# How well would modern society handle the dinosaur killing meteor if it happened today? **URL:** \ **Category:** Factual Questions\ **Created:** [February 27, 2021, 12:30am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-well-would-modern-society-handle-the-dinosaur-killing-meteor-if-it-happened-today/933856 "2021-02-27T00:30:11Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 6
**Author:** ![Pardel-Lux](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/pardel-lux/32/20182_2.png) [@Pardel-Lux](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Pardel-Lux)\ **Post date:** [March 1, 2021, 5:55pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-well-would-modern-society-handle-the-dinosaur-killing-meteor-if-it-happened-today/933856/101 "2021-03-01T17:55:01Z")
Yes, that’s about right. 15³ = 3,375, and if the asteroid is potato or cow shaped, somewhat less. My bad. ---
**Author:** ![Machine\_Elf](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/82dd89/32.png) [@Machine\_Elf](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Machine_Elf)\ **Post date:** [March 1, 2021, 7:21pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-well-would-modern-society-handle-the-dinosaur-killing-meteor-if-it-happened-today/933856/102 "2021-03-01T19:21:04Z")
On breaking up an asteroid, there was this discussion back in 2010: > [@Why is nuking an asteroid a bad thing](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-is-nuking-an-asteroid-a-bad-thing/549435): > > I’m watching the history channel about asteroids and how we can keep them from wiping us out. There many theories as to how we could avert disaster by defecting the path of an incoming asteroid. Everyone seems to agree that nuking one is a bad idea. I’ve heard this many times before. The explanation goes something like this - if the astroid hits earth as a whole it would be getting hit with a single bullet, it we nuke it into pieces it will be like getting hit with a shotgun blast. This doesn’t… In which I wrote the following: > …from **Grey’s** BOE calcs, one can see that when dealing with a small asteroid (on the order of 100 meters diameter), breaking it up prior to impact may be beneficial. The total atmospheric temperature rise due to burnup is negligible, and we would save ourselves from an impact that could kick up climate-changing amounts of debris into the atmosphere. When dealing with a much larger one (on the order of 10 km diameter), we’re just about screwed either way: this embodies energies on the order of 15 _million_ megatons (the largest nuclear device ever detonated was around 50 megatons). A surface impact would cause ridiculous seismic events and kick up life-extinguishing amounts of debris; if instead we could somehow shatter a meteor that large prior to impact, the atmospheric temperature rise would be on par with the worst clime-change forecasts, except it would happen literally overnight. > > Move from a 10km-diameter bolide to a 20km one, and the energy (and therefore the temperature rise from atmospheric burnup) increases by a factor of 8, to almost 100 Kelvins. Anything not living in the ocean would be dead in fairly short order, and I imagine the eventual increase in temps of the oceans’ surface layers would upset the marine ecology so much that life throughout the oceans might eventually die off completely. ---
**Author:** ![brossa](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/brossa/32/3040_2.png) [@brossa](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/brossa)\ **Post date:** [March 1, 2021, 7:31pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-well-would-modern-society-handle-the-dinosaur-killing-meteor-if-it-happened-today/933856/103 "2021-03-01T19:31:07Z")
> [@LSLGuy](#): > > Yeah. The Moon might be a big enough crumple zone. Assuming the impactor didn’t split the Moon a la _**[Seveneves](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seveneves)**_. Speaking of Seveneves, how would a lifeboat in, say, geostationary orbit do in a Chicxulub scenario? Is that high enough to avoid ejecta? And what’s with this 100-years-underground business, anyway? What’s keeping you from emerging after two, or five, or ten years and building greenhouses to supplement your canned food stores? ---
**Author:** ![Chronos](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/chronos/32/134_2.png) [@Chronos](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Chronos)\ **Post date:** [March 1, 2021, 10:09pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-well-would-modern-society-handle-the-dinosaur-killing-meteor-if-it-happened-today/933856/104 "2021-03-01T22:09:22Z")
Good point. OK, I concede that smithereening an asteroid would be a net improvement over leaving it intact. Though, of course, if one has the capability of smithereening it, one probably also has the capability to deflect it completely, which is far better yet. ---
