dont look up would be fairly accurate except the billionaires actually designing and completing a spaceship wouod not happen

Doomsday cults, mass death, and just an absolutely wild amount of grifting. Meteor insurance, meteor bunkers, meteor resistance pills, a piece of meteorite you keep in your body to synchronize your entheic pattern with the asteroid.

We’d train a team of dudes who drill for oil led by Bruxe Willis to be astronauts

I like how in The Road the description of the apocalyptic event is pretty clearly an asteroid but no-one knows what the fuck happened (presumably the govt didn’t bother to tell them an asteroid was incoming). There are a bunch of movies about incoming asteroids too - deep impact, one by Abel Ferrara I cant remember the name of, Lars von triers Melancholia, Don’t look up. In Ferrara’s movie people just take drugs and have sex which I think is probably what id be aiming to do too

Quarrel over which investment fund gets to claim ownership over the minerals in the rock

Demand for raw milk would sky rocket

isn’t there’s a documentary about this called Don’t Look Up

I haven’t seen it

Russia, China, and other nations immediately collaborate to construct a rocket (or series of rockets) to try and redirect the asteroid, using parts from other space missions that are now irrelevant in the face of the threat. The Western world starts up the propaganda mills about how this rocket is actually intended for space combat against Western satellites, with fake whistleblowers from the program to “confirm” this. They go about making an alternative rocket, designed with AI.

After four months, the Western-made rocket is on its third round of redesigns and a trillion-dollar grifting industry has begun in which you can reserve a digital spot on the rocket. Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies are at all-time highs. A full 65% of the Western population doesn’t believe in the asteroid, citing the fake news over the coronavirus pandemic, which only killed a few million people and led to the indirect deaths of millions more and thus nobody should have shut down for it, and how they no longer trust scientists to do the right thing. The American government is actively trying to sabotage the Eastern-made rocket and has admitted to this at least five times on national television as they regard it as such a massive risk to their imperial dominance.

The Chinese-made rocket flies off a couple weeks before the deadline and succeeds, knocking the asteroid off course with a projected impact now delayed by a couple hundred years. By this point, a solid 75% of the Western population believes the asteroid never existed and was a conspiracy to spread fear and panic across the world for some dastardly reason. The Western state media expresses surprise that the Chinese rocket could even fly because they haven’t adapted their view of China since 2004. They start off a war with Taiwan to try and capitalize off a projected Chinese weakness and to try and distract from the major W of saving all life on Earth. Taiwan is completely encircled within a week and the American fleet and airforce is revealed to be a complete paper tiger, such as they currently are in Yemen. America blows up Taiwan’s chipmaking fabricators and two months later, China reveals that the rapid technological advances that they made during the rocket-building campaign means they don’t even need those factories anymore and replacements will be there in a year’s time.

Due to the massive economic hit, severe treat withdrawals and the asteroid aftermath, Western society has melted down into utter chaos. The petit-bourgeois are starting up actual cults and are lynching minorities again. The working class is trying to keep everything going despite all unions and strike activity being outlawed as the new state narrative is that unions were invented by evil communists in 2020 to weaken America. 80 hour work days are seen as not only normal, but slacking. Rates of childbirth are at absolute record lows as nobody can support families anymore. The capitalists at the top are still trying to maintain the pre-Taiwan levels of profit and financialization is in full overdrive. Industrial intiatives are proposed by President Rittenhouse, who we had to elect to keep Trump out of office. There are ongoing genocides of minority refugee populations accused of being sent by China and Russia and Iran to destabilize our glorious civilizations throughout America and Europe and the death tolls are in the millions, but Trump might have tweeted during them and so he is clearly the greater evil here. The concentration camps are the only successful industries. There are cryptocurrencies and funko-pops based on how many people of a certain minority are murdered that week and those interned still have to pay rent for their rooms at the concentration camps.

