What would have happened to the Earth if Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 had hit Earth instead of Jupiter?

Question

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shoemaker-Levy

Answer 1

Yeah like SVAL said, we'd be dead. Seems like a rather reasonable answer....

Answer 2

If the comet stayed together or if it hit us in pieces like it did Jupiter? Either way, we'd all be dead. The largest piece to hit Jupiter did so with an estimated 6 000 000 megatons of TNT, and with one megaton of TNT equaling 4.184x10^15 Joules of energy, this is equivalent to an impact of 2.5104x10^22 Joules of energy. To put that into perspective, the asteroid that killed off the dinosaurs had an estimated 4.0x10^23 Joules of energy, or about 95 600 000 000 megatons of TNT. The one that killed the dinosaurs was about 16 times more powerful than the biggest piece of SL9. If all the pieces hit Earth, the spreading out of the impacts would have probably killed off most of all life on Earth.

Answer 3

I agree 100% with SVAL. It  would be really bad, but maybe not quite bad enough to completely wipe out humanity.

Answer 4

First the comet would strike the earth, it depends on how big the comet is for the amount of damage it would cause but this is what would probably happen. First the comet would strike and everything  would start on fire. The fire will spread and the whole earth will be on fire. The only way to survive this would to be underground. When the fire stops, all the smoke will go into the atmosphere and block out the sun totally. Then earth will be in night for a long time. And the earth will also go into an ice age because not enough heat from the sun would make it through the smoke. And because of the night all the plants would die except for fungus and mushrooms because they don't need sun light to survive, just dead stuff. And all of this would probably last about 4 years.

Answer 5

how big was the comet? we'd probably be in nuclear winter if it was big enough.

Answer 6

You wouldn't be asking this question.  

Answer 7

We would all be dead!