A day that was supposed to be Christmas, after experiencing a year of disasters, people desperately hoped this year would pass quickly, and the disasters would subside.
After all, this year has been a painful one for all of humanity.
Pestilence, famine, war, death—the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse as recorded in the Bible wreaked havoc all over the world. Humanity clearly seems so fragile in the face of natural disasters.
However, people have not given up hope. Even in the face of calamity, we still strive to fight against these disasters, demonstrating the most precious golden spirit of humanity—filled with hope, never bowing to disaster.
Yet, as if God played a massive joke on humanity, on this day, astronomers discovered a giant meteor over ten kilometers in diameter, and after calculations, they confirmed that the meteor's orbit would intersect with the orbit of the Blue Planet and would collide within a few months.
Upon receiving this news, the governments of various countries immediately blocked the information. To avoid causing social panic, almost all astronomers were put under a gag order.
But this kind of news is hard to block.
After all, the meteor hangs in the sky, and as it gets closer to the Blue Planet, astronomy enthusiasts worldwide can spot the increasingly bright and large comet through their telescopes in the night sky.
Moreover, the space missions and various countermeasures that the governments launched subsequently were hard to miss in this internet-savvy era.
These traces naturally spread online, sparking heated discussions. Simultaneously, some foresighted individuals, smelling the clues, also began hoarding supplies.
Too many disasters have occurred this year. Many people have already gained experience.
Food, medicine, protective gear, communication devices… these emergency materials were quickly bought out by everyone.
Fortunately, with so many disasters this year, companies producing these emergency supplies have increased production, especially emergency food that can last 20, even 40 years without spoiling, which has become the hottest commodity.
Throughout the year, despite emergency food always being one of the most popular disaster supplies—second only to protective gear—
Chen Xin believes that digging a shelter for oneself is more important than buying up these supplies.
Chen Xin is an online writer, earning a living by writing on various novel websites. As a writer, the most crucial aspects are imagination and logical thinking. After all, a novel is essentially a story with a logically coherent premise that attracts people.
This also leads to Chen Xin thinking about more complex matters than others in the face of potential disasters.
How should humanity avoid disaster when a meteor strikes the Blue Planet?
This was the first question that came to Chen Xin's mind.
Fortunately, as an online writer, Chen Xin often has many imaginative thoughts. He has the habit of recording these and trying to contemplate and improve them. The scenario of a meteor striking the Blue Planet was precisely within Chen Xin's scope of imagination.
While stockpiling supplies, Chen Xin also searched online for possible information and did not forget to dig out the records of his earlier thoughts from his folder.
The impact of a giant meteor on the Blue Planet would first bring a violent collision.
Even with the current size of this meteor, even if countries have space interception plans, the chances of success are not high. The greatest possibility is that the meteor would break into several smaller fragments due to human interception efforts or skim past the Blue Planet or collide with it.
However, this does not mean the level of disaster will diminish. Nor should one assume that smaller meteors are less dangerous because "small" is relative to the meteor's original diameter of dozens of kilometers.
Even if it shatters into meteor fragments several kilometers in size, an impact on the Blue Planet can still bring catastrophic disasters.
A meteor impact with a diameter greater than five kilometers would render everything within at least a one-thousand-kilometer radius from the impact site lifeless.
The impacting meteor would launch the material near the impact site into space, while the heat generated from atmospheric friction and energy released from the impact would create a wall of fire at least several kilometers high, with temperatures exceeding several thousand degrees Celsius, sweeping across at least a fifteen-hundred-kilometer radius.
Within this range, even hiding in an underground shelter poses a great probability of being cooked alive by this heat, much like a stewed chicken in Guangdong Meizhou, even if your shelter is deep enough—the subsequent earthquake, at least magnitude eleven, would be enough to bury you alive.
If you're lucky, and humanity survives in millions of years, your fossil might still be excavated.
If you'd like to leave some mark for humanity, you could stick up your middle finger, and future humans will undoubtedly be moved by your sense of optimism.
The impact of the meteor will send shockwaves traveling around the globe at several times the speed of sound, so no matter where you are on the Blue Planet, you'll hear the explosive sound from the meteor's impact.
If you're on the opposite hemisphere of the impact site when the meteor hits, you're temporarily safe, and the sound from the shockwave will still remind you to take shelter.
But all this is merely the beginning; the disaster is just starting.
In the following days, the firestorm composed of smog and debris will cover the entire Blue Planet, raising global temperatures from the poles to the Equator to between 70 and 200 degrees, turning the surface of the Blue Planet into a massive oven.
The surface will become uninhabitable for humans, and all vegetation will be scorched and ignited by this heat. Toxic gases produced by the global fires will spread throughout the atmosphere, killing the vast majority of surface life.
And all this is still just the prelude and overture to disaster, merely an appetizer before the main course.
Due to rising atmospheric temperatures, sea levels will rise rapidly, combined with the kinetic energy impact released by the meteor, producing tsunamis over a thousand meters high, impacting almost all coastal cities.
The dust cloud raised by the impact and toxic gases produced by global fires will form a smog that will block sunlight, covering the Blue Planet for decades or even centuries, plunging the Blue Planet into a long, dark night.
Moreover, material hurled into space and smaller meteor fragments carried by the meteor itself will continue to impact the Blue Planet.
In the hemisphere of the impact site, this would be like carpet bombing, and continuous meteor impacts would leave very few survivors.
Even those who managed to hide in underground shelters would find survival impossible amidst such frequent meteor bombardment, with impacts ranging from a few meters to hundreds of meters daily.
As for the hemisphere opposite the impact site, luck might be a little better, but meteors could still fall randomly, and you could virtually expect to see meteors demolish buildings with a certain probability.
But even this isn't the end, as the entire globe would be covered by a thick dust cloud and toxic gases, forming a smog that would lead to rapid cooling over the next few months.
If high-latitude cities haven't been destroyed in the collision, temperatures could drop to minus 70 degrees, while the Equatorial Region might fare a bit better, with temperatures hovering around minus twenty or thirty degrees.
Because this seemingly endless long night weathers the Earth for decades or centuries, the extreme cold will last for an entire century, making the setting of the Ice Age scenario a reality in this prolonged, freezing long night.