Eventually, the lack of non-grifter industrial activity means that when the electrical grid breaks down, there are no transformers nor cables to replace them. Untold horrors occur throughout the vast swathes of America that remain disconnected from power. China has, by this point, already transitioned to a socialist society and is drawing up plans far in advance to deal with the asteroid when it returns. Russia briefly turned fascist for a few years after Putin was killed by Prigozhin’s son out of revenge but foreign pressure resulted in the collapse of the dictatorship and a slow, cautious march back towards socialism is enacted by the replacement party. Most of the comprador regimes in the Middle East fell, resulting in an Islamic-socialist initiative which includes a now freed Palestine. South Korea was overthrown by a revolution and there are talks about how to once again join them and the DPRK together. Various countries in Africa were frantically and chaotically invaded by Western powers to try and guarantee access to cash crops and minerals to keep some semblance of treat supply going, but the damage is being repaired. Europe is back to fighting each other in massive wars over neo-fiefdoms and nobody else in the world really gives a shit about them so long as they keep to themselves; caucasians are a primitive and warlike race, after all.

half the population would gaslight themselves into believing it’s fake

25% would convince themselves it’s a non issue because it would crash into the side of the earth that they’re not on

My answer is whatever happened in the movie Don’t Look Up

Everybody would fuck around except China who builds an ultra nuke and fragments or pushes it enough to make it not destroy all life

They would hire a fuck ton of scientists all over the world while most everybody else does jack shit, and others not really having the industrial capacity and organization to actually focus on fixing this issue. A handful of countries would assist China.

But if its a small planetoid we’d be so fucked. It could do so many things like even making the moon collapse into earth, making the entire surface molten, cause the moon to go rogue and disrupt the orbits of other planets, etc. I think China would try to send a ton of people into mars or something or build some sort of asteroid capture colony with all their efforts in that case, sending up enough people to keep humanity moving. Those are possible with proper planning. West would send a bunch of rich useless old people into space and they’d all die. Vast majority of people die but most people actually do work for a common goal in keeping humanity going and there is some sort of digital project that catalogues everyone’s ideas and thoughts and all of our knowledge to send into space before death. With proper centralization and urgency a lot of people can become extremely focused and productive. A lot of governments might see spontaneous, nearly unanimous revolutions if they are deemed useless for continuing humanity’s future. There would be a great deal of monitoring and data being sent into space to describe the impact and its effects on earth as it happens, some observation posts would go on for some time in bunkers until they too die.

Who gets sent into space is going to be largely eugenicist out of necessity. However, a lot of genetic material would be collected from the people left behind and launched into space in order to ensure more genetic diversity going forward. There would be massive psychological problems, survivorship trauma, trauma relating to losing your whole family, for most people that survive. So people that are less likely to be affected by this might be selected for the program. Most of the people would likely be fairly young yet have the most experience for their age group in hard sciences. A handful of older people with significant scientific experience and good health might also be selected. Most people sent into space would likely be women. The proportion of how many people are women would be highly dependent on how many people are actually sent into space. If there aren’t many people being sent into space, its very likely we’d send only women and a ton of sperm from all around the globe for genetic diversity purposes. Women would also only be allowed to birth other AFABs until the population is high enough.

Depends if it was an election year or not.

I can’t imagine it looking too different from climate denial, covid denial, or imperial decline denial. People will demand evidence of the forest and complain that all your samples are tainted with trees.

Maybe the coping would be more intense with the clear six-month deadline, but that’s it I would think

China and Russia would coordinate nuke salvos after having nerds calculate how to break it up to minimize loss of life/habitability. Depending on various factors other powers would collaborate.

The shotgun effect is hard to avoid, but with a ton of smart of people working on it I bet they could time the blasts to redirect the shrapnel to at least enough of a degree some parts of the planet survive. Triage might be needed.

A “fun” sideshow would be the religious right reacting to this. Evangelicals would swarm the holy land and possibly ignite violence.

I feel like doctor strangelove probably had it about right. Tbh though, I feel like we ought to have enough nukes to do something. I can perfectly picture us not willing to use our nukes to protect the world though, assuming they even work anymore.