**Author:** ![DSeid](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/dseid/32/20194_2.png) [@DSeid](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/DSeid)\ **Post date:** [March 1, 2021, 11:52pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-well-would-modern-society-handle-the-dinosaur-killing-meteor-if-it-happened-today/933856/105 "2021-03-01T23:52:32Z")
> [@Chronos](#): > > Though, of course, if one has the capability of smithereening it, one probably also has the capability to deflect it completely, which is far better yet. Yeah 100% agreement I suspect that deflection… or even just slowing it down enough … or speeding it up … that it’s a miss … is best. But I can at least imagine that getting something to finesse it way out there might be harder than getting something to explode into it. The advantage of exploding it way out there, say into three or four pieces, is that each of those parts might have a new slightly different trajectory. One sped up a bit, one slowed down, one angled slightly differently. Maybe one still on exact course but it is smaller than the whole was and maybe deflecting it as it gets closer more achievable? If all is to hit I’m guessing there would be a sweet spot of least damage? Small enough pieces that there is not ejecta and no smaller, to minimize the cluster bomb effect and to minimize the surface area heating up atmosphere. Ideally into ocean deep? ---
**Author:** ![Colibri](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/colibri/32/1841_2.png) [@Colibri](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Colibri)\ **Post date:** [March 1, 2021, 11:54pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-well-would-modern-society-handle-the-dinosaur-killing-meteor-if-it-happened-today/933856/106 "2021-03-01T23:54:43Z")
I don’t think we know enough about the composition of asteroids or comets to be able to reliably predict how many pieces it would shatter into. ---
**Author:** ![filmore](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/f/7993a0/32.png) [@filmore](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/filmore)\ **Post date:** [March 2, 2021, 12:08am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-well-would-modern-society-handle-the-dinosaur-killing-meteor-if-it-happened-today/933856/107 "2021-03-02T00:08:02Z")
If it broke up into pieces, would gravity end up pulling it all back together? It seems like 15km of rock would have a relatively significant amount of gravity and all the pieces might find their way back together. ---
**Author:** ![DSeid](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/dseid/32/20194_2.png) [@DSeid](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/DSeid)\ **Post date:** [March 2, 2021, 1:42am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-well-would-modern-society-handle-the-dinosaur-killing-meteor-if-it-happened-today/933856/108 "2021-03-02T01:42:56Z")
I know enough to know I don’t know if we know … But I suspect that we’d know enough to predict enough to have an expectation of two to five parts or a thousand or somewhere in between. ---
**Author:** ![LSLGuy](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/lslguy/32/5813_2.png) [@LSLGuy](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/LSLGuy)\ **Post date:** [March 2, 2021, 1:55am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-well-would-modern-society-handle-the-dinosaur-killing-meteor-if-it-happened-today/933856/109 "2021-03-02T01:55:23Z")
> [@filmore](#): > > If it broke up into pieces, would gravity end up pulling it all back together? It seems like 15km of rock would have a relatively significant amount of gravity and all the pieces might find their way back together. Conceptually yes. But practically no. Assuming you gave it a pretty good whack, the pieces will be be initially accelerated to a decent speed apart. Meanwhile, the collective gravity of a 15km rock is real close to zero. That mutual gravity of all the chunks will be pulling on each and all of them. But it has to slow their outwards motion to zero, then accelerate them back together. And overcome the secondary collisions since they won’t all arrive back at the center of mass at the same time. Given enough time, like millennia, the rock might re-coalesce. Assuming we attacked it less than a year before it hits/misses Earth, there won’t have been enough time to re-coalesce much of anything. Said another way, the “escape velocity” of a 15km rock is real small. Some quickie online calcs say about 5 meters/sec for a solid rocky body; less of course if it’s just at a rubble / ice pile. Any fragment going faster than that won’t ever come back. For scale, 5 meters/sec is a gentle underhand beanbag toss. ---
**Author:** ![dtilque](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/d6d6ee/32.png) [@dtilque](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/dtilque)\ **Post date:** [March 2, 2021, 2:26am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-well-would-modern-society-handle-the-dinosaur-killing-meteor-if-it-happened-today/933856/110 "2021-03-02T02:26:38Z")
> [@LSLGuy](#): > > Given enough time, like millennia, the rock might re-coalesce. And in fact, will re-coalesce, at least any parts that aren’t given too much velocity. The rocks out there have been playing a big game of bumper-asteroid for some 4.5 billion years. They’ve pretty much all collided multiple times during that time. When they do collide, some bits gain enough velodity to escape and become a new asteroid, some get close to escaping and become satellites, and some eventually re-coalesce back to the rock. But as you say, it’ll take millennia. When they do re-coalesce, they end up making a rather fragile connection. There’s not enough gravity to connect them firmly together, so most asteroids are basically rubble piles. The exceptions are nickel-iron asteroids and those that rotate too fast to hold onto loose rocks on their surface. Some of the latter have actually been observed shedding dust. ---
