it will kill almost everything on Earth with the impact. It’ll be like thirty billion Hiroshimas in one go as all that energy is released, all those thousands if not hundreds of thousands of years spent hurtling through space on the longest joyride ever would end abruptly as the kinetic energy met our little planet. It’ll smash through our atmosphere blasting a huge hole, it’ll superheat with the friction of the air resisting it, and it will go boom into the surface leaving a crater close to six hundred miles wide.
The one thing the other geeks couldn’t agree on is where the thing will hit. Now that has something to do with not being able to predict the gravitational pull of the sun in a decade, but either way, we still needed to evacuate the building.
One guy kept going on and on about Yellowstone, about how if it hits that it’ll erase the entire US, but he was kind of on his own. They did concede that active volcanoes would go off when the thing impacts, but the general feel was that it couldn’t get much worse than it already was; it was like discussing degrees of total destruction, and nobody really took it seriously. Where everyone did agree though, is what happened after an impact either in an ocean or near to any coastal region. Anything not flattened by the blast would get hit by the waves. Tsunamis would reach three or four hundred miles inland and any landfall at sea level would disappear. All the debris and dust and other shit from the impact would make a cloud big enough to cover the earth and block out the sun; we’re talking somewhere in the region of two hundred billion tons of debris. No sun means no photosynthesis, which means no plants, which means no animals, which means no higher life forms.
That’s what will kill anything that doesn’t go out like a light on impact.
The cloud covering the earth will be full of things like iridium and mercury, all good stuff to breathe in, and the planet would find itself in a nuclear winter which would last twenty or thirty years, or more, until the cloud dissipated. During that winter, the surface temperature would freeze and the planet would go into an ice age.
Years later, when the ash and debris settle out of the sky, and the sunlight gets back in, that’s when things get real uncomfortable; the extreme cold gets replaced with extreme heat as all the carbon still pumped into the atmosphere acts like a glasshouse and the surface temperature rockets to the other end of the thermometer. That heatwave bakes the earth for years until it finally settles down. So basically, it makes the earth either too exploding, too cold, or too hot for life to survive, then it returns to a state of balance. Just like the dinosaurs sixty-five million years ago, only bigger and badder.
And they sure as hell weren’t going to find my blood in a mosquito preserved in amber.
Those facts didn’t make life any easier to accept, but they simplified the problem. The solution, however, was far from simple, as I explained to the others as we walked to lab K in the Texas facility. I started with the basics of how Annie worked. She was fundamentally an interface system with connectivity through every means available to us: cellular, Wi-Fi, radio, etcetera. There was a basic central processing program which I’d spent years developing, and that basic program was now at a stage where it could be told to do virtually anything. That basic program was already running the drone delivery system and the manufacturing and packaging plants, and the only human intervention was at the quality control stage.
I explained how she worked to the others, and where Eades was keen, Kendall looked almost bored. Annie basically worked like a flowchart, and the idea was one that I got years ago in high school when I saw one of those stupid pictures. It went something like: Is it broken? With a yes or no option flowing down. The ‘No’ option told you to leave it alone, whereas the ‘Yes’ option told you to pretend you didn’t see it. While the joke was a poor one, the concept had gotten me thinking.
Could a computer program follow a flowchart? Of course it could, you only need to input the options and the parameters for choosing each one. It was the closest approximation to human