How does he know it is going to hit the Rose Bowl? What if it hits Dodger Stadium instead?
You might have been joking in your post, but I can’t tell for sure…
I doubt anything is going to be routine for you afterward. The asteroid that killed off the dinosaurs also enshrouded the earth with cloud cover for several months, killing most of the plant life, and therefore most everything else that depends on plants directly or indirectly. Around 70% of all species on Earth went extinct from that impact, a lot of them being the larger land animals.
The animals still don’t know how to stockpile, which means many of them are doomed. And the plants, I assume, are just as dependent on sunlight as they ever were. So even if all six billion of us stock up on canned goods (and I can already imagine the rioting that will break out), the food supply of the future will dwindle sharply. I have no idea how long it will take to recover from such destruction.
Recovered survivalist here. You must have a pretty interesting daily routine if an asteroid impact wouldn’t interrupt it. A couple years stockpile of food, assuming you actually had a couple years worth, would only be the beginning. An asteroid impact like the one that killed the dinos isn’t going to be a localized SHTF where all you have to do is hold on until FEMA finally arrives and starts restoring order. No, such an impact falls under the heading of TEOTWAWKI. World-wide chaos shouldn’t be unexpected.
Got an uninteruptable supply of fresh water? You are going to need an ongoing supply of water. Even a couple hundred gallons of drinking water isn’t going to do it.
How are your medical skills? Got a good stock of medical supplies on hand and the skill to use them? Knowledgeable about field-expedient substitutes when your stocks run out? How is your knowledge of field dentistry?
Got big supplies of viable, non-hybrid food crop seeds stockpiled? When the dust cloud eventually settles and agriculture becomes practical again, raising your own food is going to be high on the must-do list. Probably be a good idea to study up on agricultural techniques from before the invention of pesticides, artificial fertilizers, and tractors while you’re at it.
Are you good with hand tools? Such mechanical devices as you may have that are independent of the power grid ARE going to break down at some point. Can you fix them? How good are you at scavenging, cannibalizing, and adapting parts for machinery? When something breaks down, running to Wally World for a new one ain’t in the cards.
Do you live in a defensable area and do you have trustworthy family/friends who also have valuable skills? One person or one nuclear family can’t go it alone in the long term. Though I hate to use the expression: It takes a village. There will be looters/highwaymen/spikey-haired mutants preying off their fellow survivors. Do you live in that spot, with those people, now? Having a retreat is dandy, provided you have already retreated before the world turns to shit.
Some largish amount of shoes, clothing, etc. will be left lying around after the big die-off gets done. Whether you will be able to avail yourself easily of that stuff is another question. As other groups of survivors stabilize, one anticipates the re-emergence of a barter economy.
Some over-rated TEOTWAWKI skills:
- Hunting and fishing. Following the impact, the larger fauna will die off and there will be damned little to hunt, anyway. Fishing, as most people do it, is nothing but a sport…a hobby. There won’t be time to be sitting on a bank with a rod and reel hoping to catch a few of the surviving fish.
- Shooting. Yep, there’ll probably be the need to shoot some dirtbags. Nope, you don’t need world class marksmen for the task. A decent shot who knows about old-timey farming techniques or carpentry is more valuable than an Olympic-level rifleman who has no other skills. There’ll be plenty of work for everybody to do, and nobody is likely to be real keen on some galoot who just stands around with a rifle “guarding” while this year’s crop of rutebagas needs harvested.
- Trapping. Ditto what I said about hunting. One type of trapping that will be valuable, though, is skill in trapping rats and other vermin. In the new world, they will regain their former fearsome status as carriers of lethal disease and destroyers of scant, precious food.
Do I have this level of preparation? Hell, no. I said I was a recovered survivalist. The odds of the event occuring in my lifetime are small, and the chances too good that I wouldn’t survive the initial impact anyway. Not worth pouring so much of my energy into preparing for it.
If you haven’t already, read Alas, Babylon for a pretty good treatment of life in a post-TEOTWAWKI world.
