Plausability Check: Asteroid Impact

Freizeit

Banned
Ignoring the butterflies, what's the maximum size of an asteroid impact that the human race could plausibly survive? Bonus points if the impact leaves most of the global ecology intact.

I don't care where it hits or when.

http://simulator.down2earth.eu/
 
Ignoring the butterflies, what's the maximum size of an asteroid impact that the human race could plausibly survive? Bonus points if the impact leaves most of the global ecology intact.

I don't care where it hits or when.

http://simulator.down2earth.eu/

Depends. Anything between a Milder KT Extinction event and The Tungska Event would sufficiently ruffle humanity's feathers, and prune a bunch of them from the gene pool, while allowing a survivable world. Anything bigger than (or even as big as) the KT Extinction will completely wipe out Humanity.
 
A KT-equivalent would certainly wipe out humanity. I think however that asteroid impacts as large as 1-kilometer diameter could be viable, at least for pre-industrial civilizations. The precedent for that would be the Nördlinger Ries impact, which occured around 15 million years ago in the Miocene, and which had no detectable impact on the ecosystems, at least from what is possible to tell from the fossil record. Of course, you would have a devastation across a radius of hundreds of kilometers, but apart from local endemic species (and obviously excessive loss of life) there would be no major ecological ramifications from such an impact.
 
An impact would not have to be large to be a problem, if it landed in the wrong place. Wiping out a major city could tank the world economy.

A larger impact anywhere on the globe could throw enough debris into the atmosphere to create the effect of a nuclear winter. No summer for years on end, crop failure leading to mass starvation. The ecology would eventually bounce back, civilization would have ended in the mean time.
 
Aristocracy

One other factor to consider. If you're thinking of something in the last ~50 years or so how much warning would the world get. If it's a case that something detected a few years or even decades in advance and suitable precautions were taken then that would make a big impact on the amount of damage that could be taken and at least partially recovered. [Things like deep shelters, stockpiles of food and reserves of equipment].

I highlighted the and because of course even with extensive forewarning humans can foul it up.;)

Steve
 
K-T events are more than survivable with the use of hydroponics with growlights.

Certain foods like algae could actually be grown enough to feed most of the world, or something like duckweed.

Humans will survive, but our numbers will drop to maybe 100-200 million tops if they don't switch to very fast growing food (algae/duckweed).

Fission power and coal power will allow us to survive.

Expect a HELL of a lot of fission power plants to be created in the first 2 years, and the number increasing every year.
 
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