Darkness is Coming

"Okay." Qi Xinwu nodded in response, and then explained to others, "The second video in the hard drive is the video taken by the near-moon space station when the asteroid hit the earth. In this video, we can see from a macro perspective. See what happens when the asteroid with a diameter of 500 kilometers hits the earth. I will play it at 32 times the speed, please wear your headphones, and there will be subtitles at the bottom of the screen to explain.”

   Yang Xiaoqian and Yu Qian looked at each other, looked at the projection screen seriously and seriously, and inadvertently adjusted their sitting posture to be more correct.

The screen first showed a huge sphere hanging in the vast space, but the background was not as dark and lonely as imagined. Instead, it was filled with a little bit of starlight. In addition to the companions in the solar system, there were also a few colorful lights in the distant place that ripped apart the darkness. It is a nebula thousands of light-years away, perhaps there, there, or there have been various and colorful creatures and civilizations.

   The additional LED bar screen at the bottom of the screen shows the subtitle: Earth.

It turns out that this is the earth, and it is not as beautiful as people imagined and described in various works. The sea that should be blue is gray like rotting seaweed, and the land is dark red and dark brown, but it is impossible to see from the picture. The shape of Mother Earth, but the subtitles below the projection screen and the electronic audio commentary coming from the headphones give more information.

Yang Xiaoqian did not know until now that the shape of the earth is not a regular sphere, and the astronomical telescope photos of the images of the earth, the solar system, nebulae and other celestial bodies that he has seen before are actually photoshopped - of course, it is a reasonable image weight that strictly abides by the regulations. The images of celestial bodies, which are mostly composed of invisible light, will become monotonous and tasteless, so that more people can enjoy them.

On the right side of the sphere representing the earth, there is a small gray-red sphere that is approaching the earth, that is, the extinct asteroid that is about to destroy a civilization. Next to it, it was like a jujube stone thrown at a basketball.

   But theoretically, as long as this solid jujube core is fast enough, it can tear a basketball apart.

   "Due to the different textures of asteroids, the mass of an asteroid with a diameter of 500 kilometers should be between 13 and 520,000 megatons. Attached: the unit of 'mega' is one trillion."

  Although the ending was already known, the audience couldn't help but gasp after seeing the astronomical figures displayed on the subtitles, and felt worried about the fate of another earth.

"When the extinct asteroid is 200,000 to 300,000 kilometers away from the earth, due to the existence of universal gravitation, it will absorb a large amount of space dust and interfere with the orbits of the surrounding celestial bodies. Both the earth and the moon will be affected, not only the orbits. There will be small changes, and the rotation and revolution speed will also change. Due to the complex combination of gravitational forces, the Earth will experience tidal disturbances and other phenomena that last for several hours."

  Yang Xiaoqian listened carefully to the electronic sound coming from the earphones, without falling out of a word. Judging from the distance between the earth and the asteroid in the picture, it is obvious that the stage has passed. The asteroid that is constantly approaching is affected by the earth's gravitational force, and it rushes to the earth like a moth to the fire, and there is no change of flight orbit. possible.

  When the extinct asteroid is less than 100,000 kilometers away from the earth, in the hemisphere facing the asteroid, people can see a shadow slowly moving past, obscuring the sky and the sun.

When the world-destroying asteroid was 10,000 kilometers away from the earth, a tsunami began to appear on the side it was facing. The wave height ranged from a few meters to tens of meters. The inland cities were still intact, while the coastal cities were washed away by waves as high as mountains. When it was empty, when a mountain of sea water fell, almost no people or buildings were spared.

The asteroid continues to accelerate and fall toward the Pacific Ocean. At this time, it is at the boundary between the atmosphere and space more than 100 kilometers away from the earth, and has not yet made contact with the earth. The super storm close to the speed of sound looks like an electric fan magnified countless times, twisting the center of the storm within a thousand kilometers radius into powder, and the poor creatures in it, including humans, beasts, birds and plants, All turned into fly ash under the shock wave and annihilated in an instant.

   Then, the asteroid entered the atmosphere, causing the atmosphere to rapidly change from low pressure to high pressure, and the storm suddenly reversed, spreading like ripples on the water surface, and this time, its speed will exceed the speed of sound and once again ravage the area that the low-pressure hurricane has swept away.

Finally, the asteroid collided with the earth. In the huge area where the contact surface expanded hundreds of times outward, the sea water evaporated, the material vaporized, the air was heated to a plasma state of more than 6,000 degrees Celsius, and the crustal lithosphere quickly dissolved and collapsed. Ten thousand The meter-thick crust and fragments of the asteroid will fly directly off the surface and fly into space under the impact, forming the most splendid fireworks. The mass of this firework is at least 100 million tons.

The shock wave exceeding 3,000 degrees Celsius at the outermost end will propagate at a hypersonic speed close to or even exceeding the flight speed of the asteroid, and the shock wave will penetrate the mantle and reach the core of the earth. Small wounds on the surface of the earth will rapidly expand and expand, turning from a point into a circle, and then turning into a curved arc with the shape of the earth, eventually covering the entire surface of the earth.

In the picture, the crustal material thrown into space first formed a burning black and red high wall above the arc surface. The crustal material began to fall under the grasp of the earth's gravity, and the debris that was ejected into the low orbit of the earth fell straight to the surface after returning to the earth, turning into a mighty meteorite rain covering the hemisphere. The thousands of volcanoes that came out together completely destroyed the surface of the earth in an hour, turning it into a rippling sea of ​​lava fire.

The shock wave leads the magma heat wave to rush forward, vaporizing the liquid water in the earth's oceans and crust, and burning everything it touches into fly ash. After 24 hours, only a few human remains can be preserved. , and there is no one square meter of land on the earth's surface that can live, but the inhabitants of the earth do not need to worry about displacement, because all life will evaporate in this extremely hot storm.

By the forty-eighth hour, the color of the earth's surface has changed from gray-blue to black and red, and golden threads are lit up in some areas, outlining the shape of each continent, and the Pacific Ocean where the impact surface is still showing the sun-like golden yellow. , from a distance, it looks like a huge burning briquettes.