What do you think would happen if we realized that an asteroid, was about to hit Earth, in a small amount of time?

Society would freak completely out. I don’t think that there is a plan. The only thing that I can think of is maybe a device that could shoot projectiles at it in order to break it up into smaller pieces and I’ve heard nothing about us having that capability to date. The way I see it is that the world will end when it ends and I’m going to try to remain as peaceful as possible until I’m no longer here

Fire and brimstone coming down from the skies! Rivers and seas boiling! 40 years of darkness! Earthquakes, volcanoes! The dead rising from the grave! Human sacrifice, dogs and cats living together, mass hysteria!

A question like this just came up a week or so ago.

There’s no good plan.

No one knows how exactly society would react. The world has various cultures, communities and societies. They’d react differently. Those of us who are already in some relationship with death, spirituality, disembodied awareness, and/or expecting the planet as we know it to be destroyed, might tend to be more calm about it than people who are in denial about their own mortality, or in denial about the current imminent threats to the world as we know it from mass extinctions, global climate change, water crises, antibiotic loss, and other economic and geopolitical crises.

There are at least a couple of board games about this general idea:
Abandon Planet (specifically meteor apocalypse)
Lift Off! Get Me Off This Planet!

I know Trump would blame the Democrats, then move to Russia and move in with his buddy Putin.

We’d run amok like chickens whose heads had just been cut off, looking for someone to blame.

We would have a run on the banks/stocks/groceries. Bunkers and survival stores would have more buisness.

Trump would die rich.

I’m pretty sure I would call in sick.

Depends on the size of the asteroid. If it’s a planet killer, one thing is for sure. I’d say my loving goodbyes to all jellies here. Including trump fanatics. And close it with “trump still sucks!”

I’d immediately summon the vicar round for tea & scones, then show him my penis.

Well. A couple weeks ago, I read about a few asteroids that would be coming very close to Earth. We really only saw them, when they were like three days from whizzing by, because they were coming at us from the direction of the Sun. If they were going to hit us, we’d have had 3 days to do something about them. They were not planet killers, but if one hit a major city, or in the ocean (causing a massive, fast moving tsunami,) it would have been really bad.

One would think that we should have a defense of some sort, against this type of threat.

At this point, all we can do is call for mass evacuation, from where we think one might hit. As we’ve seen with bad hurricanes, not everyone can evacuate.

I was thinking that maybe every country, should be forced to pay a small portion of their yearly income, to design and develop some sort of defense system.

There is an asteroid, called Appophis (not sure I spelled that right,) that could possibly hit us in about 10 years. It’s supposed to come very close, or maybe make direct impact. From my reading, it would be cataclysmic, at best.

Why is this not garnering more attention?

The public would not be informed. There would be nothing to do in a very short time. Didn’t y’all watch “Armageddon?” :)

^I don’t think that the government could hide it now. It would get leaked, through the Internet. Somehow…

If it weren’t a planet killer, they’d have to evacuate the presumed strike zone. To not do so, would practicality be genocide. 3 days, wouldn’t be enough time, to evacuate say, the west coast of the US. But they could still save millions of lives.

What could you do?
I would have a party for friends and family, and at the end kiss and hug every body goodbye
What’s the alternative?

@MrGrimm888 – but how?

Suppose it wasn’t a planet killer, but they could see that it was going to land in the Western US, probably Utah.

How do you move 10 million people from Utah, Colorado, Wyoming, and so on, out and to another state in a matter of a couple days?

And even if you could move people out, where do they go? Where do they sleep?

But there’s a darker side of your question too. Suppose the asteroid could be determined to land in Central America. Would Trump even want to help the people there? (You saw what he did after the hurricane in Puerto Rico).

^Well. When there are hurricanes coming, they reverse the highways, and take other measures to get as many people out as possible. One time, we had a hurricane coming, and the highway got stuck. The result was a few hundred thousand people on the highway, when the hurricane arrived. Luckily, it just glanced us, but lots of people were furious. Since then, we reverse all the highways, and make it easier to evacuate.

