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Documentaries & Arts
End Day: Comet Attack
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Unidentified explosions in the Middle East appear to suggest the onset of hostilities. But, as scientists arrive on site, they realise that this was the mysterious strike of a meteor shower. Fragments of an asteroid are falling towards the planet. A vast cloud of dark rock, the smallest the size of a large car, the largest like a small mountain, are heading towards us at 50,000kph... and the Earth is spinning Germany right into their flight path.
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Fact!
Impacts from space happen continuously but most small rocks burn up in the Earth’s atmosphere. Occasionally, however, larger meteors land and some cause destruction.
In 1930, a 50 tonne alien body made an 8.5m crater in Estonia. In 1908, a rock exploded in the atmosphere over Siberia and reindeer herders, 30km from the blast, were thrown off their feet.
Scientists believe that the greatest cataclysmic events in Earth’s history have been caused by impacts from space. 65 million years ago, more than half of all life on the planet was wiped out by a rock that caused the huge Chiexlub crater off the east coast of Mexico. It was the most recent of five great extinction events in the history of life on Earth.
We could be next.
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Fiction?
It's End Day and scientists, as they have done on countless other days, are scanning space in search of any objects destined to cross the Earth’s orbit. They've already recorded over 100 million rocks out there.
But even as they pin their hope on identifying threats in time to perhaps divert them, a terrifying prospect lurks... the mountain-sized remains of a shattered comet. The mass is approaching with the sun behind it, in an area of the sky that can't be observed due to the blinding light.
By the time it emerges from the background glare, it's right on our doorstep.
The UN holds emergency talks, but Germany, the UK and the United States go it alone in an attempt to redirect the meteor with the launch of a nuclear missile. However, this plan backfires when the meteor breaks into hundreds of pieces. They rain down on Berlin like giant cluster bombs.
The biggest fragment smashes into the suburbs. The impact annihilates the whole city. The atmosphere around the impact ignites and the shockwave tears across northern Europe.
Through dense boiling clouds of dust and gas, what little remains of the Brandenburg Gate can just be glimpsed.
But there's no-one left to see it.
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End Day
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