I just finished watching the movie again , and while this would normally go into the cafe section , its not really about the movie , but the afterwards.
We see , that the whitehouse is basically trashed again , the twin towers look like they are leaning against each other ,and the head of the statue of liberty is somewhere in manhattan.
The president has just informed us that the smaller of the two asteroids has done great damage ,but that the larger is now just cosmic dust.
Where do we go from here , if this was a real event.
If I’m still alive, I’m staying right the heck here until someone gets the power working and the Fritos factory back up and running. Tehn I’m just gonna vege out for awhile.
None–there’s a lot more to the United States of America than the small percentage of it that was inundated by the tsunami (or am I in a different movie?)
Anyway, IIRC, it was just “some” devastation, not “total” devastation as in a “asteroid that killed the dinosaurs”-type event, yes? So no rules would be tossed out the window. People would clean up, life would go on.
Especially once they got the Fritos factory back online…
Wait, and what do you mean the White House has been trashed “again?” Are you trying to bring back that old myth that Clinton staffers vandalized the White House before leaving it to the Bush administration? Or are you trying to bring up the ugly incident in the War of 1812? What’s your angle here?
Neither Apos, Try watching some other earth shattering movie like Independance Day. I think since we are talking about a movie then the OP was refering to other movies. Why does almost every thread eventually have to deal with politics? Hmmm…
In the end (which is truly the end), the smaller rock hits earth and wipes out a million or so folks (New York City and the whole East Coast too). But that’s okay because, as the President says, “hope survives”.
In the very final scene, we see a bedraggled but salvageable Capitol Building.
Good: I live near DC, and am well aware of how close it is to the ocean (and to many rivers as well). DC would have been scoured clean off the face of the Earth by the tsunami (as would New York City have been, but we see semi-intact buildings under water at one point). Think of it this way: a cubic meter of water weighs one ton. A wall of water the height and width of a building would comfortably outweigh the building itself. Mind you, the tsunami was moving at about 1000 kilometers an hour, or about as fast as a jet plane. Do you really think anything would be left standing? [Oops! (February 22, 1999): Actually, the tsunami would be moving less than that speed. Still, it would travel at several hundred kilometers an hour. I’d prefer to be far away, like on another planet.] This was simply a feel-good ending, tacked on and in my opinion inappropriate. Now, we do not know if that was simply a rebuilding of the Capitol, or if it was even in DC. However, the speech at the end strongly implied that this took place in DC ("… and the waters receded.") As I have said before, in movies such as this, the problem is usually not one of exaggeration, but of actually hugely underestimating the power and fury of such a catastrophic event.
The entire Atlantic Coast of both Europe, and North America, not to mention the Caribbean are at the very least devastated. A whole lot more than a million people are dead. Where the Tsunami went back out, it scoured the earth with the remains of what it destroyed on the way in.
But it just doesn’t make sense to guess, since there is no consistent scale for this event. A five hundred foot Tsunami is going to destroy everything for miles inland, but mostly along contour lines. It probably won’t have it’s full force at Washington. There is a lot of land, although not too many hills between DC, and the Atlantic. But the Southern Chesapeake is going to let the force come way up north much faster.
But what about the rebound Tsunami? We just blasted a big hole in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. We moved a huge amount of water out, some up into the air and some just laterally away from the center. But when the energy is done doing that, the hole will fill in. And that is very big slosh. No, not a five hundred footer, but a bigger tsunami than you see most centuries.
There is a brand new rupture in the middle of the ocean floor in the Atlantic. This has huge consequences over the next thirty thousand years, or so. The circulation of water in the Atlantic is the largest driving force in the weather over most of Europe and Western Asia. What ever actually happens is going to be different than what happens now, on a global scale.
As usual, the perspective boys blew it on the picture of the impact. That sucker was gigantic. It was hundreds of miles in diameter, and the fireball was thousands of miles wide. That kind of energy is orders of magnitude greater than the described results. It makes no sense to try to model the results. Water vapor would stay at saturation levels for months, perhaps years. Water plumes heated by magma on the ocean floor could produce “Hypercanes” for centuries. (Consider that sunshine causes dozens of Hurricanes by raising the temperature of the ocean’s surface by single digit amounts.)
We would survive, as a species. But it might be a much different world, with Ice over Europe, and swamps and jungles over the Gobi, or Sahara. Political adjustments could well be significant.
He(the president) also said that vast portions of Africa were devasted , so that would probably mean that Bermuda/Bahammas was totally scoured away. Probably the wave went as far inland as the middle east , thinking what happens when it hits the straight of gibralter and into the med.
So there is gonna be towns that were spared simply because of the contour lines and others that are just dots on a map now.
Interesting , I was only thinking of that nuclear detonation of the smaller asteroid , and the short term climactic effects. Since in the movie the asteroid touched down in August , its gonna be an interesting winter for that year.
Are you sure about a hole in the ocean floor ? , in real life , I guess anything could happen , but in the movie the asteroid came in on a flat trajectory and then plunged.
So south america and australia would become destinations of choice, would be my initial guess.
The Western US, China, Japan, Austrailia, and other Pacific nations become globally dominant. Washington is rebuilt, mostly as a symbolic gesture, but the heart and wallet of the nation is now in the West. New York et al. are small towns, once inhabitable at all. Western Europe never fully recovers. Central to Eastern Europe increase a little in affulence and influence as European money moves inland.
I think the the changes in the weather. Would be the big factor. The infrastructure that moves goods in the US inland would remain intact. Except for Oil to move the goods.
But, would the climate changes prevent the central US from growing food? Maybe.
Everything would become more localized, real fast. Corporate farms would probably fall apart. Small farms and ‘astoroid’ gardens (like Victory Gardens in WWII) would flourish.
and what of the people who went into the caves? leave them down there, as a social experiment for when the big one strikes.
we could observe them… of course there’d be protests, people wanting their loved ones back and all…
