If the rock hits the Yucatan, there won’t be anything in the USA. Just the immediate impact effects will see to that.
Plus, not to harp on, but … Yellowstone hotspot.
That should have been “anything worth hunting”.
We don’t need the latest and greatest of modern technology. We don’t need iphones or video games.
Depending on how long the nuclear winter lasts, we may need nuclear technology.
But, we won’t be nearly as worried about climate change, so fossil fuel based power should be fine. Coal fired power plants, while modern ones have a bunch of technology in them in order to increase efficiency and decrease pollution, are actually pretty simple if you are not as worried about these things.
We will probably need greenhouses and supplemental lighting, once again, not high level tech.
It depends on how much warning we have, as well. If we see it coming a couple weeks or days out, there isn’t much we can do to prepare for it. If we have a few years, that’s not enough to do anything about the impact, but it’s enough to prepare. To stockpile necessary items to start the process of rebuilding.
The world will not be uninhabitable forever. Most likely, within a decade or so, we will be able to start agriculture on the surface, in which case we need 1900’s technology at best.
Most of us are dead. Modern society is over. But as far as humans as a species, I don’t think that that is going to be enough to make us go extinct.
I think that any firestorm capable of cooking off the ammo is also going to ruin the guns as well.
If the firestorm is hot enough to explode the ammo, there won’t be anyone left around to use it.
I’m not talking about that. I’m also not talking about electricity. I’m talking about stuff like, oh, insulin. Or antibiotics. Or the fuel you’ll need to get that coal/uranium to your power plants. Unless you’ve kept some carthorses in your bunker with you…
I am presuming little warning - even a few years is too little, IMO. If we have a century to prepare, I can see some humans surviving - for a while. Until basic human assholishness kicks in and the few survivors do something to wipe each other out.
Thanks, but that wasn’t really my question.
My question was, would the firestorm that would be expected from a sizeable meteor impact explode the ammo? Or would that require temperatures hotter than is plausible?
If it also destroys the guns, that doesn’t make much difference; a gun with no ammo is a club, not a gun. And any significant firestorm will destroy any human who isn’t able to take shelter from it; we burn fairly easily and we need nearly continuous available oxygen. But if some humans make it to bunkers and deep basements (and don’t wind up trapped there by the collapse of structures above them), that gives rise to questions about what they might find on emergence that’s still in useful condition.
As has been pointed out, the Chicxulub event did not wipe out all life on land. If temperatures everywhere had risen to the level needed to set off ammo, then nothing on land would have survived. While some areas like North America would have been scorched, that was not true globally. In some areas plants, mammals, birds, lizards and even frogs made it through.
As I understand it, the global firestorm would only affect the ammo if it was exposed on the surface,as it was an IR effect. Otherwise, the projected temperature rise was only ~10K for areas not actually set on fire.
What you’re missing here is that I have no idea what temperatures are needed to set off ammo. (Well, not quite no idea. Obviously 100ºF won’t do it, and I presume the interior of the sun would.)
Are you saying that, in something like the Chicxulub event, no significant area of the planet would have gotten high enough to set off ammo? that only a few areas would have? that many areas would have, but not all of them?
(It’s been pointed out before in this thread, I think, that some animals may have survived by being underground at the time – a lot of creatures use burrows – and that many plants have fire-adapted seeds and/or can resprout from underground roots. I don’t know to what extent there are known survivals that wouldn’t have come into those categories, or over what portion of the world they might have survived.)
Thanks – that’s more useful. Yes, I was assuming that if people had firearms and ammo in a bunker with them (and I expect that some would), then if the people survived the ammo would too. But if a surface firestorm would have destroyed ammo that was above ground, then they’d have trouble renewing their supplies.
Yeah, diabetics are going to die. So, that takes out 10% of the population, assuming that you didn’t already screen for them before you chose your population. Also you don’t need the most modern of technology for that. We’ve had insulin since the 1920’s. We can get it from sheep.
There are some antibiotics that are quite easy to make. And with a much reduced population, there should be far less concern about developments of antibiotic resistance. Also, once again, this is an edge case. I’m in my forties, and I’ve never needed to take antibiotics. You may have some people die from lack of modern medicine, but most people will be fine.
For coal, well, you can just dig that up out of the ground. There are still plenty of places that it is readily accessible. For uranium, you would need to stockpile a bit, but the cool thing about nuclear power is how dense it is. The actual volume you would need to keep a settlement of a few thousand people going for decades would fit in a standard storage container. Most likely, you’d just go ahead and load it all into the reactor at the outset. Nuclear aircraft carriers have 25 years of fuel already to go when they first set out.
Sure, you will need to put some transportation and construction equipment in safe bunkers. That’s not that big an issue.
Less than a year or two is probably too late. More than that, and we should be easily able to prepare.
I mean, we may do that without an asteroid impact at all.
Anything within a thousand miles or more of the impact, there isn’t going to be anything useable.
There will be stuff raining down from the sky, and if that hits nearby, it’s going to destroy anything nearby. Forests will probably be on fire across the planet, so anything that is currently at risk from a forest fire will probably be toast.
