Near-miss from a city-killer asteroid this week

[sologdin]

it'd be really cool, i think, if the earth were just a giant space monster egg and the asteroid strike disturbed the dogmatic slumber of the giant space monster baby therein sufficiently for it to emerge and be free and swim the solar waves in search of its long-suffering giant space monster mother.

[A True Kaniggit]

You been playing Stellaris? That can happen in Stellaris. 

[Ormond]

On 7/27/2019 at 11:02 AM, Werthead said:

 

In fact, if the 1908 Siberia impactor had been delayed in its arrival by about four hours, it would have landed pretty much right in the middle of Moscow and taken out the entire city. In fact, current estimates put the Tunguska object and this week's near-miss asteroid at almost exactly the same size, both physically and in terms of detonation (~15 megatons). The good news is that the Tunguska event happened in one of the most remote places on the planet and there were no confirmed human deaths.

 

This is, bizarrely, very close to the plot of the Ace Combat video game series, where an alternate-reality Earth (down to having a completely different geography, but everyone still flies American and Russian fighter jets because reasons) spots a large asteroid called Ulysses on a collision course and the nations of the world collaborate to build a massive railgun network to destroy it before it can land (which doesn't entirely work and smaller fragments pummel several continents, triggering a global refugee crisis that in turn triggers a world war).

I hadn't heard about the danger to Moscow from the 1908 impact. Someone could write a very interesting "alternate history" novel about that and how the world would be different if Moscow had been destroyed in 1908, which to me sounds like a better plot than the Ace Combat scenario.

[Derfel Cadarn]

Be afraid if a scientist announces an imminent ‘near miss’ while tanking a bottle of wine and snorting up a bag full of coke.

[Werthead]

4 hours ago, Ormond said:

I hadn't heard about the danger to Moscow from the 1908 impact. Someone could write a very interesting "alternate history" novel about that and how the world would be different if Moscow had been destroyed in 1908, which to me sounds like a better plot than the Ace Combat scenario.

Moscow wasn't Russia's capital at the time, as it was still St. Petersburg, so possibly not as different as you'd think in the short term. The Tsar and the government would have survived.

In the long term, maybe. The Soviet government moved the capital away from St. Petersburg in 1918 because they believed it was too easy to capture by a foreign power (and both the White Russian armies and various European powers were invading Russia at the time), being too close to the sea and the western borders. Assuming that stayed true, it would have moved to a rebuilt Moscow or possibly another major city well inland, possibly Smolensk or Minsk (probably not Kiev, as that's too close to the southern borders). 

If it stayed at St. Petersburg/Leningrad then it would have been much easier for the Germans to capture the city during WWII, as they've have thrown everything at it rather than dividing their forces between Leningrad and Moscow (and ultimately ending up failing to take either).