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

On Mon, 10 Mar 2008 17:47:12 GMT, "Martha Adams" <mhada@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
>
wrote:

>"James Nicoll" <jdnicoll@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:
>> 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.

>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!  

Do you people HAVE to keep dredging up ****bboleths?

>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.
-- 
"The flame rises but it soon descends
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