Impact events in fiction

[1] The theme increased in popularity from the 1950s onward, possibly as a result of nuclear anxiety following World War II,[4] and received additional boosts in popularity in 1980 with the publication of the Alvarez hypothesis, which states that the extinction of the dinosaurs 65 million years ago was caused by an asteroid impact that created the Chicxulub crater off the coast of Mexico,[5][6][1] and in 1994 with the collision of Comet Shoemaker–Levy 9 with Jupiter.

[1][10][11] A popular one in fiction is that it was caused by an alien spaceship, possibly first put forth in Ed Earl Repp's 1930 short story "The Second Missile".

[11][14][15] An alien spacecraft is also the explanation in Polish science fiction writer Stanisław Lem's 1951 novel The Astronauts and its 1960 film adaptation The Silent Star,[11][13][16] while a human-made one is to blame in Ian Watson's 1983 novel Chekhov's Journey.

[10] Another proposed explanation is that the cause was the impact of a micro black hole, as in Larry Niven's 1975 short story "The Borderland of Sol".

[11] Some stories nevertheless accept the conventional meteorite explanation, such as the 1996 The X-Files episode "Tunguska" that instead revolves around the impact possibly having introduced alien microbial life to Earth.