If something like an asteroid, was going to hit, they would do things like that, and hopefully the military/airforce, would help get as many people out as possible. It would still be devastating, but we could help as many as possible.

As far as a foreign country, it would depend on their government’s willingness to accept help. America would help, if they were allowed to. Trump is a LOT of things, but I think he would try to help in such an event. As long as they weren’t evacuating them to the US. Even then, I think he would try to help. Trump is a terrible person. But he isn’t completely heartless. If he wasn’t, we could have nuked North Korea, and Iran. Give him some credit…

I hate Trump. But he’s had plenty of chances to kill millions, yet hasn’t. He’s not a flat character, in a badly written book. He is a rounded character. I’ve been observing his behavior, since he took office. He deserves credit for his wrong doings. But he also deserves credit, for what he’s not done wrong… He’s made a lot of wealthy people richer. He’s fucked the environment, badly. But he hasn’t killed thousands of people either, at least directly… And he could have… And still can… He conducts his office, with lots of business-like decisions. Making threats, to get leverage. I don’t agree with his behavior, and he’s frankly playing with fire in the large part. But nothing horrific has happened yet…

What nobody has addressed here except @ragingloli is that NO matter where it hits, it could very well mean that it would knock our planet off its axis and bring the apocalypse where life everywhere on the globe would become uninhabitable. The ONLY people leaving this planet would be the leaders of every nation, some of the scientists, some of the most elite doctors. In other words, ONLY those who could be MOST beneficial in repopulating a new world!!! They don’t think the average working stiff is important enough to be included. So, I’d contact EVERYBODY that I love to tell then how much they mean to me & then I’d bend over & kiss my ass goodbye!!! I’m at the age where my mortality is a reality, so I’ve STOPPED fearing death!!! As my favorite man said “I don’t know how to die so I’m going to enjoy living”

^Loli, is an expert at bringing up things, we don’t always consider.
That’s why she’s such an invaluable part of the pond. Same with @ucme .

They are truly irreplaceable…

Within 70 million years what was once a small band of lizards would rise to become the most intelligent beings on the planet:

1. Their god would bear a striking resemblance to a handbag, luggage and a pair of expensive shoes
.
2. In this reptile eat reptile world everyone would complain about having to chase tail and argue about how to cook it properly.

3. Life of earth would be at the brink of nuclear destruction before the planet was inadvertently saved by an asteroid.

4. In one of these iterations cockroaches would send a cocked probe to Proxima Centauri only to have the spacecraft explode spreading fecal matter containing dna throughout the entire Milk And Cookies Galaxy.

Are we assuming that it is blindly clear that everyone will die? How would people react if it was known for sure, no exceptions, that you were dust in 24 hours? Hoarding and caves would be irrelevant.

I think it would be fantastic. I would have the biggest bbq for the neighborhood before the even bigger bbq.

Fucking hell, hate to bring it up again, but I have been dealing with cancer for a while and you just sort of accept it and get credit cards to buy a table saw and planer and drum sander and router to make your own urn.

In 1773 scientists told Paris it would be destroyed by a comet and later that a comet would destroy the Planet Earth well has science been right in its predictions of Dooms Day?

@UrVic That’s actually a myth. What happened is that the astronomer and mathematician Jérôme Lalande was scheduled to present a paper entitled “Reflections on those Comets which Can Approach the Earth,” which was about the gravitational effects that Earth and nearby comets could have on one another’s movements through space, and a handful of Parisians freaked out and falsely claimed that he had predicted the end of the world. The rumors spread before anyone had read or heard a single word of Lalande’s paper, and even an advertisement that he placed in a newspaper had no effect on the public panic. It’s a story about mass hysteria, not the failures of science.

This thread, was about anything from a planet killer, to a city killer. Maybe I should have been more clear, on the details.