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by xwdv 1045 days ago
Only 400m in diameter.
3 comments

... The Chelyabinsk meteor had ~20m of diameter.

The impact energy of a 400m diameter asteroid is somewhere in the same ballpark as the deployed nuclear arsenal of the United States.

Not extinction-level impact, but wherever it hit would definitely feel it.

Yes some place will feel it somehow, 70% chance it strikes an ocean and creates a tsunami.

But the world will go on, people will shrug their shoulders and go on with life.

If it was a 60 mile wide asteroid, now that would truly be the end.

This would wipe out an area equivalent to a mid sized country and would possibly have global effects. The threshold for that is somewhere between 250 meters and a kilometer but we fortunately do not have any data to make that much more precise. You definitely wouldn't shrug your shoulders and get on with life, it would be the most important event in your life assuming it didn't end. Depending on where it happened the economic impact of such an incident would destabilize the world economy for decades.
How much of that would burn up in the atmosphere if it did hit?
Quora is pretty much unreadable now. Is the main answer just chat gpt? That's how it seems from mobile view. The page is too noisy to navigate for me.
Not sure why this happened but it went viral in India as a place to practice english for internet points or an online place to for Indians to do endless chit-chat, which is a lot more fun in person there than it is online!
Quora has been trash for awhile now.
Yep, they've added a ChatGPT answer on top of all the human answers. Although in this case the human answer isn't really better, but it's the fault of the person who asked the question for being vague about the kind of speed they meant.
How could Quora suck worse? Rub a little AI on it.
The more I think about it, this might be a good thing for the world, and amazingly stupid on the part of Quora. Since the whole Quora shtick is to heavily gamify your experience on the site, perhaps knowing there's always going to be an ML 'summary' above your incredibly erudite reply (/s in case it wasn't obvious) will make most people realize "hey...this place actually does suck" and maybe move on to something better...a life or something.
This video has comparisons of devastation that would be caused by different sizes (around 7:50 mark) of asteroids: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Wrc4fHSCpw
So a 500m is roughly a couple thousand or ten thousand times more than a Hiroshima nuke?
More like 50,000 or so (back of the envelope).
As a fraction of the overall asteroid, very little, thanks to the square-cube law.
The better question to ask is, how much energy would that transfer to the atmosphere on its way to dumping the rest into the planet proper?
Not enough.
A lot.
Going at 55~ km/s
Or 8. The page isn't quite sure.

Bad news for any life forms on its path either way, to be fair