What if a city-killer asteroid skims past inside the Moon's orbit?
A city-killer asteroid passing inside lunar orbit is a pure vol-and-defense headline: long Lockheed/Northrop/RTX on a planetary-defense spending narrative and a reflexive gold/VIX bid, fading equity weakness within days as the rock misses by definition. The Feb-2013 Chelyabinsk airburst (coinciding with asteroid 2012 DA14's flyby) is the analogue — global headlines, no measurable market move. The defense leg is the only one with staying power; treat the rest as a one-session fear spike.
Every number ships with its receipt — the odds, the range, the precedents, and a public grade at Reality Check. The statistical machinery that produces it is proprietary.
The butterfly cascade
How this trigger trickles across markets, left → right — the root shock, its first‑order moves, then the ripple effects. Drag any node; tap a market for its real price history.
Resolution timeline — how this probability is moving
Our model's odds (electric blue) over time vs the market's (Polymarket, amber), from the past toward the Tail risk horizon. Each dot is a real macro event that nudged the probability — green pushed it up, red pushed it down. Tap a dot for the source. Loading the probability audit trail…
What it would mean
If this plays out, it is a risk-off shock. A newly-detected city-killer asteroid passes inside the Moon's orbit, igniting panic and a planetary-defense spending surge. The trigger decomposes into signed root‑shocks — Defense spending ▲ · Geopolitical risk ▲ — which propagate through our causal graph to the markets below.