Yo I'm bored, let's go chuck rock-filled snowballs at the Earth!

December 8, 2022 10:30 PM

Asteroid Launcher: not your parents' Asteroids. Choose a type of NEO, how large it is, how fast it's going, and the angle of impact when it hits the Earth's atmosphere. Pick a point on the map, and hit the LAUNCH ASTEROID button. The app will show on the map and tell you factoids about the resultant crater, fireball, shock wave, highest wind speed, and earthquake. But ya gotta aim and chuck it just right, and then quick, hide behind the moon so the earth doesn't know what hit it!
posted by not_on_display (30 comments total)

I live in the middle of the Chicxulub crater and often point out to friends that the odds of another strike here are inestimably slim — unless the first one was thrown on purpose, in which case we’re pretty much in for it.
posted by Tell Me No Lies at 12:00 AM on December 9, 2022 [8 favorites]

I live in the middle of the Chicxulub crater and often point out to friends that the odds of another strike here are inestimably slim — unless the first one was thrown on purpose, in which case we’re pretty much in for it.

We'll take the crater. Honey, the chances of another asteroid hitting this crater are astronomical. It's been pre-disastered. We're going to be safe here.
posted by Ickster at 12:15 AM on December 9, 2022 [5 favorites]

Not that it would be at all easy to implement, but I was disappointed that I couldn't create monster tsunamis.
posted by Ickster at 12:16 AM on December 9, 2022 [6 favorites]

That was fun!
posted by aniola at 12:42 AM on December 9, 2022 [1 favorite]

That was cool, I just wish it did tsunamis for ocean hits as well.
posted by Hactar at 12:43 AM on December 9, 2022

How easy it is to kill the Earth with relatively small asteroids shows that truly malevolent space faring aliens have never come here.
posted by jamjam at 12:52 AM on December 9, 2022

Disappointed there's not an option for tungsten rods, otherwise this is perfectly terrifying. I've always been happy to live as near central London as I can afford cos then I know I'll be vaporised instantly in a nuclear attack, but asteroids don't have such political targeting, and the idea of my clothes burning off my body 200km from impact is Threads-level nightmare fuel.

Question for asteroid-impact experts: you can adjust the angle of impact, but the crater and resulting effects are always displayed as a perfect circle, something I would associate more with a perfect 90 degree strike. In reality would it be more of a, I don't know how to describe it, like a plume shape? Or does that amount of material travelling that fast always tend toward creating a circular impact area?
posted by Ten Cold Hot Dogs at 2:22 AM on December 9, 2022 [3 favorites]

I initially wished there was an aggregated metric, as I initially started in the US (LA and NYC) trying to make the biggest impact but then realized the high score would be ... y'know, I'm gonna stop there cause probably this isn't about high scores and just "holy hell is that what even a small asteroid would do with 500 miles of me?"
posted by revmitcz at 2:33 AM on December 9, 2022

Disappointed there's not an option for tungsten rods

yam seng, beltalowda
posted by lazaruslong at 3:07 AM on December 9, 2022 [20 favorites]

Question for asteroid-impact experts...does that amount of material travelling that fast always tend toward creating a circular impact area?

It's been a while since I did any work in this area, but yes, pretty much. The crater isn't created by the impactor scooping material out of the earth. It's created by the kinetic energy of the impact itself vaporizing everything starting near the point of impact. Less like a spoon digging into the earth, and more like a bomb going off.

For low-angle impacts, sometimes you'll see secondary circular craters downrange, from the parts of the impactor that didn't vaporize in the original impact and then hit the ground again later.
posted by fizzitt at 4:08 AM on December 9, 2022 [5 favorites]

Paging Marco Inaros, Marco Inaros to the white phone.
posted by rikschell at 4:10 AM on December 9, 2022 [3 favorites]

heheheh i blew up my house
posted by dorothyisunderwood at 4:33 AM on December 9, 2022 [4 favorites]

I have to admit I would sort of like the ability to chuck a marble at 0.998c but then the authors/devs would have to get into all the stuff that Munroe got into with the lightspeed baseball.
posted by GCU Sweet and Full of Grace at 4:36 AM on December 9, 2022

Damn, missed Westminster.

Competitive version: Interplanetary (Steam link), which I suspect is more fun against humans than the robots I've played against so far.
posted by polytope subirb enby-of-piano-dice at 4:39 AM on December 9, 2022

Was the title supposed to be a reference to Flash Gordon? That's how I read it.
posted by mikelieman at 5:04 AM on December 9, 2022 [1 favorite]

This reminds me of playing SimEarth back in the day when I would drop asteroids on India. Not because I bore India any particular ill will,.mind you...I just found the shape of the resulting crater/bay aesthetically pleasing.
posted by Mr. Bad Example at 5:20 AM on December 9, 2022

First I nuked (MarcoInaros'd?) Tallahassee, because as a Florida resident, you know. But then I wanted to see where I could drop an asteroid and do the least damage. Just getting started, but FYI you can drop one in central Wyoming and have zero deaths in the crater.

Thirding the wish for tsunami effects.
posted by martin q blank at 6:46 AM on December 9, 2022 [1 favorite]

This is how the Gamilons attacked Earth, during Star Blazers season 1.

