I was goofing around and found this meteor impact simulator. I input the following values; projectile diameter 100m, trajectory angle 45°, velocity of just under 20 km/s(call it 19.5 I guess, they had a dial instead of digital display for this). my projectile was iron and it was hitting igneous rock. I placed the impact on the Shchukino District of Moscow Russia. That part of town was turned into the impact crater. Moscow isn’t completely destroyed, I don’t think, but there is severe damage to the rest of the city.
My question is, of course, how does this affect world events today and going into the future?
The surviving elements of the Russian nuclear defense establishment misunderstand why Moscow has disappeared and as per their established playbook promptly fire everything they have at the USA & NATO.
About 20 minutes later a very large dollop of civilization comes to an end.
Yes, and the probability of having a small (but deadly) asteroid coming undetected is real. In this case, a nuclear response is likely from the country touched, provided it has nuclear capacity.
If the missile is detected, probable area of impact will be predicted and evacuated by Putin (maybe not by the common people). So no change in the conduct of events.
Yeah Moscow wasn’t the best choice and I realized that after I had already logged out.
Let’s put the impact in Pyongyang. I think that would probably officially (maybe not) end the Korean War finally. What beyond that. I really want to put it Beijing, but I fear I would get another global conflict ending civilization in most of the northern hemisphere.
If the meteor destroys the capital city of darn near any country, that’s going to trigger a war as that country collapses and the neighbors move in to occupy the land or at least prevent failed state banditry from surging into their own territory from the newly ungoverned territory. Whether the war is small or large and how many more countries get roped in is just details.
As we’re all learning* by the day, predicting the progress of wars is difficult. Probably the hardest possible prediction there is, since it involves very highly motivated humans doing Homo Sapiens’ two core competencies: organization and violence.
* re-learning actually, but human memory is short, and doubly so for inconvenient eternal truths.
In the long run? Not much. It might increase funding for meteor defense projects slightly and make us just extremely unlikely to detect and deflect an incoming threat instead of completely unlikely. Humans shrug off disasters even when they happen to their next door neighbors, and the impact won’t be next door to more than a tiny fraction of humanity.
Sadly, the USSR built a Dr. Strangelove-like Doomsday system called “Perimeter” (aka “Dead Hand”). The Russians have kept it operational. Supposedly it’s normally off but turned on during times of crisis which might include the present due to the war in Ukraine.
A meteor strike on Moscow might trigger it and kablooey.
This system is believed to be quite vulnerable to going off due to purely accidental things like power failures. Didn’t they see the movie???