What would be the economic impact of a major meteor strike?

Great Debates
1

Imagine that a disintegrated asteroid runs into the Earth. It’s high summer in the northern hemisphere. A huge swathe from Sakhalin through India to Gabon gets bombarded. There are multiple impacts in the 100 MT range. China, India, and the areas between are hit particularly badly, suffering 75%+ population losses.

The human tragedy is one thing, but how would this affect the world economy? China is a huge creditor, so what if the remaining populace call in their debts to help rebuild? And much of the world’s high technology equipment is made in the area. (q.v. Thailand and hard drives last year). And the world’s two biggest markets have just downsized drastically.

OTOH there are now 1.5B+ fewer mouths to feed. 1.5B+ fewer people in need of energy, so there are going to be major cuts in energy and food prices.

2

In summary.

3

Any impact event large enough to kill 1.5B in the short term will devastate agriculture worldwide. This is a an extinction level event. Maybe some would survive, but widespread starvation is a certainty.

Ergo, in the short term the price of food goes up exponentially.

Hi-tech sector? Can’t each an i-Pad. Worthless.

Energy needs? A sort of nuclear winter type event would be forthcoming. Staying warm may be a problem for some, at least for a time.

4

Ever read (or seen) “The Road”?

Multiple 100MT hits would raise enough dust to seriously affect the level of sunlight that is able to filter through to the surviving plant life which would seriously affect the next harvest time. So 1.5B+ fewer people notwithstanding, there would be significant starvation issues.

There would likely be a significant amount of secondary orbital fallout planet-wide since 100MT is enough to launch a steaming bolder to the other side of the globe. This, of course, would start fires anywhere there was wood available to burn.

There would certainly be a great deal of chaos affecting the shipping of food and energy. People running up credit card debt wherever stores are stupid enough to accept it. Teenagers having unprotected sex. All of the post-peak-oil and survivalists thumbing their collective noses (and waving their guns) at the rest of society.

If any of these space bolders hit water it would do even more damage than hitting land due to the tsunami/tidal waves it would create. Since most of the planet’s population lives next to the water and most of the significant cities are next to water and all of the heavy freight shipping has to be next to the water the global economy would almost certainly collapse.

Then there would be the Christians and their derivative religions either celebrating the rapture and/or realizing that they hadn’t yet ascended into heaven.

Margaret Atwood suggests in “Oryx and Crake” that if our highly technical society ever fails it will never be reconstituted since we’ve already exhausted the easily processed raw materials. It reminds me of the question, “Given perfect knowledge, how long would it take a single person to build a Cadillac from scratch?”

5

Would you need a Caddie though? I mean you want to cruising Mad Max in style of course, but take the ink pen. Marvel of eningeering, also cited on these forums as something that can’t exist without a society like ours.

However they had pens before, they used bird feathers. We have the resources to build complex things, from efficiencies of mass production, but before that, we built simple things that did the same roles as our complexes things. Not as well, but they functioned, and gave us a platform to build complex things.

Maybe it would be hard to build a Caddie, but an old style horseless carriage? People did build those. Then someone built a factory, then someone else built a Caddie factory. There’s a chain of events that went from wooden bicycle to Chevy Volt.

I have to ask, what resources would we be short of? Fossil fuels? I think we could make do without them. Metals? Other than uranium, we don’t destroy metal by using them. Just trash them. The elements remain. Hydrocarbons? Plastics are nice, but we could make them from other hydrocarbons than fossil fuels. Fertilizer?

6

Populations in China and India are very concentrated. Very many could die with relatively minor impacts. To take the UK as an example, a Tsar Bomba (50MT) exploded over central London on a work day would probably devastate the area within the M25 and cut the population of the U.K. by a sixth or more, but the physical impact on the U.K. would be minor as the area affected is a very small proportion of the U.K. landmass.

And the Tsar Bomba did not breach the Earth’s crust or anything like it. And volcanoes explode with forces in the 100 MT range. Krakatoa exploded with the force of 200MT and we’re still here.

So no, I don’t think such a series of strikes would be anything near an ELE.

7

I think “What world economy?” about covers it. “Subsistence economy” would be the only existing one for the entire globe for at least a couple centuries. Anything that takes out such a swathe of territory is an ELE.

8

Yeah, multiple 100MT impacts all at once? Not quite pasteurized planet, and I don’t think it would be an ELE, but yeah, pretty much every society on the planet would collapse as we went a decade or more with no crops to speak of.

I’m not sure if impact of that magnitude would cause ionization disruption of global telecommunications or not. I’m not an expert.

Assume at least one of those hits the Indian ocean, we would be looking at tsunami’s of unprecedented proportion, scouring the Eastern Coast of Africa, the southern coasts of Asia and possibly even hitting the west coast of North and South America. I think we would be looking at much more than 75% of population lost in India, at least. Imagine it being scoured to the Himalaya’s with several hundred meter high tidal waves travelling at insane speeds. Big enough, and we could see North America West of the Rockies completely wiped clean of man, or pretty damn close.

Temperatures would plummet, it would rain non-stop for weeks, if not months, due to the water impact vaporizing millions of tons of seawater.

I imagine, if the impacts are that big, that it may set off the Ring of Fire all at once. Volcano’s, earth quakes, the whole 9 yards, all at once.

It’s possible, assuming that pockets of civilization survive in Northern Europe, Western Asia (Russia, et al) and the America’s that we could recover. But it would be a long road back, and may be enough to knock us back to pre-industrial society. At least for a generation or two.

A good take on this is the book Lucifers Hammer by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle. While a bit dated now, the science is still sound, and the impact event is very similar, though I believe your initial hypothesis is quite a bit smaller than the strike estimated in the book.

Maybe. Depends on how many impacts you are actually talking about. In the book it appears that they probably take a thousand MT worth of impacts (in multiple hits), since the comet is more of a shotgun blast that doesn’t quite miss.

9

Ahem.
Would the destruction of China and India benefit the US economically?
:slight_smile:

10

If one single 100MT impact hit the ocean, the tsunami effect would be pretty negligible, unless it happened quite near to an inhabited coast. The amount of energy in the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami was equivalent to 9,320 *gigatons *of TNT, according to Wikipedia.

11

100MT impacts are not large in asteroid terms. They would cause massive localised damage, but global effects would be minimal. The Tunguska Event was an estimated 5-30MT.

12

Upon some fast research, you are both quite correct. A 50MT bomb was tested by the Soviets, and while it was a biggie, it wasn’t as bad as I was thinking.

I think the OP needs to provide more detail… how many strikes, where, etc. to come up with any sort of correct(ish) answer…