Re: Comet impact in the Eastern United States - Feasibility of Evacuation

"James Nicoll" <jdnicoll@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote in message 
news:fr2a0b$bhu$1@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> In article 
> <606fddac-d790-45bb-aed8-76aa6aae7404@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
>,
> Matt Browne SFW  <matt.h.browne@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:
>>
>>The assumptions are the following: Four weeks before the impact, it's
>>clear the comet will hit the Eastern United States. Every day the
>>comet's trajectory can be calculated more precisely. Two weeks before
>>it hits, the impact site is narrowed down to Pennsylvania; then a week
>>later it's clear the comet will hit the greater Pittsburgh area. The
>>comet is big and fast enough to affect the entire Eastern United
>>States area (almost 1 km in size, traveling at 40 km/s). This scenario
>>is depicted in the movie "Impact Earth" (available on DVD). Here's a
>>description:
>>
> http://www.lpl.arizona.edu/impacteffects/
>
> Plugging in the numbers, that breaks windows in Toronto.
>
>
> -- 
> http://www.livejournal.com/users/james_nicoll
> http://www.cafepress.com/jdnicoll
(For all your "The problem with
> defending the English language [...]" T-****rt, cup and tote-bag needs)

A.E. vanVogt's null-A Venus makes a good counterexample here:
faced with an invasion, the people all respond rationally.  It
would never happen here because, 1) Look at the Bush people
response to Katrina -- Gaah!  About the most productive thing
they would find to do would be a Presidential Prayer Session;
and 2) too many people would be running away disregardless of
the cost or of the overall social picture; and 3) the people
who actually got to somewhere safe, standing cheek-to-jowl with
others, would be quickly overwhelmed by a tide of their sewage
with absence of water fit to drink.

I think that as mentioned above, the species would survive, but
that the cost and result of this surviving is only a topic for
bigger and better dystopias from writers' worktables.  And that
there are more immediate topics better to be working on.  Of
which the principal one in my mind, is the consequences of the
two ****k wars we have going on; and of the intended and
deliberate destruction of the Constitutional checks and
balances system of government that we had up to about Regan
time.

Titeotwawki -- mha     [rasfw 2008 Mar 10]