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Age of Ultron
May. 7th, 2015 07:48 amI thought Age of Ultron was boring. Noelle Stevenson had this and this to say, and I more or less agree with her. I really wanted this movie to be good, but it peaked at the party scene with Thor's hammer. After that, it was all Too Many Cooks.
I was most interested in the concept of the floating city used as a doomsday device.
According to Wikipedia, altitude sickness starts becoming a problem at 2,500 meters. Although the city that's lifted into the air is a city in the fictional European nation of Sokovia, the location that was actually filmed was Fort Bard, which is already up in the alps (with the highest peak in the Aosta Valley region being Mont Blanc, which has an elevation of 4,800 meters). What this means is that, if civilians were still running around the city while it was flying, it couldn't have actually been lifted that far above its base elevation.
The Chicxulub crater in Mexico, which is believed to the impact site of the meteor that wiped out the last wave of the dinosaurs, would have been caused by a meteor with a diameter of roughly 10 kilometers. I'm not sure how many kilometers squared the fictional city in The Age of Ultron was supposed to be, but a normal mid-sized city would be about two to three hundred square kilometers (to give a comparison, Philadelphia, which is relatively compact, is about 370 km2). Since only a section of the fictional city was lifted into the air, I think about one hundred square meters might be a good estimation of the area we're working with.
So here's the question: Assuming you take an object of that size and drop it from roughly 500 to 1,000 meters, would it really cause more atmospheric interruption than, say, the eruptions of the Eyjafjallajökull volcano in Iceland back in 2010? That incident shut down air travel for about a week, but there were no direct fatalities, and obviously it didn't wipe out the human race. The 2010 eruptions were classified as a 4 on the volcanic explosivity index, an exponential scale on which an 8 is described as "apocalyptic." Even if the mass of the city dropped from that height wouldn't result in the same megatons of force striking the earth's surface as the Chicxulub meteor, it's still possible that the energy of the collision would be enough to completely pulverize the city itself, which might create enough ejecta volume to have a substantial impact on the atmosphere. Based on the size of the city, however, I don't think the discharge of particulate matter would count as "supervolcanic" – there just weren't enough cubed kilometers of mass there to begin with.
That being said, you would also have to take into account the joules of energy used to...
Wait, what am I doing?
I was most interested in the concept of the floating city used as a doomsday device.
According to Wikipedia, altitude sickness starts becoming a problem at 2,500 meters. Although the city that's lifted into the air is a city in the fictional European nation of Sokovia, the location that was actually filmed was Fort Bard, which is already up in the alps (with the highest peak in the Aosta Valley region being Mont Blanc, which has an elevation of 4,800 meters). What this means is that, if civilians were still running around the city while it was flying, it couldn't have actually been lifted that far above its base elevation.
The Chicxulub crater in Mexico, which is believed to the impact site of the meteor that wiped out the last wave of the dinosaurs, would have been caused by a meteor with a diameter of roughly 10 kilometers. I'm not sure how many kilometers squared the fictional city in The Age of Ultron was supposed to be, but a normal mid-sized city would be about two to three hundred square kilometers (to give a comparison, Philadelphia, which is relatively compact, is about 370 km2). Since only a section of the fictional city was lifted into the air, I think about one hundred square meters might be a good estimation of the area we're working with.
So here's the question: Assuming you take an object of that size and drop it from roughly 500 to 1,000 meters, would it really cause more atmospheric interruption than, say, the eruptions of the Eyjafjallajökull volcano in Iceland back in 2010? That incident shut down air travel for about a week, but there were no direct fatalities, and obviously it didn't wipe out the human race. The 2010 eruptions were classified as a 4 on the volcanic explosivity index, an exponential scale on which an 8 is described as "apocalyptic." Even if the mass of the city dropped from that height wouldn't result in the same megatons of force striking the earth's surface as the Chicxulub meteor, it's still possible that the energy of the collision would be enough to completely pulverize the city itself, which might create enough ejecta volume to have a substantial impact on the atmosphere. Based on the size of the city, however, I don't think the discharge of particulate matter would count as "supervolcanic" – there just weren't enough cubed kilometers of mass there to begin with.
That being said, you would also have to take into account the joules of energy used to...
Wait, what am I doing?
