Say it was the size of Corsica and traveling at the speed of a reversing truck and bumped into a land mass. Would it still be an extinction level event?

  • Phoenixz@lemmy.ca
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    12 days ago

    It wouldn’t

    Earth’s gravity would make it accelerate from a far away distance and when it would hit, it hit with speeds greater than a bullet.

    An entire large island hitting earth at those speeds usually means game over for humanity and maybe even all life in this universe

    Not that we’d need any help in doing that, were perfectly capable of doing that ourselves

    • altphoto@lemmy.today
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      12 days ago

      But only if it was already exactly in a crash course. Otherwise it would end up as a moon as soon as it missed crashing the first time.

      • Tedesche@lemmy.world
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        10 days ago

        It’s much more likely that it would either fly away at another trajectory or circle back several times before eventually hitting us. In order for it to become another Earth satellite, it would have to miss us at a very precise angle and speed in order to get trapped in a stable orbit around us.