if an asteroide hit the earth what chances of sivival?

Answer 1

It totally depends on size. Amd Campbhelp is wrong. The asteroid that creamed the dinosaurs and 50%+ of all species on earth was estimated to be just 10 km (6miles) wide.

A 1 km hit may not produce widespread extinctions but would almost undoubtedly cause so much damage that civilisation as we know it would collapse.

It would only take a direct hit from a 100metre rock to destroy a large city.

But having said that, 100metre ones are estimated to hit once every 1000 years, and the Earth is about 95% NOT urban

In 1908 one exploded over the wilderness in Russia (note that is the biggest, emptiest terrain) and knocked down 2000 sq km of forest and killed a herd of reindeer. Nobody died, because nobody was there. But on a city, it would have been devasttating, with 100s of thousands of casualties.

A 10 km wide hit would cause extinctions, probably including the human race, but these are estimated to occur only every 100 million years.

Relax

Answer 2

As jamand says, a 200 mile asteroid hitting Earth would be really bad. Lucky for us no asteroid that large has any chance of hitting Earth. Those few asteroids that do have some possibility of hitting Earth are all less than 20 miles wide, and most are much smaller than that. Such an impact would be bad enough to wipe out a city or small country, and if it landed in the ocean it would make giant waves flooding all the surrounding coast lines, but it would not kill all people on Earth.

Answer 3

It really would depend on where you were and the size of the thing that hit. Approximately 75 000 space rocks enter the atmosphere every year and not a single person is recorded to have been killed by one I think the chances of survival are good. Most are vaporised on their way down. Most that reach earth strike the water, the rest mainly fall into uninhabited areas of the earth. The only person ever even hurt by one was a lady (forgot her name) in America. A small meteorite crashed through the roof of her house, bounced of her radiator (and radio?) and struck her on her leg causing a small bruise.
If a large asteroid wasn't deflected by the mass of Jupiter or the moon, and managed to penetrate earth’s atmosphere, and didn't explode due to the extreme heat change (which happened to the Tunguska one in 1908) and it struck the earth not the sea, and you weren't stood under it, and you were in a developed country with good food supplies and heating, your chances of survival would still be better than your chances of getting served quickly at a fast food chain :-)

Answer 4

Survival from the impact wouldn't be much of an issue.

The real problem would be the immediate death of the global economy if this thing hit a country. Then it would probably cause a worldwide depression and deaths by starvation and other necessity-related deaths would skyrocket.

After a while though, there might be some adverse affects from materials and debris thrown up into the atmosphere, but certainly not enough to cause the extinction of the human race.

Answer 5

It depends on the size of the asteroid, meteor (they only become meteorites when they land on the ground) etc.

It may be worth remembering that life did survive the last big extinction evel event 65 million years ago. There was a major upheaval in the order of dominant species but life surivived and they didn't have our technological abilities then.

Answer 6

I strongly recommend A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson.
I have already read and re-read one copy to destruction and happily have another copy to quote from.

"Asteroids as most people commonly know, are rocky objects orbiting in loose formation in a belt between Mars and Jupiter. In illustrations they are always shown as existing in a jumble, but in fact the solar system is quite a roomy place and the average asteroid actually will be about one and a half million kilometres from its nearest neighbour."

He says that there are up to around a BILLION asteroids.
Around 26,000 have been catalogued!

This would be fine if they all stayed on course between Mars and Jupiter but they don't.

Bill Bryson again
"Think of the Earth's orbit as a kind of motorway on which we are the only vehicle, but which is crossed regularly by pedestrians who don't know enough to look before stepping off the verge."

"StevenOstro of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory has put it,
'[If you coul] light up all the Earth-crossing asteroids larger than 10 metres, there would be over a hundred million of these objects in the sky - ... all capable of colliding with the Earth... it would be deeply un-nerving'"

"even a small asteroid the size of a house could destroy a city"
"In 1991 an asteroid name 1991ba passed within 170,00Km of the Earth, in cosmic terms the equivalent of a bullet passing through your sleeve."

So somebody said that we would never let an asteroid hit us we would destroy it first.
This is patent nonsense sorry.
No Earth bound telescope could spot an object 100 metres across headed for us even if it was trained on that part of the sky.
The reality is that most telescopes are trained on far distant galaxies searching for extrasolar planets such as Gliese 581c so there is practically no chance of spotting an asteroid until it is about to hit.

In the unlikely event that we did spot an approaching asteroid perhaps if it were much larger like miles across we could not really do much to stop it.

Some people imagine we could blast it with a nuclear missile.
Unfortunately we don't make nuclear missiles to leave Earth's atmosphere. We are far too busy making them to hit each other's cities for that.
Secondly even idf we did all we would do is create a radioactive huge rock hurtling towards us.
If we managed to break it up by any means we would create a mass of huge rocks hurtling towards us that would do just as much damage over a wider area.

So any volunteers to go up like a bunch of space cowboy heroes and blow it up directly?
Well if we had a rocket that could carry a man into space any more then that might be an option.
The shuttle is still inoperative and the old moonshot rockets (assuming you believe they ever existed, I do) were retired and the plans destroyed. Mad!

So if an asteroid is going to hit us we had better stick our fingers in our ears and wait.
Oh but hang on you won't know its coming will you?
So what's the first you will know of it?

Bill Bryson again quoting Ray Anderson an expert on the Manson crater and asteroid impacts.
"It wouldn't be visible to the naked eye until it warmed up and that wouldn't happen until it hit the atmosphere, which would be about one second before it hit the Earth."
"[It would be travelling] at such a speed the air beneath it couldn't get out of the way and would be compressed, as in a bicycle pump. The temperature below would rise to some 60,00 Kelvin, or ten times the surface of the Sun."

"Everything in its path would crinkle and vanish like cellophane in a flame"

"Every living thing within 250 Kilometres that hadn't been killed by the heat of entry would be killed by the blast"

"For those outside the zone of immediate devastation, the first inkling would be a flash of blinding light followed an instant to a minute or two later by a rolling wall of darkness reaching high into the heavens"

"People up to 1,500 Kilometres away would be knocked off their feet and sliced or clobbered by a blizzard of flying projectiles."

"Within an hour a cloud of blackness would cover the Earth and burning rock and other debris would would be pelting down everywhere, setting much of the planet ablaze."

"the soot and ash in the atmosphere would blot out the sun for months possibly years"

Plants would die animals would die there would be no food a global winter would take hold for an unknowable length of time, the probability of the survival of human woul be very muc h in doubt although there are 6 billion of us so a few might just make it but it would be no fun for many decades to come.

Anyway enough cheerfulness for one night eh?
I'm off to bed, sleep well

Answer 7

It would depend on it's size really.

If it was 200 miles across I would think the chances of anything surviving were pretty remote - perhaps a few insects and cockroaches - but not a lot else.

Answer 8

Well, I used the Freedom of Information Act to make the BNSC (British National Space Centre) tell me if there any plans to deal with a major impact, and if so, what are they/ can I see them.

There aren't any plans any-way.
Regarding your question, if they are meant to manage it, i'd say pretty low.

Answer 9

we would never let an astroid hit the earth.... BUT if an actual astroid hit (not a large meteor) we would be most likely distroyed. Would we all die, probably not right away, but life as we know it would be changed forever (thousands of years)

Answer 10

6.4 billion is a lot of people to kill, lots would die but humanity is unlikly to die out completly.