Their "planet bombs" were asteroids that were irradiated, and sent to collide with Earth.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1xILUFJPF9g&t=99s
posted by kmartino at 8:39 AM on December 9, 2022 [1 favorite]

Definitely wishing for aerodynamic tungsten and/or steel rods by weight, and "dropping from X height" rather than "approaching at X speed." For the novel I'm writing.
posted by seanmpuckett at 8:42 AM on December 9, 2022 [1 favorite]

No tidal waves for ocean impacts. Real missed opportunity.
posted by Headfullofair at 11:10 AM on December 9, 2022 [1 favorite]

With a 3 foot diameter stone asteroid coming in at the slowest speed possible at a 90° angle, I got a

A 6 ft wide crater in our driveway:
The crater was 1 ft deep
The asteroid impacted the ground at 12 mph
The impact was equivalent to 0 Tons of TNT
More energy was released than Tunguska explosion
An impact this size happens on average every day

For a carbon asteroid of the same size:

A 1 ft wide crater
The crater was 0 ft deep
The asteroid impacted the ground at 0 mph
The impact was equivalent to 0 Tons of TNT
More energy was released than Tunguska explosion
An impact this size happens on average every day

Oddly enough, my survival seems possible under either circumstance.
posted by y2karl at 11:37 AM on December 9, 2022 [3 favorites]

Yes but why did you pick carbon or stone asteroids, when you could go for a gold asteroid instead? I mean...
posted by flamewise at 12:21 PM on December 9, 2022

I did Bedminster NJ and West Palm Beach, FL. No reason.
posted by hypnogogue at 12:34 PM on December 9, 2022 [1 favorite]

Yes but why did you pick carbon or stone asteroids, when you could go for a gold asteroid instead? I mean...

I wouldn't survive?

64 ft wide crater

The crater is 14 ft deep

Your asteroid impacted the ground at 537 mph

The impact is equivalent to 0 Tons of TNT

More energy was released than Tunguska explosion

An impact this size happens on average every day

posted by y2karl at 12:37 PM on December 9, 2022

More energy was released than Tunguska explosion

Funny how that is the one invariable result no matter what the size the asteroid is. You'd think they could provide a Chelyabinsk or an Ann Hodges option.
posted by y2karl at 3:26 PM on December 9, 2022 [1 favorite]

I live in the middle of the Chicxulub crater and often point out to friends that the odds of another strike here are inestimably slim

On an old blog I once wrote:

I've been thinking about Chicxulub. Not the town in the Yucatan, nor the crater to which it gives its name.

I've been thinking about the big asteroid that made the crater 65 million years ago, extinguishing about half of all animal genera and ending the dinosaurs.

The question is: Could something like this happen again or is this a sort of phenomenon that only happened in the distant past? Do we live a solar system where this sort of thing still occurs?

No, this event was of a bygone era, when the solar system was only 99% of its current age.

posted by neuron at 7:42 PM on December 9, 2022

When it detects that a crater would be made on the ocean floor, I do get tsunami results. e.g. "The impact will create a 1.1 mile tall tsunami". (That was a 1mi iron asteroid coming into the Atlantic at a 5˚ angle.)

Looking around the other projects on the neal.fun site, this fits in: it's a fun neat visualization, but not an advanced simulator by any longshot. Fun to know that something released more energy than the Yellowstone supervolcano eruption. Maybe. More or less. You get the idea. PIERCED EARDRUMS 100 MILES AWAY?? But the neal.fun site has a lot of other cute but eye-opening data-visualizations; click around.

> Was the title supposed to be a reference to Flash Gordon? That's how I read it.

I was thinking about the voices of bored middle-school boys who were soon gonna be throwing rocks at cars or whatever, "mope mope destroy." Not that far off from that Flash Gordon villain maybe. (I saw that movie once, when I was a kid, maybe in the theater... and I remember nothing of it except "FLASH! AAAA-AAAAH! DEFENDEROFTHEUNIVERSE!!") Nope, it was the destructive whine of bored youth. With comets instead of gravelly snowballs. Probably waiting for a ride from their mom driving a fake wood-painted station-wagon, after having watched Flash Gordon in the theater.
posted by not_on_display at 8:22 PM on December 9, 2022

Now you guys have all become Shiva, Destroyer of Worlds. This is why we can't have good things.
posted by y2karl at 10:56 PM on December 9, 2022 [1 favorite]

(First of all for people reading along in their heads, ‘x’ is pronounced “sh” in Mayan. Locally the name is pronounced "chick-shoe-lub").

Do we live [in] a solar system where this sort of thing still occurs?

The solar system is about 4.5 billion years old. 66 million years ago is very recent comparatively and I’m not sure that anything that hadn’t settled out in the first 4.4 billion years will have settled out now.

In addition there is a school of thought that the Chicxulub meteor was pulled by Jupiter out of the Kuiper Belt or Oort Cloud — both reservoirs of enormous objects that are so far away that just perturbing their orbits would take millions of years. In terms of slinging one of these objects into the close solar system a million years is a blink.

We don’t know how many Chicxulub or larger strikes there have been in the history of the Earth, but experts believe there will eventually be another one, give or take a few million years.
posted by Tell Me No Lies at 6:57 AM on December 10, 2022 [1 favorite]

1 mile limit and just one at a time?

Wait, these aren't real asteroids!? I'm feeling a little ripped off, here.
posted by loquacious at 2:55 PM on December 10, 2022