Meteor - English Language version

[Vekseid]

Meteor Strikes Earth - English Language Version

I didn't realize they made a translation >_>

[The Overlord]

Cool animation...the very real science behind the event notwithstanding, I do believe we love scaring ourselves with this sort of nightmarish scenario.

They've rehashed this many times over on the Misery- I mean History Channel, ad nauseum.


Yeah we get it, it's going to be bad. Real bad. Bad to the point that we're all irrevocably and indelibly fracked. So bad it's not even worth worrying about because nothing will be around to pick up the pieces and tell campfire scare stories about it. The plus side is that with temperatures that high, our bodies will incinerate before our brains even register the searing pain and heat.

[Paradox]

I'm quite unabashed in my love of envisioning potential catastrophes of the future; thanks for sharing this, Veks.

One thing-- since the melting point of marble is around 1000°C, and the photosphere (the outermost layer of the sun) has a temperature of 6000°C, those Doric columns from Greek antiquity would have melted into superheated goo  :P. I suppose they left them there through artistic license. 

[Vekseid]

Probably. Mind, impacts like this just aren't happening in our Solar System any longer. That was the equivalent of tossing Ceres into Earth. Anything that occurred in the past ~2 billion years were firecrackers in comparison.

[Will]

I'm quite unabashed in my love of envisioning potential catastrophes of the future; thanks for sharing this, Veks.

One thing-- since the melting point of marble is around 1000°C, and the photosphere (the outermost layer of the sun) has a temperature of 6000°C, those Doric columns from Greek antiquity would have melted into superheated goo  :P. I suppose they left them there through artistic license.

I was wondering the same thing, honestly.  It looked like everything on Earth had been destroyed except for ancient Greek temples. wtf?  Not even considering the fact that they would melt too, the ground beneath it had turned to magma.  What the hell was it supposed to be standing floating on?

Still, it was a pretty awesome clip.  I've never seen a "what if" involving a meteor that size.  Pretty horrendous.

[The Overlord]

This probably happened once in Earth's history; Theia, the alleged Mars-sized planet that formed the moon in its aftermath when it hit 'us'. You're talking about the difference between some thousands or hundreds of miles in the Theia incident or the scenario in the clip, compared to something under ten or twenty miles in the Chicxulub event possible related craters, and earlier catastrophes such as the late Cambrian.

Today, in the middle age of our solar system and well past the early bombardment era, the Earth just doesn't recover from a scenario like this later on. Once the crust has solidified again, where in the hell do you expect to get the combined mass of the world's oceans back? Not likely. Earth is dead after this.

I think the clip has a nice 'oh wow....holy shit' factor to it, but we'd need something truly biblical to get this going...either something that can wrench Ceres or a moon from the outer solar system out of orbit and send it sunward. That or a freak rogue planet from interstellar space that were know are out there.



As far as your anxiety closet demons go, I'd be much more concerned about global climate change.

[Vekseid]

Alternately, what gets depicted here was a firecracker compared to Theia. As the movie discusses, this was a much smaller impact that is thought to have happened six times during Earth's formation. Theia is a special form of collision caused by its mass becoming nontrivial compared to Earth's while in a L4 or L5 orbit.

[GothicFires]

Friday April 13 2029 (my 56th birthday) There is supposed to be an asteroid that is going to come between the Earth and the moon that we should be able to see with the naked eye. I can't remember when they said its return would be but it is supposed to get closer to the earth each time it passes.

[The Overlord]

The collision is purely 'what if' and completely out of context in the video, because stuff like this happened in the earlier history of the solar system; the bombardment period that most of the planets and moons bear scars from. Fortunately for us, the solar system has settled down in its middle age.

The magnitude of force between Theia and Ceres might be apples and oranges, but for purposes of how it's depicted, meaningless.

They're showing the smashup modern-day, and for all intents and purposes both events would be total planet-killers, so far as life here is concerned.


It's like comparing shooting your TV with a shotgun or a Howitzer...either way you're not watching television again.

[Oniya]

Friday April 13 2029 (my 56th birthday) There is supposed to be an asteroid that is going to come between the Earth and the moon that we should be able to see with the naked eye. I can't remember when they said its return would be but it is supposed to get closer to the earth each time it passes.

That would be this one:  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/99942_Apophis

[Will]

The collision is purely 'what if' and completely out of context in the video, because stuff like this happened in the earlier history of the solar system; the bombardment period that most of the planets and moons bear scars from. Fortunately for us, the solar system has settled down in its middle age.

The magnitude of force between Theia and Ceres might be apples and oranges, but for purposes of how it's depicted, meaningless.

They're showing the smashup modern-day, and for all intents and purposes both events would be total planet-killers, so far as life here is concerned.


It's like comparing shooting your TV with a shotgun or a Howitzer...either way you're not watching television again.

That may or may not be true.  It seems to me that a lot of our understanding of the mechanics of our solar system falls under informed speculation.  There could be any number of reasons that a large object ends up hurtling toward Earth.

Besides, 65 million years ago is really nothing on a cosmic scale, and there was a significant impact then, right? 

[Vekseid]

That may or may not be true.  It seems to me that a lot of our understanding of the mechanics of our solar system falls under informed speculation.  There could be any number of reasons that a large object ends up hurtling toward Earth.

Besides, 65 million years ago is really nothing on a cosmic scale, and there was a significant impact then, right?

There have been no significant impacts in terms of geological reshaping since the Late Heavy Bombardment.

Mare Imbrium was created ~3,850 million years ago, and is the only remotely comparable impact, of which Earth should have seen more of - and larger. The crater has a diameter of ~1,100 kilometers, compared to 170 for the Yucatan crater. Even the largest impacts that have occurred since have only created ~300km craters. Not healthy for the nation that gets impacted, or the biosphere as a whole, but civilization would probably still continue.

[The Overlord]

Besides, 65 million years ago is really nothing on a cosmic scale, and there was a significant impact then, right?

Yes, you could say it was a significant impact, being as it was an estimated 10-kilometer object, likely cast the world under the shroud of nuclear winter, and wiped out much life. Although there is argument that the Chicxulub event actually occurred a good 300,000 years prior to the mass extinction at the end of the Cretaceous, and thus is not the smoking gun. Nevertheless multiple large impacts have occurred since the late Cambrian that would have played some degree of hell on the biosphere.


However, the fact that you and I are sitting here millions of years later discussing it means Earth can obviously recover from it. But the impact in the video...that's a planet killer.

[Caeli]

Finally got back around to watching this. That was a way, way cool video.

I've always had a huge fascination for astronomy and earth science - all of the movies and documentaries have a very "whoa, epic" kind of feel to them.

[Oniya]

Hard to avoid 'epic' when you're dealing with that kind of scale.  It makes people and their conflicts seem very, very small.

[Caeli]

Hard to avoid 'epic' when you're dealing with that kind of scale.  It makes people and their conflicts seem very, very small.

Oh, definitely. We're considering scales of time and destruction that make the lifespan of a human less than even a blip in Earth's existence, and our idea of "global warming" was like a cool day during the reign of the dinosaurs.

And that's not even going beyond the solar system :-)