What would have happened to the Earth if Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 had hit Earth instead of Jupiter?
If the comet stayed together or if it hit us in pieces like it did Jupiter? Either way, we’d all be dead. The largest piece to hit Jupiter did so with an estimated 6 000 000 megatons of TNT, and with one megaton of TNT equaling 4.184×10^15 Joules of energy, this is equivalent to an impact of 2.5104×10^22 Joules of energy. To put that into perspective, the asteroid that killed off the dinosaurs had an estimated 4.0×10^23 Joules of energy, or about 95 600 000 000 megatons of TNT. The one that killed the dinosaurs was about 16 times more powerful than the biggest piece of SL9. If all the pieces hit Earth, the spreading out of the impacts would have probably killed off most of all life on Earth.
