This NASA Space Simulator Lets You Drop Asteroids On People You Don’t Like

So this is fun. The Killer Asteroids simulator, put together by the Space Science Institute in Colorado alongside NASA and the National Science Foundation, lets you pick a place — right down to the street address — carefully select an asteroid or comet of a size of your choosing, and send it hurtling down to Earth with all the callous glee of an Old Testament god. It even measures how much damage you do — the impact crater, the building destruction, the range at which people will just spontaneously catch on fire. All the important stuff.

You have to install a Google Earth plugin, but it’s worth it to gain mastery over fiery balls of intergalactic death.

I’m sure this will inspire thousands of children to ponder the wonder of science and our place in the universe, but what it’s really fun for is entering people’s addresses in and seeing just how bad you can fuck ’em up with a giant frozen rock from space. By way of example, here’s what it looks like when you drop a medium-sized asteroid (about three times the size of a football field) travelling at twenty kilometres a second on the Junkee offices in Surry Hills.

If you are plotting to kill me from space, look on this map and consider: is not your survival bound up with mine? What price will you pay to see me dead? Would you see the world burn? You have avoided these questions until now, but you can avoid them no more. I will make you gaze into the furnace.

Rather than doing that, you could instead send “an icy mud ball six miles across” down upon the KIIS FM studio, which is located at 3 Byfield Street, North Ryde. That would look like this:

As you can see from the data, dropping such a celestial body on Kyle and Jackie O would obliterate the city of Sydney entirely, demolish every structure in the state of New South Wales, cause first-degree burns as far as Adelaide and Hobart, and quite possibly extinguish life itself. On the other hand, you would no longer have to listen to Kyle and Jackie O. There are pros and there are cons to weigh up, is what I’m saying.

Science is fun. Go play with it here.