We all know by now that it is believed that the Dinosaurs were killed by an astoroid or comet roughly 6 miles in diameter traveling at many times the speed of a bullet that slammed into the Yucatan peninsula. A rock this size rarely hits the earth—only every 30 to 60 million years, if even that.
However, smaller collisions occur much more frequently. Rocks large enough to destroy the entire population of Paris along with its outlying suburbs happen to hit us every 100 years or so—the last one hit in a remote region of Russia at the turn of last century.
And a bit rarer are non-extinction level rocks impacting us about roughly once every million years or so. These are objects that are no more than about a kilometer or so in diameter, much larger though than the centennial rocks which are often not much larger than a bus or airplane. But don't let the small size of these objects fool you---like Prince said, 'it might be little, but it's louuuuddd.'.

Imagine if you will a rock that size traveling at many times the speed of a bullet entering the earth’s atmosphere. The air underneath it would be immediate compressed, as it would not have enough time to escape or get out of the way. The resulting compression would superheat the air (in a few milliseconds) to several times the temperature of the surface of the sun. Everything in the path of the object would vaporize immediately—houses, cars, buildings, people, …EVERYTHING. Less than a second after that, the meteor/comet will have smashed into the earth’s surface instantly vaporizing itself and throwing millions upon millions of tons of debris into the outer edges of our atmosphere (and near orbiting space). Looking in it’s direction from hundreds of miles away, you’d see the brightest light you’ve ever seen….literally.
A wall of destruction would race outward like a ripple when a drop of rain hits the surface of a body of water. Only this ripple would be moving faster than the speed of sound, superheated from the explosion, and roughly a kilometer tall. Nothing within a thousand miles would survive it. If you were unlucky enough to be in the path of such a thing, you would see this huge wall of blackness headed your way…remember, it’s going faster than the speed of sound, so you wouldn’t even hear it. You’d just see a silent wall of darkness taking up the entire horizon and much of the sky headed your way…silently.
The impact will almost certainly set off a chain of volcanic explosions, hyper-hurricanes, and mega-tsuenamis. It would immediately and instantly knock out all communications on earth, so nobody would know what exactly happened.
Before the end of the first day, hundreds of millions of people will be dead. Within a few months, the haze left over the athomosphere would sufficiently block out the sun’s warming rays and disrupt crops for at least 2 or 3 years, if not a decade. Livestock, wildlife, ocean life, …people… would die by the billions.
Remember: This is not an extinction level event—this is only a kilometer wide piece of rock. Life on earth will definitely go on. And this is something that is believed to happen every million years, the last one being roughly a million years ago.

Look, I guess what I’m trying to say, is that if you’re too intimidated to pick a fight with lammastide, theAudience or 2the9s due to their intellect, you may not get a chance to do it tommorow.
Rocks this size are almost never detected, so it would come unannounced, out of a clear blue sky.


[Edited 2/25/10 8:19am]

not one spelling mistake that I can see...

BlackAdder7 said:

I'm glad someone already checked. I don't feel like reading all that till later.

BlackAdder7 said:

Well, there was this...


Possessive pronouns don't take apostrophes.

But that's pretty minor. Dan, I find posts like this provocative, thoughtful, and sexy. Please do more.

BlackAdder7 said:

He wrote "immediate" instead of using the adverb "immediately".And the typical "its/it´s" mistake.....and "astoroid" should be asteroid.






No seriously, I really like Dan´s style. He´s a good writer and very, very eloquent. The little typos just add a human touch to those things he writes. I really like the way he writes.

And no, I´m not really worried about those asteroids....my mind is so fucked up these days that I dont´t really care.


typo edit....talk about people sitting in the glasshouse

[Edited 2/24/10 8:57am]

BlackAdder7 said:

I like wether a lot. Natural disasters fascinate me.

Dinosaurs are more of a boy thing tho.

Ya gotta love the internet and all who fail in her.

A post is made highlighting the fact that we could all die a horrible death in the blink of an eye and the people who read it are more interested in spell checking. Brilliant.

comegetwild said:

or in mocking other people's posts

i guess in the end, it would be a blessing for the planet itself
if everything over 25 pounds was whiped off it in one fell sweep.

we humans would be fucked, ok

but without us, the atmosphere and all life would find a balance
again.

and if we have to go one day, i'd rather it be by a big freakin'
bang that came like a bolt of lightning in a clear blue sky than
have it be due to the sun getting bigger and bigger until earth
becomes one big george forman grill for humans.

IstenSzek said:

Ya. Just think how tan we'd get.

TotalANXiousNESS said:

you'd have to put on half a can of sunlotion just
to walk down the driveway to the mailbox



"oops, forgot my sun lotion, there goes my ear"

comegetwild said:

True. But only because it´s Dan.

dude!




[Edited 2/24/10 10:01am]

the music on this is pretty horrible but the video
is a pretty cool rendition of what it would look
like when hit by a giant meteorite.

BlackAdder7 said:

Luckily I am good at skimming words and not having to read the content.
I found a spelling error:
mega-tsuenamis

IstenSzek said:

Goodbye CD collection. Scary.

johnart said:

^^

Whenever I see that the latest post in a thread is from a mod, I automatically assume it's because the thread was locked.

No offense, Dan.

Dan, your posts are way too long to read, but I agree the dumbest thing about these movies about asteroids is the notion that we'd see them coming.

comegetwild said:

OMG, They are such assholes, swear to gawd.

YOU SHOULD TOTALLY BEAT THEIR ASSES FOR ME!!!

I would like, soooo totally be your friend, because I'm passive in nature and don't believe in ass beatings, but if you did it for me, I could totally benefit from those ass beatings and still incur no karmic debt.


BEAT. THEIR. ASSES.


group hug

IstenSzek said:

OMG

IstenSzek said:

UGH.

I'm not falling for your sensationalists scare-tactics.

IstenSzek said:

Oh damn.

Just watched it. The extinction level even would play out much like this, except for the 'slow-mo' depiction of the entry of the object---it would happen faster than that.

And the music is horrible. It doesn't even come close to portraying to the true horror of the scenes. Perhaps, I could redub it with the new Vikings Fight song.

Maybe if this happened Earth could get rings like Saturn!

NDRU said:

and Neptune

ZombieKitten said:

and Jupiter!