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Comment by GalenErso | Hacker News Reader

I have long said that if I was given the chance to go back in time just once, and come back, I would return 66 million years ago to witness the meteor impact from the safety of a space shuttle.

And now I have an idea for Elon Musk: interplanetary disaster tourism. Purposefully crash asteroids on remote areas of Mars and charge for front row seats. This would have the added benefit of bringing valuable metal ores to be harvested close to the demand source.

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LEO may not even be safe, would it? Afaik a large part of the damage was the heating of the atmosphere from enormous amounts of secondary impacts due to the debris - many of these small rocks probably flung up into LEO, though it would be interesting to know how risky a stay in LEO would be during such an impact.

If you want a SciFi story touching many such topics I highly recommend "Seveneves" by Neal Stephenson.

Parameters for 300 km range (200 km STS altitude + downrange)

https://impact.ese.ic.ac.uk/ImpactEarth/cgi-bin/crater.cgi?d...

    Thermal Radiation:

    Time for maximum radiation: 11.5 seconds after impact

    Visible fireball radius: 223 km ( = 138 miles ) 
    The fireball appears 169 times larger than the sun
    Thermal Exposure: 7.72 x 10^9 Joules/m^2
    Duration of Irradiation: 49.7 minutes
    Radiant flux (relative to the sun): 2590

(The physics aren't the same, but just for the sake of comparison: Chicxulub's 4e8 megatons-TNT of energy, at 300 km, is 1/r^2 equivalent to a 4 megaton nuke, at 30 meters).

>(The physics aren't the same, but just for the sake of comparison: Chicxulub's 4e8 megatons-TNT of energy, at 300 km, is 1/r^2 equivalent to a 4 megaton nuke, at 30 meters).

Altitude 300mi is not the same as linear distance to blast 300mi

At 300mi up you could be over a different continent and get a good view and you would probably want to be so that you get a better view from the side.

It would help that Mars has a less dense atmosphere than earth (about 1%), so there’s less stuff to heat. On the other hand ejected material would face less resistance from the atmosphere and thus reach larger heights (even ignoring Mars’ lower gravity)

I think with simulation work like the OP, and Hollywood CGI, we could produce a better virtual view of the event than you could get from any safe distance.

There is indeed a VR simulation available for the asteroid impact.

> I would return 66 million years ago to witness the meteor impact from the safety of a space shuttle.

Don't know how safe you would be. If I remember correctly, there's a theory saying that impact ejecta even shot out into space.

Crazy.

These would make amazing VR experiences

Hummmm VR tourism on Mars, that reminds me of something... But it might not be a great idea if the VR is too realistic /s

My most memorable VR experiences were a jellyfish/turtle scene and a closeup of a whale, among several games and apps I tried with my headset some years ago.

Games were fun enough, some good, some not. The visual, non-interactive experience gave me a true sense of awe, as if I were transposed into another reality briefly. Not a big fan of the whole "meta" idea, but executed and refined properly, we'll be in the matrix soon enough. Glad I won't be participating :)

"The Blue" was indeed amazing.

Back then, I showed it to visitors at work (besides real projects) and it never failed to impress.

To terraform mars we'd need 3500 nukes per day for 7 weeks. That would be quite a show!

but... why..?!

Always nice to have a second habitable planet.

Nuking it wouldn't make it any more habitable.

At best you'd make the surface slightly warmer and maybe melt some leftover CO2 on the poles.

To actually terraform it to anything resembling even an Earth desert, you'd need incomprehensible amounts of energy.

I don't expect it to work either. But there is probably enough water. Maybe not other stuff.

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