#Live asteroid impact movie

#Live asteroid impact movie

The last strategy, lampooned in the successful Netflix movie Don't Look Up, is to ignore the problem until it is too late. A massive volcanic eruption in Indonesia about 74,000 years ago likely caused severe climate disruptions on a global scale, but early humans were sheltered from the worst effects surviving in areas like Africa and India. However, humanity already survived a similar event in the past. A winter with widespread famine in an already struggling world would be the consequences. Temperatures would drop for decades, reducing the growing season of plants. The soot of the mega-fires burning on entire continents, together with dust and water vapor, will form a thick blanket of clouds in Earth's upper atmosphere, significantly reducing the sunlight reaching the surface. They could also act as a genebanks to preserve species, like the Global Seed Vault in the tectonically stable and remote Arctic Svalbard archipelago already does.īased on computer simulation, in the first moments of the impact, the energy released by the collision will cause a 300 degrees hot blast wave, igniting large areas of the Earth's surface.

They also could be used to store goods necessary to survive the first years after the impact, like food, medicine, fuel and fresh water. Large underground facilities could be constructed in cratons, the thick and stable cores of continents, or deep beneath the oceans. Underground facilities would protect humans from the direct effects of the impact, like the blast and fires, and the aftermath, like an impact winter. Citing the case that many burrowing species or species living in the deep sea survived the mass extinction 66 million years ago, the authors conclude that bunkers could also save humankind. If the impact is unavoidable, the second strategy involves large underground bunkers to survive the impact and its aftermath.

Based on their calculations, the authors conclude that asteroids over 40 kilometers are virtually unstoppable using current technology.