[HN Gopher] Simulate Asteroid Impacts on Earth
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Simulate Asteroid Impacts on Earth
Author : faebi
Score : 139 points
Date : 2022-12-05 19:30 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (neal.fun)
(TXT) w3m dump (neal.fun)
| mikewarot wrote:
| It's truly amazing how much stuff you can just dump safely in the
| middle of Lake Michigan. Of course... there's no calculation of
| the Seiche it would induce.
| Fomite wrote:
| This was my experiment too - "What if it hits one of the great
| lakes?"
| adabyron wrote:
| They become even more extraordinarily great lakes!
|
| Some believe this has already happened.
|
| https://www.greatlakesnow.org/2019/12/great-lakes-
| meteorites...
| newaccount2021 wrote:
| gwill wrote:
| pretty neat. I wish it would tell you an approximate terminal
| velocity for the mass of your asteroid.
| djexjms wrote:
| Third field down after simulating the impact.
| jamesmaniscalco wrote:
| There is a nice calculator for terminal velocity of a sphere in
| air here:
|
| http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/airfri2.html
|
| That being said, I'm not sure how relevant terminal velocity is
| for anything but the smallest/slowest ends of the parameters of
| this app. For an asteroid going 38,000 mph (default speed on
| linked page), drag just doesn't play a big part - the asteroid
| passes through the atmosphere in ~5 seconds, not enough time
| for it to slow down significantly.
| twothamendment wrote:
| It would be cool if it could factor in mountains - but I get why
| that is not an easy task. Fun isn't the best word to describe
| this page - but it was!
| jvanderbot wrote:
| It's conceptually simple : use visibility based on viewshed for
| heat and direct blast concussion. Secondary effects (wind)
| would be harder.
|
| But it's _computationally_ extremely difficult, as you say.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| Well, you could cheat.
|
| There's so much cheap GPU compute used for mining shitcoins
| and training glorified Markov chains on Reddit dumps, surely
| someone could spare a few racks to run some CFD on a detailed
| GIS model of our planet, to create lookup tables that would
| allow everyone to cheaply simulate all kinds of fun events,
| such as nuclear detonations, asteroid impacts, "rods of god",
| relativistic kill vehicles, supervolcano eruptions, etc.
| anywhere on the planet, at the push of a button.
|
| The social value of this would be immense - even if you and
| me never used those precomputed LUTs for anything, they would
| surely help Randall Munroe or Kurzgesagt or others answer
| _even more_ high-energy "what-if" questions with even
| greater accuracy!
| themarbz wrote:
| Cool! Some info on tidal waves for water hits would be even
| cooler
| [deleted]
| Baeocystin wrote:
| Definitely more colorful than Nukemap. Would love to see
| something other than a simple circle for the various radii-
| surely the impact angle and local geography would shape the
| blast, no?
|
| (I realize that is a very hard problem to accurately model.)
| aaroninsf wrote:
| <click click click> this is fun, I should show it to the kids
| <scroll, scroll> hmm <scroll, scroll> ... <deletes from browsing
| history>
|
| The kids have enough lingering anxiety from the pandemic I think
| donatj wrote:
| I've always had a weird fear whenever I was in Duluth that Lake
| Superior would get hit by an Asteroid. The lake itself seemed
| like a much bigger and more likely target.
|
| A couple people have commented as much, but I wish this took
| water into account.
| agilob wrote:
| Speed is limited to 100km/s, our Voyager 1 is going 17 km/s
| doesn't sound so fast.
| zppln wrote:
| _An impact this size happens on average every 25,000 years_
|
| A comet on default settings. T-that can't be right, r-right?
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| Don't worry, we're overdue a climate-altering / mass-
| extinction-triggering supervolcano eruption anyway.
| maxbond wrote:
| I'm sure you know this, but just to point out, we're no more
| "overdue" for a supervolcano because it's been longer than
| average since an eruption than a gambler is "due" to win
| because they've pulled the arm on their slot machine enough
| times. (Though iirc some volcanoes are periodic. But unless
| I'm quite mistaken, supervolcanoes aren't periodic globally.)
| bee_rider wrote:
| Is there really no memory in this process? I imagine to
| some extent, some tensions would be building up or
| something like that.
| maxbond wrote:
| I don't feel qualified to say there is no "memory", if I
| make claims any stronger than I've made already I'll be
| out of my depth, but see the information below for
| instance:
|
| > Most volcanic systems that have a supereruption do not
| have them multiple times. When supereruptions do occur
| more than once in a volcanic system, they are not evenly
| spaced in time.
|
| https://www.usgs.gov/faqs/yellowstone-overdue-eruption-
| when-...
|
| I think these are just very complex systems with many
| different factors, like the kind of rock they're under,
| what's going on with the continental plate at that time,
| etc. We don't have a good understanding of what's
| happening in the mantle, which is especially relevant for
| hotspot volcanoes like Yellowstone that are fed from the
| mantle (note that this is not how all supervolcanoes
| work).
|
| Allow me to leave you with an awesome animation of the
| formation of a very different supervolcano:
| https://youtu.be/sx3_WJHAERc
| go_elmo wrote:
| no need to need luck - we'll extinct ourselves with co2 quite
| soon, gg
| swagasaurus-rex wrote:
| There's currently controversial archaeological evidence for a
| younger dryas (12,900 years ago) meteorite impact which caused
| mass global cooling, though thats one of several theories.
|
| There's also speculation and some small amount of material
| evidence that a meteorite airburst the middle east/levant[1]
| maybe leading to myths of cataclysm like Sodom.
|
| The 1908 blast at Tunguska in Siberia is now widely regarded as
| a result of a cosmic airbust.
