What if a meteor hit us now? What happens after that?
What if a meteor hit us now? What happens after that?
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.