“The entire city of Columbus is instantly vaporized… The state of Ohio and its 11 million inhabitants cease to exist in the blink of an eye…”

I was talking this morning to Nefarious about how important it is that humans start to migrate across the solar system and then the universe, and we watched some asteroid videos. Several times before in our planet’s history the biosphere has been remade by an asteroid, and a few smaller asteroids at least (1999 RQ36, Apophis, 2007 VK184) are making quite close passes to Earth in the immediate future. Here’s a National Geographic video on a slightly larger asteroid hitting us:

It gets scarier when a big asteroid — say 500 km across — hits the Earth. On one level, the odds of us getting hit with something this big are slim to none, but on the other hand, all you have to do is look up at the Moon with a pair of binoculars and you can see by its scars that it does happen enough times over the life of a celestial body.

9 Comments

  1. Victoria wrote:

    Interesting. I’m strangely alright with witnessing the apocalypse if it happens in my lifetime. It’d be an interesting way to go (or live through?)!

    Wednesday, February 11, 2009 at 10:08 am | Permalink
  2. chrissy wrote:

    hey i live 2 hours north of columbus, dont say such things!!!

    Wednesday, February 11, 2009 at 11:48 am | Permalink
  3. Allison wrote:

    I have to back up Chrissy here, I live too close to Columbus!

    Wednesday, February 11, 2009 at 11:57 am | Permalink
  4. Kyle wrote:

    Man National Geographic channel rocks. Gotta love there Naked Science show.

    Wednesday, February 11, 2009 at 12:37 pm | Permalink
  5. am wrote:

    So how did Nefarious react to the conversation? It’s something that I know will come up in my future talks with Jude, but sometimes I worry that I’m going to make him worry more than he should.

    Wednesday, February 11, 2009 at 2:51 pm | Permalink
  6. Victoria wrote:

    Hey if this was to happen, I think we’d all live too close to Columbus ;-)

    Wednesday, February 11, 2009 at 3:45 pm | Permalink
  7. Dan wrote:

    Ohio deserves it!

    Wednesday, February 11, 2009 at 10:46 pm | Permalink
  8. Ben wrote:

    Thats pretty insane.
    Being in South Africa we always seem to escape the devastation that happens on American television shows or movies.

    Friday, February 13, 2009 at 5:40 am | Permalink
  9. jazzybean wrote:

    this is simply fasinating. and i loved how you linked the Moon to wiki :)

    Sunday, February 15, 2009 at 7:25 pm | Permalink
Wow Shannon, that's really annoying! What is it, 1997 on Geocities? Retroweb is NOT cool!

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