|
| There seems to be a growing body of evidence that large, city-
| destroying asteroids are actually quite frequent in geological
| terms. The odds of hitting an actual city are low, but I don't
| like those odds
|
| [1] https://www.livescience.com/64179-ancient-cosmic-airburst-
| mi...
| lucb1e wrote:
| Is it just the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon ("a cognitive bias in
| which, after noticing something for the first time, there is a
| tendency to notice it more often") or do asteroid impact related
| things always go for Manhattan? I open this map and, bam, there's
| a map zoomed right onto Manhattan and a "select impact location"
| prompt.
| rossdavidh wrote:
| Well, they go for Manhattan first, but then the second one is
| usually Berlin.
| defrost wrote:
| Typically true for those from a Leonard Shower.
| jimbokun wrote:
| Or sometimes Tokyo.
| lucb1e wrote:
| They've already got earthquakes and tsunamis, can Manhattan
| not have the asteroids? (Says the European, dodging all
| natural disasters)
| dwringer wrote:
| I think the name itself is a bit of a meme for blast radius
| calculations and the like.
| jstummbillig wrote:
| Well, that was fun
| theylovezmw wrote:
| Lots of fun, Neal's work is always very impressive - not only on
| the technical implementation level, but the creativity as well.
| sisteczko wrote:
| Too bad not everyone thinks in terms of miles, feet nor furlongs.
| I suggest you add an option for a metric system in your spare
| time. Otherwise great illustrative site!
| svnpenn wrote:
| this only goes up to one mile. Chicxulub was _six miles_.
| IceHegel wrote:
| Edward Teller, the inventor of the hydrogen bomb and longtime
| head of Los Alamos National Laboratory, believed it was possible
| and even a good idea to place 1 gigaton yield warheads on orbital
| platforms for asteroid defense.
|
| It might seem outlandish to us, but then again, so would a
| hydrogen bomb.
| brookst wrote:
| Very cool. After trying numerous combinations of composition,
| velocity, and diameter... my takeaway is that most asteroids 70
| feet or bigger would do substantial damage at 1 Hacker Way, Menlo
| Park, CA.
| PM_me_your_math wrote:
| How many people tagged NYC with an asteroid? Just wondering.
| mrlonglong wrote:
| Trump at his place in Florida. Felt quite satisfying.
| bee_rider wrote:
| Oh the conspiracy theories that would cause.
| annoyingnoob wrote:
| Which is worse, a mile wide fireball in the sky or a mile wide
| impact? Seems all bad to me.
| faebi wrote:
| I'm not very good in successful HN titles, therefore I let
| ChatGPT write that one for me with this prompt:
|
| _Rewrite the following twitter message as a hackernews title. It
| should be as successfull as possible and attract many readers_
|
| _Original Tweet: New page! Make your own asteroid and launch it
| at Earth to see the effects._
| EarthLaunch wrote:
| I want this for git commit messages.
| TacticalCoder wrote:
| I tried it just for fun yesterday: transforming Git commit
| message whose subject are too long and that are not in the
| imperative tense into short title using the imperative tense.
|
| For this kind of thing it mostly works.
| e12e wrote:
| Did you try to post the patch and ask for a commit message?
| throwaway742 wrote:
| What was your prompt for this comment?
| faebi wrote:
| I didn't think about going that far, but yes, that would have
| been the way to go.
| kulahan wrote:
| This is very cool, I can't wait until this is freely available.
| I wanna run it locally and screw around with it!
| panosfilianos wrote:
| This is simply insane at this point.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| More than, that, if "Simulate Asteroid Impacts on Earth" is
| really what ChatGPT came up with, then color me impressed -
| it has done its job _perfectly_.
| fitzroy wrote:
| I'm confused. A 100 ft asteroid that explodes 2.2 miles in the
| air seems to result in far more deaths from a 0.6 mile wide
| fireball compared to a 200ft asteroid that would hit the ground
| in the same location (Fort Lauderdale, FL).
|
| 100ft = 211,172 deaths
|
| Is this correct? https://imgur.com/a/Elst6Q3
| boilerupnc wrote:
| Where's my resulting tsunami info? ;-)
| omoikane wrote:
| Came here to ask the same question :) I picked the impact
| location to be some ocean spot and it didn't kill anyone, I am
| not sure if that's optimistic.
| JoshGlazebrook wrote:
| Same. I just rewatched deep impact recently too so I picked
| somewhere off the east coast.
| sholladay wrote:
| Why do we enjoy simulating our own destruction so much?
|
| I was seeing how big/fast an asteroid that hits New York would
| have to be to hurt me in Boston. Turns out it would have to be
| larger than I thought.
|
| Would be nice to be able to click a place on the map and see how
| survivable that location is.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| > _I was seeing how big /fast an asteroid that hits New York
| would have to be to hurt me in Boston. Turns out it would have
| to be larger than I thought._
|
| Did the same on my area with that infamous nuclear bomb
| simulator/map. Some of the historical warheads seem
| surprisingly weak relative to modern city sizes. That said, in
| both nuclear and asteroid impact scenarios, do consider that,
| while you may be out of range of the thermal and pressure
| waves, you might still be in range of "extreme disruption
| caused by survivors closer to the blast moving outwards,
| emergency services moving inwards, and the economy and social
| order going to shitters as the country deals with what
| happened" wave.
| frobolo wrote:
| I can only recommend Threads (1984) if you want a glimpse
| into just how utterly bleak post-apocalyptic life might be.
|
| https://archive.org/details/threads_202007
| skilled wrote:
| I think this needs to be optimized for impacts that hit water and
| the effects _that_ would have, because right now it doesn 't do
| that so it feels a bit generic.
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(page generated 2022-12-05 23:00 UTC)