Now, I’m pretty lousy with the math and the equations, but I think the stadium is quite a bit bigger than that (from this site):
The stadium measures 880 feet from north to south rims and 695 feet from east to west rims.
The circumference of the rim is 2,430 feet, while the inside at field level is approximately 1,350 feet.
The turfed area inside the bowl measures 79,156 square feet.
The fence around the Rose Bowl is one mile in circumference.
An asteroid is going to wipe out all life on Earth? :eek:
I’m moving to Canada!
No, I wouldn’t need to learn any more farming than I already know, or dentistry, or any of those other fields. If I need my teeth tended to, I’ll go to the dentist. If I need medical attention, I’ll visit the physician. If looters/highwaymen/spikey-haired mutants are a problem, I’ll call the cops, just like I would if they were a problem right now. Two or three years advance notice is plenty of time to prepare an entire first-world nation, including the plant and animal species we depend on. So the doctor and dentist and police officer will have a supply of food, too, and will also go about their routine.
Please expand. Who shall stockpile this food? Where will it be stockpiled? How will it be distributed? To whom shall it be distributed? Do the winos, crackheads, hookers, and other members of society’s underclass get fed, or just you the doctor, dentist, and policeman? You are aware, are you not, that the typical American city relies on uninterrupted daily deliveries of food in order for everyone to “go about their routine?”
Why wouldn’t you? Are you saying you would rather die than live AND not have to deal with the idiots? I’ll deal with ecological catastrophe, nuclear winter, famine or what have you if that means we don’t have to deal with overpopulation anymore.
Well, the Dodgers might go back to Brooklyn. No loss there.
Stranger
You do understand that 200 meters is ~ 625 feet? Per your factoids, the Rose bowl stadium is 282 meters long & 223 meters wide. As squink said, that’s “about” 200 meters across. More like 250 actually, but the RB isn’t anywhere near 250 meters/700 feet tall and we need to be thinking in 3D, not 2D…
If we estimate the stadium as 100 feet tall, and simplify the base to be the enclosing rectangle, that’s a volume of 100 * 880 * 695 = 61,160,000 cubic feet. If we assume our meteor of the same volume is a sphere, it has a radius of 243 feet, or 78 meters. In other words, a meteor the size of (ie the volume of) the RB is around 156 meters in diameter.
By squaring off the RB we overestimate its footprint by 10-15%, and although it’s been years since I’ve been there, my recollection is that it’s shorter than 100 feet tall (ie an 8-ish story building). So our equivalent meteor is likely to be even smaller than 155 meters in diameter.
You can’t really believe that. Look what happened when Katrina hit, which would seem like a walk in the park compared to this. “Post-apocalyptic” was a very common descriptor for the city of New Orleans for a couple of weeks.
Of the politicians who believed this asteroid was coming at all, there would be so much bickering, in-fighting, and partisan tomfoolery that nothing would ever get done about it. Or, rather, something would get done, but it would be far too little, far too late to protect anybody but the elite upper-class (politicians and upper-echelon businessmen.)
Search your feelings. You know it to be true.
The Rose Bowl is only 100 feet at the top of the press box. The rest of the stadium is about half that. You enter each level around row 27 and most sections go up to row 77, so it sticks up 50 rows. And the rows aren’t 1 feet above each other as that would be one hellacious set of stairs to climb.
UCLA season ticket holder, Row 42 of my section.
Katrina, hard as it was on the Gulf coast didn’t create a worldwide catastrophe. I think what was being said is that a Rose Bowl sized impact wouldn’t be an earth shattering event.
The Barringer Crater in Arizona is thought by scientists to the the result of an impact by a meteorite 30 to 50 meters in diameter. That’s anywhere from 3 to 5 times smaller than the size computed by LSL guy. That means that the effect of the larger one would be from 30 to 125 times greater than the Barringer object. Significant but not earth shattering.
The Barringer meteor excavated and estimated 175 million tons of material. This is only a littler over 1/100th of a cubic mile of rocks. The explostion at Krakatoa removed 6 cubic miles of earth, rocks, etc. which is about 600 times as much as the Barringer and worldwide the only long term effect was a slight cooling and gaudy sunrises and sunsets.
