Lois and Clark being married, and her knowing Clark’s secret, is sure to have a big impact on this story. I’m looking forward to seeing how you have it play out.
(begin physics geekery)
Not your fault, but I’ve always been peeved with the scientific illiteracy in this episode (ignore the flying man, please). First of all, a seventeen-mile object four days away at 8.3 miles/sec is not going to cast a shadow on the Earth’s surface. It would have to be much, much closer to do that.
An object that size could not affect the Earth’s rotation or orbit significantly on impact. Nightfall is to the Earth as a baseball is to a forty foot sphere. Earth has 100 million times the mass of Nightfall.
However, Nightfall
is three times the size of what killed the dinosaurs (and thus nearly thirty times more massive), and would have a devastating effect on life on Earth. Not to mention obliterating everything for thousands of miles around the impact point. I feel the writers overdid it on the effects on the planet, and underestimated the impact to human and other life. Nuclear winter, firestorms, etc. etc.
I’ve modeled the impact using
this handy calculator. You can play with the parameters yourself. As the page says, the results are uncertain, but they shouldn’t be off by an order of magnitude.
And of course, Clark didn’t have to destroy the asteroid to save Earth. If it’s four days away, he just needs to push it for a few minutes and it’ll miss. Don’t TV writers know basic orbital mechanics??!
Oh, wait…
