Needing research for my next project

Hi Everyone!

So I have this malnourished plot bunny that's driving me crazy. Tomorrow, an asteroid of about 20 miles in diameter hits the area of France. The French are lucky because they get wiped out immediately, but the dust cloud covers the planet and begins the process of mass extinction and a massive, prolonged ice age.

But I'm having a few problems with the timeline and I thought maybe some of you could point me in the right direction.

In probably less than a year, most food crops are completely gone and huge numbers of plant species are extinct. Is this correct?

How long would the sun be blacked out across the planet by the dust cloud of an impact that huge?

How long would it be before most of the large animals became extinct? Would it take a few years, 20, 50? (There's no light because of the dust and moisture in the atmosphere.)

Is eating human meat safe and, if not, what would it take to make it safe? (Like does it cause some kind of genetic issues or anything for those eating it, even if properly cooked?)

Could rats be farmed by feeding on the dead to sustain a reasonable population of people? (Whatever reasonable is . . . *shrug*)

Thank you all for any input you might have!

Ideas on global effects:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impact_event
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_winter
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Ice_Age
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Krakatoa


These diseases have ties to cannibalism:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kuru_(disease)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bovine_spongiform_encephalopathy

How long would it take for people to be wiped out? Depends on how badly the water is contaminated, and how fast food sources die out. Logically, once plants die, the animals eating those plants will die, and the animals eating those animals will die. The question is how long it takes everything to die out.

Question: why didn't the French evacuate? You'd normally see an asteroid coming for months, if not years.

OK cool. Next question - I take it there were attempts to deflect or change the course of the asteroid, and these failed?

It's worth establishing these up front so your readers don't find themselves wondering midway through why everyone seems so surprised about the apocalypse.

:O)

onesecondglance wrote:
Question: why didn't the French evacuate? You'd normally see an asteroid coming for months, if not years.

Remember Hurricane Katrina? The government told people to evacuate, to get far away from the Gulf Coast, and tens of thousands of people just ... didn't. Or they got moving too late and weren't able to get out in time. I know a guy who was in Texas at the time, and he was trying to leave where he was. He got started too late and got stuck in the crush of people leaving the city. After six hours stuck in the traffic he turned around for fear of running out of gas on the highway ... and made the trip back the same distance he had come in only fifteen minutes. And there they were just trying to evacuate a strip of the coast. Imagine trying to evacuate an entire nation of 65 million people.

And have you seen the movie Contagion? Their depiction of what happens in major cities like Chicago when society and civilization break down is very terrifying, and very real. A lot of people simply wouldn't want to live in that world -- and, in this case, they'd be waiting for death no matter how from the blast they got. I can imagine a lot of people just staying put, saying their prayers, and waiting for the end.

France? Nobody EVER picks Italy.

actually, you would not see the asteroid with bare eyes until about 20 seconds before impact. and there is no way to know where it would hit until it hit

and it would be supremely irrelevant. picture in your mind an orange. the kind with the really thin shell that is very hard to peel. the shell is proportional to the thickness of the earths mantle. the juicy bits are proportionate to the earths core.

a 30 km / 20 mile meteorite would cause the skin to shift on the juicy bits. seabeds would be mountain tops, rainforests would be desert

earth: erase *.*
earth: fdisk
eath: format
earth:>

todos kaput.

some people believe this happened to Mars