Okay, so, if you haven’t heard. Armageddon is a space movie where Michael Bay sends oil drillers to blow stuff up. IN SPACE!
But I have three slightly serious questions
One : The asteroid is the “size of Texas”. If we take that to mean roughly 260k square miles, would bacteria be able to survive? Or would the whole earth turn into a firey hellscape?
Two : The objective of our chuckle nuts is to drill into this astroid about 800 feet deep, Chuck a bomb into it and it blows into two pieces. Would that depth be sufficient to actually blow the astroid in half; even with a best case scenario?
Three : Assuming we dug 800 feet into the ground and planted a nuke there…. Could we get rid of Texas?
Comments
1: I won’t / can’t do any math but, you’re thinking squared miles when you should be thinking cubed miles. It would absolutely liquidate the planet’s entire crust and likely kill all life including bacterial life. That is, even assuming bacterial life exists deep below the Earth’s surface, probably going all the way down to the mantle (which it likely does).
I guess I can imagine some exceptions, like an organism with an extremely low metabolism which lives deep inside rocks, deep underground, might be spared for a time, even a long time. Or maybe the event would trigger a sort of panspermia, where so much of the Earth would be ejected out of Earth’s gravitational field that inevitably some of it would fall back down to Earth after things had cooled down (probably tens or hundreds of millions of years later) and probably have an incredibly simple life forms preserved within, or at least genetic material inside which could help repopulate the planet faster than life had initially formed.
2: I won’t do math but obviously 800 feet would be insufficient. Texas is 500 miles wide at it’s longest point (about), so lets say that what we’re talking about is a spheroidal object with a diameter of about 400 miles. The only way you can blow it in two (which you can’t), would be to split it in the center. Drilling it down 800 feet would be essentially the same as blowing it up on the surface. If you went down 200 miles and blew up the bomb, any bomb strong enough to split two halfs of the planet would also just destroy the whole thing. Won’t entertain the third question as it’s cringe.
One- extinction level event however bacteria would survive and likely small animals that can find ways to deal with nuclear winter. The initial impact likely destroying most of the surface of the hemisphere with the initial shock wave and fireball. The rest of the planet suffering from catastrophic earth quakes, volcanoes and gas emission. It may change the earths atmosphere.
Two – we probably would be unable to create and then send a nuke big enough to split or destroy the asteroid.
Three – ignoring answer two, Texas would no longer exist, nor would human civilisation o t he planet.
Three: In 1971, the U.S. detonated a 5MT device at a depth of about 1800 meters. The ground above the detonation bounced up about 6 meters before subsiding to form a shallow crater a few hundred meters wide. That was about it.