What If Asteroids Got Bigger and Couldn’t Stop?

First, a grain of sand. Then a pea. Then a rock the size of a car, a bus, a football pitch... Every time something from space hits your street, the next one is bigger - all the way up to the Moon, and then Mars. One continuous shot from your street. Every number on screen comes from real impact physics. 0:00 Intro 0:15 1 mm - a grain of sand 0:26 1 cm - a pea 0:37 10 cm - a grapefruit 0:58 4 m - a car 1:38 19 m - a bus 2:20 60 m - a football pitch 3:05 340 m - Apophis 4:07 1 km - a city 5:10 10 km - Mount Everest 6:18 700 km - bigger than Vesta 7:20 3,475 km - the Moon 8:10 6,779 km - Mars 8:52 Every rock, ranked The real ones 2008 TC3, about 4 m across, exploded over Sudan in 2008. About 600 of its meteorites were found. In 1992, a meteorite hit a parked car in Peekskill, New York. Chelyabinsk, Russia, 2013: about 19 m, around 500 kilotons. About 1,500 people were hurt, mostly by flying glass. Tunguska, Siberia, 1908: about 80 million trees flattened. It never reached the ground. Apophis (340 m) will pass Earth on 13 April 2029, about 32,000 km up - closer than many satellites. NASA says it won't hit us for at least 100 years. A rock about 10 km wide hit Chicxulub, Mexico, 66 million years ago, and ended the dinosaurs. About 4.5 billion years ago, a planet the size of Mars (Theia) hit the young Earth. Its wreckage is thought to have formed the Moon. The biggest meteorite ever found is Hoba, about 60 tonnes, in Namibia. Sources Impact effects (entry, airburst, crater, fireball, heat, quake, air blast, ejecta): Collins, Melosh & Marcus (2005), "Earth Impact Effects Program", Meteoritics & Planetary Science 40, 817 - https://impact.ese.ic.ac.uk/ImpactEarth/ Airburst blast waves: the US Defense Nuclear Agency's airburst model, as implemented in the open-source glasstone package - https://github.com/GOFAI/glasstone Building damage thresholds: Glasstone & Dolan, The Effects of Nuclear Weapons (1977) Meteoritic material reaching Earth (about 48.5 tons a day): NASA - https://science.nasa.gov/meteors-mete... Apophis: NASA - https://science.nasa.gov/solar-system... 2008 TC3: Jenniskens et al. (2009), "The impact and recovery of asteroid 2008 TC3", Nature 458, 485 Chelyabinsk: Popova et al. (2013), "Chelyabinsk Airburst, Damage Assessment, Meteorite Recovery, and Characterization", Science 342, 1069 Oceans boiling, the surface melting: Sleep et al. (1989), Nature 342, 139; Citron & Stewart (2022), "Large Impacts onto the Early Earth: Planetary Sterilization and Iron Delivery" - https://arxiv.org/abs/2201.09349 #whatif #asteroid #space