second. It was shown moving at a very low angle across the sky, but even so, at that speed it would appear to cross the sky in something like ten seconds. It was moving too slowly in the movie. I am willing to give them the smoke and fire bit; comets are dark, so as it ablates it will give off what looks like smoke. The comet entry would have been much brighter, too, blindingly bright. When I was a kid I saw a meteor burn up that was so bright it lit up the sky and left an afterimage on my eye for several minutes, and that meteor was probably smaller than a pea. Wolf-Beiderman was a bit bigger than that! Something like that gives off a lot of energy. The people watching it would have been blinded. But then, not for long...

The Comet was also moving much faster than the speed of sound as well. This means it would generate a tremendous shock wave, the force of which would have smashed flat everyone watching within hundreds of kilometers. They would never have heard The Comet; they would have been squished into jelly before the sound could reach them. Yuck. In the image to the right, you can see the shock wave as a circular front with the impact in the middle. The impact graphics were very good.

(This was a quote from Phil Plait, the creator of BadAstronomy.com. He is an astronomer, lecturer, and author. He worked ten years on Hubble Space Telescope and six more working on astronomy education. He later struck out on his own as a writer. He has written two books, dozens of magazine articles, and too many blog articles to count.)

[Tai-pan]

Originally Posted by SpankyMcLankey

I like to think of...

what if the sun was burnt out for no reason. Or else taken out of our solar system by an even bigger star/asteroid. Like, the earth would freeze over within a week. So what would you do in those couple days you could?

Burnt out for no reason? Taken out of the Solar system? Well to be honest the sun has been at it for ~4 to 5 billion years and has another 5 or so billion left.

Contrary to the movies, the sun isn't going to go supernova...or even nova....or anything else.

In ~5 billion years it's going to have lost about 30% of it's current mass, and the surface temperature would have climbed too high for life to have existed on earth for the last 3 billion years or so (in fact in ~ 1 billion years from today the surface of the Earth will become too hot for liquid water to exist.)

The sun will then turn into a red giant as the hydrogen fuel runs out and the sun starts to fuse Helium atoms (happens around a 100 million Kelvin or so). The surface of the sun will expand past earth's orbit...Some scientist believe that the planets' orbits will expand away from the sun as well keeping them from being swallowed. Others believe that the expansion will not be enough to escape the sun.

Either way, the sun will grow even hotter and Earth will turn into what Mars looks like now. The oceans will be boiled away and the atmosphere will dissipate into space.

After the sun burns up it's helium fuel, it will switch to gasses farther up the energy scale and the sun will start to pulse, throwing out solar winds that will strip away it's outer layers. It will then start to forum a Planetary Nebula and at the center a white dwarf that will last another 10 billion years or so then slowly die away to a black dwarf.

But to your question, if something blocked all energy from the sun to earth, it would be like nuclear winter. The earth would slowly radiate off it's energy (remember, space is a vacuum. You need a medium to radiate heat away in a vacuum.) So it would take a very long time for it to cool down. Plant life would die fairly quickly without light. Without light, we would need Vitamin D supplements. After a few months to a year, the surface would be too cold to sustain life (-60F to -90F) on the surface. In a few years time, the earth's atmosphere would start to fall to the ground as 'snow' and solidify.

This doesn't mean it's all over though. The deep oceans would remain the best place for life to carry on. The reason is the ocean floors are very hot and there are many superheated geysers (black and white gushers as they are called) that bring heat up from the center of the earth which the source of heat there is friction. As long as the core keeps turning counter to the surface of the earth, we will have a hot core...which means heat...which means the potential for life to live on. If we are smart enough to design and build shelters that deep or find a way to tap the earth's natural heat and duct that into some underground city, we just may live through something like that.

Hypothetically.

[pacman]

^not we. rich rich rich motherfuckers and world leaders. and then maybe they can finally settle their scores man to man.

[SmokeSomeDoja]

Originally Posted by Captain Cannabis

Near-Earth Asteroids
Potentially Hazardous Asteroids (PHAs) are space rocks larger than approximately 100m that can come closer to Earth than 0.05 AU. None of the known PHAs is on a collision course with our planet, although astronomers are finding new ones all the time.
On September 10, 2008 , there were 979 potentially hazardous asteroids.

you mean 2.5 microparsecs?

[Bongy_Digital]

id put that shit in a red wagon and eat french fries off of it.

[cheeseking]

heres a pretty badaass simulation of what a large asteriod imact would do to the earth, courtesy of discovery channel and pink floyd.