Most people don’t know the real reason the Flintstones cartoon went off the air.
An asteroid as large as 9 miles in diameter hit the earth near what is now the Yucatan Peninsula.
It hit the earth at a speed of 12 miles per second, it created a 90-mile-wide crater, it fostered an explosion a billion times more intense than the atomic bombs we dropped on Japan, it lit wildfires that swept for thousands of miles, and it created 300-foot-high tsunamis that swept far inland.
As most readers know, the Flintstones lived in what is now called Arizona – particularly if they remember their visit to the Grand Canyon, which was only a small stream and a six-inch-deep trench at the time. So, the Flintstones missed the tsunamis, but they did not escape the devastation.
First of all, most of Dino’s relatives were wiped out, and more disconcerting was the massive dark cloud that covered the earth for years, plunging temperatures as much as 36 degrees!
The Flintstones tried to sell their house so they could move to a better climate, but they had no buyers given that everyone else was dead – reminding us all that giant asteroids hitting the earth can easily drive real estate values to zero.
I share this story, which took place 66 million years ago, because NASA recently increased the odds of an asteroid hitting the earth – so I think we should all prepare.
This post on X by Collin Rugg says the odds are 1 in 32 that a large asteroid will hit the Earth by 2032. The asteroid in question is 177 feet in diameter – magnitudes smaller than the Flintstones’, but still large enough to wipe out an entire city.
What is kind of scary is the fact that giant asteroids like the Flintstones’ have hit the Earth many times including South Africa (2 billion years ago), Canada twice (1.8 billion years ago and 200 million years ago), and Russia (35 million years ago).
What is more frightening though are the major asteroid explosions that have taken place in Russia over the last 100+ years.
In 1908, an asteroid ranging in size from 200 to 600 feet exploded 3 to 6 miles above the ground in remote Siberia, releasing energy equivalent to 10 to 15 megatons of TNT (the Hiroshima bomb was only 0.015 megatons). It flattened 80 million trees – over 800 square miles. If it had actually hit the earth, the devastation would have been far worse.
In 2013, a 60-foot asteroid exploded 19 miles above a Russian city, releasing 500 kilotons of energy (30 times Hiroshima’s bomb yield). The explosion, despite its elevation, still injured 1,500 people and damaged 7,200 buildings!
And in 1947, there was another 60-foot asteroid explosion above Russia, but it was in a remote area, so there were no injuries. But there were still multiple craters (from the breakup of the asteroid) and there was a huge fireball – which scared the bejeebers out of the Russians who were still a bit jittery over that WWII thing.
So, how will an asteroid collision impact real estate and mortgages?
Who cares… I just wanted to write about asteroid collisions because it is so interesting. 😊
But yes, a major collision resulting in mass devastation would bring rates down several percent much like we saw during COVID – when every investor and trader rushed to the safety of bonds. Real estate in unaffected areas might respond well to the lower rates too, assuming it’s not overcome by 300-foot tsunamis.
