What if an undetected meteor airbursts over a populated region?
A populated-area airburst with kiloton force shatters windows and spikes insurance/defense — the actionable move is a one-to-two-day VIX pop and risk-off in high-beta crypto/Nasdaq, plus a short-lived bid in defense and reinsurance-adjacent names. Chelyabinsk (Feb-2013) is again the template: locally destructive, financially negligible. Skeptical take: with no second strike, the deleveraging cascade self-reverses fast; the only edge is fading the panic, not chasing it.
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. An undetected meteor airbursts over a populated region with kiloton force, shattering windows and rattling insurance and defense markets. The trigger decomposes into signed root‑shocks — Geopolitical risk ▲ · Risk appetite ▼ — which propagate through our causal graph to the markets below.