Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by Tuna-Fish 1045 days ago
... 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.

1 comments

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.