Planet-Killer Simulator
A couple weeks ago, Buckethead posted a nice piece on the Earth's latest near-miss encounter with an asteroid big enough to make forever irrelevant all concerns of who's gonna win The Apprentice.
If you're like me, you like staring into the abyss and playing around with what you find in there. So go check out this Earth Impact simulator. Plug in your desired specs (say, witnessing a 5-mile wide hunk of ice hitting the earth at a 35-degree angle at 200Km/s from fifty miles away), and it spits out a detailed analysis of the armageddon you've wrought, from how loud the blast will be at your chosen distance to the size of the fireball and deadly flying chunkage and probable damage to structures.
We're all gonna die! Sweet!
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J,
J,
OK, this is fucking cool. Although I think there are limits to what this particular program can do.
I put in a 1 mile hunk of iron moving at just under the speed of light and got quite dramatic effects: a 76 mile crater, a 110 mile fireball, and this line- Richter Scale Magnitude: 10.1 (This is greater than any shaking in recorded history). The other stuff about general panic, conspicuous cracks, and glass shattering seemed a little...anti-climactic.
I didn't get the utter, immediate planetary annihilation I'd hoped for but it's still a hoot.
This little thing is almost as fun as a Sid Meier or Maxis product: SimDoom or something.
Ah, muuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuch
Ah, muuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuch better:
100 mile hunk of iron
180,000 mi/s
90 degree impact angle
Yield:
3400 mile crater
8400 mile fireball
14.1 Richter Scale
Total destruction at my position, 5000 miles away. Note: My first position, 100 miles away, was voided as I would have been within the impact crater and ejected.
Am I liking this too much....?
GL, you need to read Killing
GL, you need to read Killing Star, by Charles Pellegrino and George Zebroski. The primary focus of the story is the relativistic bombing of the earth and its colonies, and the struggle for survival of the (very few) survivors.
I don't think the program that Johno found takes into account the true effects of objects moving at relativistic speeds.
Read the book, it has more great concepts on the average page than most sf novels have in their entirety. I can't recommend it highly enough.
Killing Star was great.
Killing Star was great. Especially so because the aliens don't even figure into the story until fairly late in the game. It's just people dying and nobody knows why.
It kind of underscores the thing Buckethead said earlier this week about space seeming empty because it's too dangerous to say "Hello".
Buckethead, I think you're
Buckethead, I think you're right about the simulator. However, if you're 5000 miles from an impact site and still "beneath the continuous ejecta deposit" I think it's safe to assume that we're all doomed-- doomed!