**Author:** ![MrDibble](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/mrdibble/32/114_2.png) [@MrDibble](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/MrDibble)\ **Post date:** [March 2, 2021, 4:27pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-well-would-modern-society-handle-the-dinosaur-killing-meteor-if-it-happened-today/933856/111 "2021-03-02T16:27:24Z")
My personal feeling is that a repeat of Chicxulub leaves humanity extinct. And just wanted to add, people advocating for subterranean refugia better make sure they site them properly. And by that I mean that the ideal location is probably _not_ on the other side of the Earth from the impact. The mantle plume will get you long before the mobs of desperate excludees. ---
**Author:** ![TriPolar](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/tripolar/32/3008_2.png) [@TriPolar](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/TriPolar)\ **Post date:** [March 2, 2021, 5:18pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-well-would-modern-society-handle-the-dinosaur-killing-meteor-if-it-happened-today/933856/112 "2021-03-02T17:18:56Z")
> [@MrDibble](#): > > And just wanted to add, people advocating for subterranean refugia better make sure they site them properly. And by that I mean that the ideal location is probably _not_ on the other side of the Earth from the impact. The mantle plume will get you long before the mobs of desperate excludees. Murphy posits that any place people choose to slowly starve to death underground will actually turn out to be close enough to the impact site wiping out not only those people but all of the stockpiled resources that could have been used by survivors somewhere else. It’s like playing Battleship, except they only have one bomb to drop on you, but one bomb wipes out 90% of the board. ---
**Author:** ![Darren\_Garrison](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/darren_garrison/32/92_2.png) [@Darren\_Garrison](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Darren_Garrison)\ **Post date:** [March 2, 2021, 9:34pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-well-would-modern-society-handle-the-dinosaur-killing-meteor-if-it-happened-today/933856/113 "2021-03-02T21:34:01Z")
> [@Machine\_Elf](#): > > On breaking up an asteroid, there was this discussion back in 2010 Other threads touching on it include: > [@Redirecting asteroids on an impact course by momentum transfer](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/redirecting-asteroids-on-an-impact-course-by-momentum-transfer/804718): > > Stranger on a Train, who has claimed many times to be a rocket scientist and made many educated seeming posts, made the following statement : \*Redirecting a much larger object, however, becomes a substantial challenge not only because of the additional mass but because the impulse will impinge upon only by a fraction of aspect of the body and would likely be absorbed as deformation within the body (inelastic transfer or liquification) rather than uniformly delivered to the entire aspect. Moving… > [@The K-T Asteroid: Would Modern Instrumentation Have Seen It Coming?](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-k-t-asteroid-would-modern-instrumentation-have-seen-it-coming/804670): > > Would the equipment we use now to watch for ELE asteroids have picked up the K-T asteroid? If humans had been on the ground at the time, when would they have been able to see it with their own eyes? Hours before impact? Minutes? Seconds? ---
**Author:** ![Chronos](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/chronos/32/134_2.png) [@Chronos](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Chronos)\ **Post date:** [March 2, 2021, 10:36pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-well-would-modern-society-handle-the-dinosaur-killing-meteor-if-it-happened-today/933856/114 "2021-03-02T22:36:46Z")
It’s not like we’d be trying to all survive in one single bunker. There are suitable “bunkers” all over the place. And I put “bunker” in scare quotes because plenty of perfectly normal houses would be adequate for the purpose. Sure, if you’re right at Ground Zero, or antipodal from that point, nothing’s going to save you. But most people won’t be at those points, no matter where those points are. ---
