Hacker News new | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit login

Working link: https://cneos.jpl.nasa.gov/sentry/details.html#?des=2024%20Y...

8.1 megatons of kinetic energy. According to the Torino rating, only risk of “localized destruction” (less than “regional devastation”): https://cneos.jpl.nasa.gov/sentry/torino_scale.html






Comparable in energy to a B-53 nuclear bomb, minus the radiation.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B53_nuclear_bomb


So a 14 km blast radius it seems.

Unless it lands in the ocean in which case tidal waves, and if on land, probably an earthquake/shockwave.

A comparable ocean impact would be the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake, which was about 3x more energetic.

I'd assume quakes transform much more energy into tsunami waves than meteorite hit does.

That is not correct.

Earthquakes' energy doesn't all go to displacing water and hence generating tsunamis. An ocean impact is significantly more efficient at transferring energy into tsunamis.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/B97804...


Interesting, I would assume surface wave dissipation to counteract that compared to seabed origin.

2004 Indian Earthquake was 9.1-magnitude, so it was about 150 megatons of TNT.

The USGS estimated 1.1×10^17 Newton-Meters of energy, which converts over to ~26Mt TNT.

https://web.archive.org/web/20100404013939/http://neic.usgs....


What I just learned from ChatGPT…

Asteroids mostly contain the same naturally radioactive elements we find in Earth's rocks - mainly potassium, uranium, and thorium in very small amounts. When they hit Earth, they don't typically create radiation hazards. Scientists have checked out famous impact sites like Meteor Crater in Arizona and found normal radiation levels. While impacts can briefly create some radioactive isotopes through the collision process, it's really the impact's explosive force that does the real damage, not radiation.


*megatons of TNT. 1 MT of TNT = 4.14*10^15 joules

So you wouldn't want to be under it, but a good-sized hill would be enough cover?

Yes, deep underground shelter planned for nuclear attack will be enough to survive, as damaging mechanisms, are mostly same - short but very powerful infrared flash and deadly shockwave (better to consider it as very fast pressure grow and then pressure drop).

Just staying behind hill, will be not enough cover from shockwave, so people will suffer from fast pressure changes.

But shockwave quickly weakened as square of distance, and hill will make it's path longer. So, something like 100m hill could be considered as moving border of deadly zone 100m closer to epicenter.


Those numbers were a bit abstract to me, so to get an idea: Tungunska event (1908) is estimated between 3 and 5 [1], and the Chelyabinsk (2013) at 0.5 [2]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tunguska_event [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chelyabinsk_meteor


The ESA's estimate is a bit lower, at 0.1 MT: https://neo.ssa.esa.int/search-for-asteroids?tab=possimp&des...

I'm guessing there's still a lot of uncertainty.


Link fixed now. Thanks!

imagine if you could channel that much kinetic energy into a propulsion system for interstellar travel

If you had a 100 ton spacecraft and you pumped all that kinetic energy into it with perfect efficiency, it would get up to 0.2% of light speed, fast enough to reach the nearest star in about 2000 years.

[flagged]


I don't want to come off too harsh here -- not a personal attack -- but I genuinely don't understand why folks are sharing the output from LLMs. It's usually too long, it's not written by a human (which is why I came to HN), and I could have trivially asked an LLM myself!

I've been ongoingly baffled by the phenomenon as well. Like it's a new technology and all, but it seems incredibly obvious to me that copy and pasting output like that is adding nothing to the conversation (and the hallucination factor makes it, well, worse then useless IMO).

Some people are literally just that out of touch.

Imagine if every forum was just screenshots of google search results.


Yeah it is bad and a lot of damage if it hits somewhere populous but my understanding is we've tested nukes that powerful

Largest was the Tsar Bomba at > 50 megatons! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsar_Bomba



Consider applying for YC's Spring batch! Applications are open till Feb 11.

Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: