HackerTubewatch
Surprise me
Frame from Discovery Channel - Large Asteroid Impact Simulation Plays via YouTube's privacy-enhanced embed

Discovery Channel - Large Asteroid Impact Simulation

Anselmo La Manna
Demos
YouTube
Cited on HN 6 times, 2020–2025, never outright recommended score 0
Years with an HN recommendation, 2007–2026

HN commenters link it to convey the scale of asteroid impacts, such as the one that killed the dinosaurs, or of ejecta and tsunamis.

A Discovery Channel computer simulation of a large asteroid impact on Earth, showing the scale of the devastation. It sits in a broader context of early Earth impacts and the moon-forming collision.

“This discovery channel video might help put things in perspective” (HN, 2021)

5 citations · 1 jokes · Demos

6 Hacker News comments

From the HN archive; up to 20 kept per video, favoring different commenters. Recommendations first.

@jacquesm Aug 2023 Cites it
on HN thread Asteroid ZTm0038 with a >3% impact probability
Not to spoil your lunch or anything: [this video] Of course 500 Km is a big difference with 400 meters but to those near the point of impact it wouldn't matter and the global effects would still be beyond anything in our history. This is one interpretation of what this could look like: [link]
@tim333 Sep 2025 Cites it
on HN thread Minerals represent potential biosignatures in the search for life on Mars
Read more
>the energy required to kick up a rock to a trajectory where it will hit Mars (or vice versa) is orders of magnitude more than the energy required to vaporize all nearby life, so we've got a pretty big problem already Not necessarily. Something like the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs would have created temperatures at the impact point high enough to vapourize everything but probably also chucked a lot of more distant stuff into the sky that didn't get as hot. Here's a Discovery channel 'simulation' of a large impact chucking stuff up [this video] Not sure it's very accurate but it gives an impression of the sort of thing that may have happened.
Simulation of large impact ejecting material into the sky.

Video list and Hacker News comment labels from HackerTube (prompted by @karpathy), released under ODC-By 1.0, built on the open-index/hacker-news archive. Hacker News data is provided by Y Combinator; comments remain the work of their authors. Video titles, channel names and thumbnails belong to their creators and are shown via YouTube. HackerTube Watch is an unofficial edition. Data export of 2026-10-31.

Keyboard shortcuts

/
Search
j k
Next / previous video
r
Surprise me
l
Like (video page)
w
Watch later (video page)
?
This help
Esc
Close