North Pacific Near-Catastrophic Impact

Disaster / Destruction

On the morning of August 20th, 2042, a forty-meter asteroid blasted a hole in the Pacific Ocean about five hundred miles southwest of California with about three megatons of explosive energy. While the resulting tsunami damage around the Pacific was moderately destructive, it was quickly determined that this was actually a lucky escape: with just the smallest shift in trajectory, the impact could have completely wiped out the city of Los Angeles. This close call was later referred to colloquially as "God's Warning Shot," as it significantly raised public awareness of humankind's cosmic fragility.

The North Pacific Near-Catastrophic Impact was a large Earth meteoroid strike that occurred at 15:23 UTC on August 20, 2042 at roughly 32°N, 130°W (some 500 miles or so off the coast of southern California). Although human civilization had some asteroid detection infrastructure in place already, the final approach of the impactor was from the sunward direction, making it incredibly difficult to detect. The object mostly survived atmospheric entry and slammed into the sea with about three megatons of explosive energy, causing significant tsunamis in much of the Pacific region. Based on data obtained during and after the event, the impactor was estimated to have been a stony-metal asteroid around 40 to 50 meters in diameter, hurtling through the atmosphere at around 30 kilometers per second —much faster than most recorded bolides. The aftermath, while somewhat destructive, was mild compared to the damage it could have caused if its trajectory had been shifted just a few hundred miles northeast. The impact had a marked effect on investment into space infrastructure; placing self-sustaining populations of humankind on other worlds in the solar system was seen as an "insurance policy" by many.