A new website that simulates the impact of an asteroid in your city.
Just choose the city and click on “launch”: it is possible to view all types of adverse effects that could occur on the chosen point and surrounding areas.
Futurism reports the debut of Asteroid Launcher, a website that simulates some of the effects of various types of asteroids crashing into Earth. All users have to do is set the material, size, speed, and angle of impact, select a location and launch.
Users can see the radius of the fireball, the decibels of the booming sound, the width of the crater, the magnitude of the earthquake and other elements in a series of interactive graphs that complement a panel that explains the details. To find out how many people could die, lose their homes, or suffer burns, hearing loss, or wind damage, you can look at a series of categories that calculate these effects based on each location’s current population .
This site was designed by Neal Agarwal, whose anthology of coding projects is full of data and black humor. The Asteroid Launcher is his latest creation and the demonstration video, featured on his Twitter account, examines the impact of a small asteroid on Philadelphia and, apparently, much of the surrounding area.
However, it is also true that most of the asteroids that hit the Earth every day are small in size. These asteroids are also factored into the website’s analysis, which shows that a very large asteroid is needed to cause catastrophic damage to the planet and its populations. Most of the time the smallest and lightest asteroids fail to clear the atmosphere. As disconcerting as it may be to know that these asteroids exist, the website’s analytics panel goes a long way in understanding how common they are and how little damage they cause.
In short, a learning tool, a disaster predictor and a strangely fun game, all in one.
- FUN WEBSITE LETS YOU SIMULATE AN ASTEROID IMPACT IN YOUR HOMETOWN IT’S SHOCKINGLY DETAILED. (futurism.com)