Is this sudden global cooling scenario plausible?
In the year 2071 the Dysnomia incident happened. The Dysnomia (a mining ship) suffered a catastrophic failure and violently exploded sending its payload, an aged comet, hurtling towards earth. The comet proceeded to rip apart in the atmosphere distributing a massive amount of dust in the stratosphere leading too catastrophic global cooling. This global cooling forces a large portion of the human race to move into arcologies and urban areas, mostly abandoning the country side.
But is this series of events even plausible? That's what I'm stuck on is how to physically have these series of events unfold without:
- a massive impact (smaller ones are acceptable)
- blocking out the visibility of the sun (dimming is fine)
- Not too severe cooling that GMOs couldn't be bred within a few years to adapt to the new climate (most agriculture would move to vertical greenhouses however)
This post was sourced from https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/131198. It is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.
1 answer
Been there, done that!
This apparently happened already 1,500 years ago. Scientists at Cardiff University, UK, believe they have discovered the cause of crop failures and summer frosts some 1,500 years ago "“ a comet colliding with Earth.
So the only part that is tricky, other than fine-tuning the size of the comet to come up with just the right amount of sun-dimming dust, is to figure out how a ship would capture a comet. Based on other things I've read, I think capturing an asteroid or two would be a lot easier than a comet. Comets have very large orbits, so they are moving pretty quickly when they get near Earth. Asteroids have more "typical" orbits. There have even been serious real-world proposals to capture & mine small asteroids using near-future technology, though to capture one that would be large enough to cause a nuclear winter would require some significant engineering advances.
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