If you have a basement in Kansas, and nothing hits nearby, your guns and ammo will probably be fine.
[quote=“thorny_locust, post:190, topic:933856, full:true”]
This site says it’s 400 C.
Based on that figure, the only areas that would have gotten anywhere near that hot would have been the immediate impact areas (including secondary impacts.) Most of the planet would not have reached anywhere near that temperature.
That’s assuming you have the luxury of screening. But that was just one example, there are lots of other medications like it.
So there are sheep in this bunker with the carthorses… lots of room to grow forage in there, as well? Or a lot of hay space? Also, good manure clearance facilities…
So - antibiotics factory, as well. And, I assume, the facilities to make the supplies for the factory, like glassware…
What about the existing antibiotic resistant strains?
Currently doing a lot of dangerous hands-on work equivalent to, say, rebuilding a society, are you? Also, currently living in close confinement with a large assortment of other people and, apparently, a menagerie of animals? Can you say “zoonotic”, class?
There’s a reason battery chicken farms and feedlots use a lot of antibiotics. Which reminds me - you better hope that those easy-to-make antibiotics include the animal ones, because they use way more of that stuff than humans do.
…if you live where the coal is.
And 25 years is an eyeblink. I thought we were talking about rebuilding human society here, not helping a few thousand people survive a few decades more.
The stale fuel issue is. Unless you’re running everything on freshly-made biodiesel which … you’re growing where, again?
Thanks.
This site
says forest fires burn at well over 400C. And this one
House Fire Temperature: How Hot Does It Get? says that house fire temperatures often reach 815ºC at ceiling level, though generally much less at floor level.
So that answers a large chunk of my question: ammunition would be destroyed in forest fires, and a lot but not all of the ammunition stored in buildings not caught in a forest fire would most likely be destroyed if the buildings caught on fire (though that site’s of course discussing likely temperatures if a house catches fire, not if a whole city does so.)
Colibri, are you saying that you wouldn’t expect there to be widespread fires except close to the points of impact?
Ok, there were widespread fires beyond the immediate impact areas, and yes, that would have destroyed ammo. So those areas would be rather extensive.
This site indicates the global extent of wildfires. Eyeballing it, it appears they may have affected half the planet. However, note that this is based on modeling rather than direct evidence.
that the articles propose for the increase of volcanism over the already high rates that occurred for the next roughly 600,000 years, with magma flow increases preceded by increases in CO2 release.
In response to my pointing out the lack of evidence of anything on the scale of “sooner” for a geological timeline perspective, which you define as “many thousands of years” you claim:
???
No one is debating that there was an increase in volcanism occurring in the hundreds of thousands of years period that followed impact. It apparently is not yet firmly established that correlation is causality in this case but it is an extremely reasonable hypothesis. The article you cited demonstrated exactly what you had stated it did - that the increase in volcanism was not only at the antipodes but had sea floor increases as well. It does not have anything in it that pins the increase down in time more than
So, um no.
Within a million years is not “sooner” even in geological time.
No, I have made and make no such assertion.
I do argue against the position that extinction of modern humans is assured by an impact. Or even a claim that a return to Paleolithic levels of existence is assured.
The details would of course depend on the details.
Let’s take @Chronos’s hypothetical and the entire nation of Iceland survives relatively intact … and scattered groups elsewhere. As the several years to decades long winter subsides they do not have all the resources to be completely modern but they did have the ability to preserve the knowledge and the people to teach a next generation that knowledge. Rebuilding to the point of being able to travel off Iceland to points south? To develop seafaring capabilities able to survey what is left where and to set up shop in areas most arable and where mines for coal can be created? A generation? Two? Three?
Let’s say reduced to Middle Ages technology, King Arthur’s court, with a whole mess of Connecticut Yankees in it. What happens to civilization from there on what time course?
OK, we’re at over 190 posts in and that’s the second time that scenario’s come up and I can’t resist posting this:
though the disaster in that case has nothing to do with asteroid impact and is magical in cause.
OK, let’s play this hypothetical out …
Travel, how, exactly? In their current boats, which run on fuels they will no longer be able to use? Iceland has no domestic fossil fuel production. New boats? Built with what? All the forests they no longer have? Or maybe all the aluminium they produce…with no local source of bauxite?
Not likely. The first several generations - at least a dozen - are going to be dedicated to pure survival. And since they’re not going to be doing all the fishing they currently do (since their fleet is diesel), that’s going to be pretty hard-scrabble as it is.
Modern Iceland is not some Viking sanctuary - it’s a modern country run very much as part of a global society. Take that away, and it’s not going to be rebuilding civilization at all. It’s just not located for it
Now, if you suggested New Zealand miraculously survives intact, that’s a much better base. Of course, we know it didn’t do so well last time, what with all the soot and all…but let’s imagine it does. It at least has the resources that Iceland does not. I could see a new world growing from that.
That actually does appear to spare much of North America and Europe (from the immediate fire damage, not necessarily from smoke and/or storm and/or climate and/or ecological damage.) But that of course would depend on where the theoretical next strike hits.