As far as my participation in the thread, I wasn’t addressing a Rose Bowl-sized impact. I was addressing one on the scale of the impact that wiped out the dinosaurs. Chronos had poo-pooed the seriousness of such an impact by stating
I disagree.
I’m missing the part where it was demonstrated with mathematical certainty three years in advance that a category 5 hurricane would hit New Orleans in September of 2005. If a large asteroid or comet hit with a week of advance warning, most of us would be toast (not all of us, even then, since there are some folks who already stockpile food). But a week of advance warning is a lot different from two or three years.
Do you have any idea how much food “a couple years worth” is for even a single person, much less a whole family or a whole city? Seriously, there’s a couple hundred million or so people in the CONUS. What form is this food supposed to be in so that it could be stored long term and then distributed in any easily usable form?
Chronos - are you talking about the time needed to - what? - relocate people? Because location has nothing to do with this. The exinction that will follow this type of event is global - aside from the obvious deaths at ground zero. 2 years worth of advance notice won’t do much unless you’re planning on heading for an other planet. When the asteroid hit the gulf region 65 million years ago, practically no animal over 10 kilograms survived. Anywhere on earth. No matter how prepared YOU may be for this type of event, the rest of the population won’t be. Anyone who survives in the long term will develop some pretty interesting survival tactics. That may not be too different from life in Montana, but it will be a hell of a culture shock for the rest.
If everybody had a stock of 300 pounds of Pinto beans, they’d have enough Pinto beans to last them 7 years.
Water, however, is another matter.
Even for people living next to a natural source of water, such as a river, are going to run into problems. The giant cloud of dust kicked up by the asteroid impact is going to radically change the weather patterns across the entire globe. Areas that used to get plenty of rainfall or snowfall can become deserts, and areas used to be deserts can get hit with storm-fed flash-floods. (And remember, folks, flood water is going to be too contaminated to drink!)
Assuming each person can survive on 1 liter of water per day – which is below the recommended 8-glasses-a-day intake level and does not include water for cooking or washing – each person will need 365 liters of water per year, or 192 gallons of water, minimum, to survive for the 2 years we’re expecting the global climate screwover to last. Hope your rationing skills are up to the task!
This would also have the advantage of of offering a ready supply of methane for power generation when the oil and natural gas pipelines go down.
You’re making an awfully broad strokes there. First of all, while it is generally asserted that an asteroid impact (most likely the one at Chicxulub, although some planetologists suggest that there were multiple near-simultaneous impacts from a Shoemaker-Levy 9 type of cluster) it is not clear that the impacts along were responsible for the K-T extinction event; the heavy particulate matter thrown up into the atmosphere shouldn’t have remained suspended indefinitely–cetainly not for more than a couple of years–which fails to explain the extent of extintion. Some scientists have asserted that massive wildfires or extensive volcanism was responsible for more long-lived climate change. There is also the issue of population diversity; while 80-90% of species are estimated to have died out, they did not represent the same amount of diversity that current populations display; therefore, a moderate change in climate or environment could have affected broad swaths of species. And it’s not clear that the extintion event occured over the span of a few years; while there were clearly some large dieoffs, especially in the North American continent, some paleontologists suggest that the extinction occured over a span on the order of 10 million years, indicating that more subtle selective pressures were responsible for extinction and the subsequent massive speciation of surviving species. In other words, it just may have been time for a new niche–the small, homothermic mammals–to step in.
And as already discussed, an asteroid the size of the Rose Bowl–~250m in diameter–would do none of this; the damage would be localized, and the effect on global ecosystem would be less than a highly active volcano. Even a larger impact would probably not threaten life on Earth, and with preparation should be readily survivable, albeit not without discord and some amount of social breakdown.
The rub, though, is that we probably won’t have two years warning; two months is being generous, and it could be as little as a few weeks. We have no active program that tracks large, potentially threatening celestial bodies–those we’ve found have been mostly incidental–and it is quite possible for one to sneak up on us. Things in space, especially those that have a low albedo (reflectiveness) are pretty hard to see.
Stranger