**Author:** ![MrDibble](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/mrdibble/32/114_2.png) [@MrDibble](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/MrDibble)\ **Post date:** [March 3, 2021, 7:16am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-well-would-modern-society-handle-the-dinosaur-killing-meteor-if-it-happened-today/933856/115 "2021-03-03T07:16:58Z")
It’s a _little_ more than just the antipodal point…mantle plume flood basalt eruptions won’t be any fun for anyone on the planet, and definitely not surviveable for anyone within a thousand km of the antipode or more. We’re talking about millions of km3 of lava erupting. ---
**Author:** ![DSeid](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/dseid/32/20194_2.png) [@DSeid](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/DSeid)\ **Post date:** [March 3, 2021, 7:22pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-well-would-modern-society-handle-the-dinosaur-killing-meteor-if-it-happened-today/933856/116 "2021-03-03T19:22:45Z")
Are we? > **[New Model Predicts Fallout from Big Meteorite Strike](https://www.space.com/13490-meteorite-strike-earth-impact-model.html)** > > A new model predicts the seismic activity on Earth after a major meteorite collision. If a huge meteorite strikes the planet, the results could be disastrous. > [@](#): > > The new study showed that the seismic waves resulting from the impact would have been scattered and unfocused, causing less severe ground displacement, tsunamis, and seismic and volcanic activity than previously thought. Linked to before. With the other study a model that demonstrated that it hit at a worst possible angle. ---
**Author:** ![MrDibble](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/mrdibble/32/114_2.png) [@MrDibble](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/MrDibble)\ **Post date:** [March 3, 2021, 7:32pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-well-would-modern-society-handle-the-dinosaur-killing-meteor-if-it-happened-today/933856/117 "2021-03-03T19:32:15Z")
> [@DSeid](#): > > Are we? [Yep.](https://academic.oup.com/gji/article/187/1/529/564818) [We are](https://pubs.geoscienceworld.org/gsa/gsabulletin/article-abstract/127/11-12/1507/126064/Triggering-of-the-largest-Deccan-eruptions-by-the?redirectedFrom=fulltext). > [@](#): > > It is therefore reasonable to hypothesize that the Chicxulub impact might have triggered the enormous Poladpur, Ambenali, and Mahabaleshwar (Wai Subgroup) lava flows, which together may account for \>70% of the Deccan Traps main-stage eruptions. ---
**Author:** ![DSeid](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/dseid/32/20194_2.png) [@DSeid](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/DSeid)\ **Post date:** [March 3, 2021, 7:50pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-well-would-modern-society-handle-the-dinosaur-killing-meteor-if-it-happened-today/933856/118 "2021-03-03T19:50:46Z")
It neither supports your claim nor contradicts the cites I’ve given. Specifically it states that in the context of having the then extant extensive volcanism it is reasonable to hypothesize the impact could have been a trigger of more lava flows. Do we currently have the same Deccan level existing volcanism? ---
**Author:** ![MrDibble](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/mrdibble/32/114_2.png) [@MrDibble](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/MrDibble)\ **Post date:** [March 3, 2021, 8:10pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-well-would-modern-society-handle-the-dinosaur-killing-meteor-if-it-happened-today/933856/119 "2021-03-03T20:10:24Z")
Didn’t read both cites, I see… the first one shows that an impact is enough on its own. Yes, it will energize some existing mantle plume. Even without having any current Deccan-level eruptions, we do have [plenty of current hotspots](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hotspot_(geology)#/media/File:Hotspots-more.jpg) that could be activated by impact seismicity. They don’t have to be _already_ Deccan-level to be made much, much worse than they are… ---
**Author:** ![k9bfriender](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/k9bfriender/32/3283_2.png) [@k9bfriender](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/k9bfriender)\ **Post date:** [March 3, 2021, 8:15pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-well-would-modern-society-handle-the-dinosaur-killing-meteor-if-it-happened-today/933856/120 "2021-03-03T20:15:19Z")
> [@Colibri](#): > > And while it killed off 75% of all species, 25% of all species survived. As for plants, [the effects varied regionally,](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cretaceous%E2%80%93Paleogene_extinction_event) with North America being hardest hit, but even there more than 40% of the flora survived. 25% of species may have survived, but probably 90+% of any given species individual members were killed. In the end, I don’t think that a dinasour killer asteroid would make humanity go extinct. We’d have some bunkers, we’d have some areas that were not rendered uninhabitable. But it _would_ kill billions, it would probably kill 99ish% of us off. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-well-would-modern-society-handle-the-dinosaur-killing-meteor-if-it-happened-today/933856.md?page=5) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-well-would-modern-society-handle-the-dinosaur-killing-meteor-if-it-happened-today/933856.md?page=7)