Comments on: How To Measure The End Of The World. https://scientificgamer.com/how-to-measure-the-end-of-the-world/ Science, gaming, and all things in between. Wed, 01 Jul 2026 22:05:15 +0000 hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=3.7.36 By: Hentzau https://scientificgamer.com/how-to-measure-the-end-of-the-world/#comment-15558 Fri, 15 Mar 2013 15:58:57 +0000 http://scientificgamer.com/?p=3259#comment-15558 I don’t have access to my science stuff at the moment so I can’t look up the specific energy, however: nobody really knows what sort of direct damage a serious asteroid impact would do to the biosphere, although if it’s powerful enough to crack the crust you can bet on a significant chunk of the Earth’s population dying out anyway thanks to shockwaves, tsunamis etc and the subsequent starvation as food sources wither and die and modern civilization collapses under the strain. However, what is absolutely certain is that an impact powerful enough to crack the crust would have the knock-on effect of making every single volcano on the planet erupt at the same time. This sort of dramatic geological upheaval would release far more harmful material into the atmosphere than the asteroid impact itself, and so even if the majority of the Earth’s surface remained unscathed after the impact it’d be turned into a rather poisonous and uninhabitable place for several million years. Nobody is getting out alive after that.

(So it’s your latter explanation. I imagine the energy threshold required for the above scenario to occur is actually much less than that required to penetrate the crust, it’s just the handiest shorthand I could think of for what would cause it.)

]]> By: Joe https://scientificgamer.com/how-to-measure-the-end-of-the-world/#comment-15557 Fri, 15 Mar 2013 13:48:35 +0000 http://scientificgamer.com/?p=3259#comment-15557 Can you go into more detail about cracking of the earth’s crust? What kind of energy are we talking about here (minimal amount to actually crack the crust.) Also, what would be the effects of this? Is the damage from the cracked crust the main concern or is it just that anything powerful enough to have that effect would take it over the threshold of total annihilation?

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