They’ll probably expect to be whisked into Heaven just before the meteorite hits, just like the ones who wanted a nuclear war during the Reagan era, because they were sure they’d be sucked into Heaven just before the bombs land. These people are looking forward to something like this. They’d divert the meteor to hit in the first place, if they had the power.
As far as what they would do, I expect they’d either sit around and pray, or go out and try to make their holiness crystal clear to God by killing as many unbelievers, gays, etc as possible.
That’s always the trick isn’t it? You don’t want to be the guy who punched out his boss, told his mother-in-law to suck it and went on a sex, drugs and violence spree only to find out that some scientist forgot to carry the 1 and the comet is going to miss us!
Plus I’d want to get far enough away so I could at least get a pretty good view of the impact.
I think it depends on how much time is left before Meteor Day. If it’s a week, I think the following would happen:
-Most people would stop going to work. Some might go out of boredom or to socialize or out of a sense of duty, but it would be very much like the week between Christmas and New Years.
-There may be some violence, but how many people would really spend their last days fighting over food or HDTVs? The world’s ending in a week.
-There might be violence as a result of people’s frustration trying to get from Point A to Point B to be with loved ones, escape the impact zone or just go on a last vacation. Of course the combination of lots of people trying to go somewhere and no one really running the transportation infrastructure would make things difficult.
-Once people have settled on where they will be spending their final hours/days, most will probably spend their time praying, having sex, getting drunk on their roofdeck, hanging out with friends and loved ones and basically just waiting for the end.
If the timeframe is signigicantly longer, like months or even years, I expect the scenario to be much worse. It’s long enough that people will need to continue working to support themselves, however most will fail to see the point. There will be a general malaise over the land as people realize everything they do is ultimately futile (which it’s always been anyway, but that never stopped us before). I’m thinking of something like On The Beach or Children of Men where everyone knows the end is coming and society just keeps sinking deeper and deeper into an economic and spiritual depression.
Meteor has been kind of done to death. Why not make it a black hole?
Here are some movies that cover the topic of how people deals with the impending end of the world. I have singled out movies where the end is known and unavoidable, however for the most part, it does not have a direct affect until it actually happens. So IOW, I’m excluding movies like War of the Worlds or Day After Tomorrow because they primarily deal with people trying to survive during the calamity and it’s aftermath.
Children of Men
On the Beach
Last Night
Miracle Mile
Deep Impact
When Worlds Collide
Lasagna.
Cream puffs.
Ben and Jerry’s New York Super Fudge Chunk ice cream.
A rueben sandwich.
A loaf of authentic sourdough bread and a pound of fresh butter to spread on it.
German chocolate cake.
We would be eating peanut butter sandwiches at my house after about two days unless my wife had been to the grocery store in the day or so before the announcement. We never have more than 2-3 days worth of food on hand. I imagine that there are lots of people, especially the poor, who mainly eat fast food and don’t have much food at home. Do you think McDonald’s would be open? I don’t. And once people get hungry, or even see hunger in their immediate futures, things will turn very ugly very fast.
Have you ever noticed the way people clean out the supermarkets when there is a snowstorm coming, even in temperate places where there is every reason to believe that everything will be all ploughed out and back to normal within a day or two? Never underestimate the human capacity for panic and the impulse–however futile, given the end-of-the-world scenario proposed in the OP–to stock up in the face of an emergency. Also, there would be that portion of the population who would run amok and riot because they just enjoy raising hell and destroying things, and those who would act out their destructive and acquisitive fantasies because they would refuse to believe that the end was, indeed, near. I salute you for your optimistic belief that people would respond with serenity (or at least calm fatalism), but I don’t share it, that’s for sure.
It’s not really the end of the world, is it? It’s the end of civilization as we know it. The world will continue existing, nature will bounce back or evolve past it. Really, you’re just talking about people dying off.
I say it’s going to be sooner rather than later, self inflicted, and past due.
I look forward to it. We deserve no less a reward for the shitty way we have treated this planet, and each other.
Hell, with the CERN Large Hadron Collider about to go into operation in a few months, the possibility could be more real than you think. The OP had better hurry up and finish this story.
Slight hijack - I’ve heard about this many times, and living all my life in Western Canada, I have never experienced it. We have city-stopping snowstorms (nothing like Eastern Canada, of course, but still pretty heavy), but it doesn’t make us start stocking up on things.
GuanoLad, I think that’s an excellent extinction distinction to make - all humanity dying, or the planet getting blowed up? All humanity dying is not the end of the earth; it’s just the end of this particular scourge on the planet.
