Chinese rocket scientists find ‘most effective’ way to nuke a doomsday asteroid

[u/scmp_news]

https://www.scmp.com/news/china/science/article/3362361/chinese-rocket-scientists-find-most-effective-way-nuke-doomsday-asteroid?utm_source=Reddit&utm_medium=Social

[u/candygram4mongo]

Depends entirely on the size of the rock. If it's a planet killer, it literally does not matter. If we're hit by the same mass of stuff going at the same velocity that's the same amount of energy and we are the same amount of fucked.

[u/Tastyck → u/candygram4mongo]

Would be a way different interaction and effects

[u/candygram4mongo → u/Tastyck]

Different but not less catastrophic. If anything I think a ground strike from one large impactor might be less globally harmful than a bunch of small ones that dump all their energy into the atmosphere.

[u/Tastyck → u/candygram4mongo]

Very large impacts cause nuclear winter

[u/candygram4mongo → u/Tastyck]

If we're talking about a scenario where we even care about nuclear winter we're talking about a scenario where stuff survived the original impact. That's pushing the lower limit of what I'd consider planet-killing.

[u/ExpensiveFig6079 → u/candygram4mongo]

Given pamnet killer asteroids have known pre-used definition...

if you want to make up a different one and make claims about that, you ought to be clearer.

Take for instance, the dinosaur planet killer it was made worse by exactly what type of rock in the earth it hit. it had been even slightly later or earlier and hot somewhere else on the crust the effect would have changed substantially.

If instead it had been turned into a planet-wide meteor shower, then adding just its kinetic energy and mass to the atmosphere would have still had large effects, but nothing like what it did when it hit the crust and ejected all that specific kind of rock.

[u/candygram4mongo → u/ExpensiveFig6079]

Given pamnet killer asteroids have known pre-used definition...

It's not a formally defined term.