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Apocalypse Missed: Asteroid Near Miss
Erik Hovland writes: "The NEAT project at JPL found a nice big rock (about half a km). And it is going by earth at about 0.0317 AU, a close call by cosmic terms but definitely a miss. Still one of the closest encounters yet, glad someone is playing chicken little for us.Full story here." The chunk of rock has been dubbed 2000 QW7, and was spotted last weekend because of its speed and brightness. But rest easy, since "there is absolutely no danger of a collision." As if they'd tell us -- even now, I bet Bruce Willis and Liv Tyler are suiting up.
=================== Pretty? Feh. Shiny? Feh. A Jedi craves not these things.
I found a link that may be of interest: Apollo 11 experiment continues to return valuable data.
So I am suggesting the Moon Unit, the distance from the earth to the moon. In this context, the asteroid passes about 12.19 Moon Units from Earth, and the sun is 384.6154 Moon Units away.
Point being, some people panic when you say 0.0317 AU, but would probably be more relaxed if you said 12.19 MU (Moon Units).
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"Never apply a Star Trek solution to a Babylon 5 problem."
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
given that the Moon is actually moving *away* from us.
--
Peter
Not to rain on the chicken littles, but...
.0317 AUs (3% of the distance between the earth and sun).
Oh, don't apologize. It's not rain we're worried about falling from the sky...
There's room for a lot of 1km chunks of rocks in
Yup. Just the fact that we've seen this NEO (and a couple hundred other 1km rocks) pretty much means we can tell it's not going to hit us any time soon. Some of us worry about the thousands (based on the limited searches we've done and the density we've found there) of kilometer-sized earth-crossing asteroids we haven't seen, though. Not to mention the tens of thousands of "city killer" sized NEOs that are theoretically out there, but that we can't easily track.
Hollywood got it wrong repeatedly; if we were to get hit by an asteroid, not only would it not have to be "Texas sized" to wipe us out or kill thousands, it wouldn't even necessarily be detected. We've had asteroids pass within a million miles of Earth, but only be detected *after* they went by.
If we haven't had a serious hit in the last 2k yrs
But we have. We had a "city killer" hit in Siberia last century, for example. God only knows what has hit the oceans or similarly unpopulated areas when nobody was watching.
what do you think the chances of us getting one in the few years since we've had the technology to see them?
Conservatively, about 1 in 2 million that we'll see a mass extinction sized event in my lifetime; about 1 in 20 that we'll see a "city killer" hit a moderately populated area in my lifetime. There are "in between" events to consider too, but that gives you the basic idea. Even wildly speculating, I'd guess no higher than a 10% chance that I'll see either. But when you consider that the damage from a nicely aimed city-killer could reach $10e12, and the damage from a multi-kilometer rock would be (from our point of view) infinite, the situation is still a little worrisome.
...Deep Impact or Armageddon (exactly the same plot)
<O
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it's those dang martians throwing rocks at us again!!!
hey man, there's no need to brag.
How big does a rock have to be to get through earth's atomosphere? Obviously this will depenend of the composition of the meteor and where it lands, etc... but how big are we talking ballpark for something on the scale of say, a small nuke blast?
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Thanks
Bruce
Bruce Perens.
So what else could be used? Light? Well, OK, but what about low albedo (sp, sorry) objects? Use something like lidar? (Laser radar.) Again, low light reflection dictates high detection power.
If we could detect mass somehow, that would be the way to go, but we can only detect mass at a distance by observing how it affects other mass as it passes.
Well, radiation (and this means more than radioactive, it includes light, radar, ect.) would mean very high output power and very sensitive recievers, with long dwell time for speed of light delays.
Any thoughts?
Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom. It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves.
> Today's hasty cosmic visitor -- known by researchers as 2000 QW7 --
> was discovered just last weekend on August 26, 2000
This makes me wonder what sort of realistic contingency plan we have for reacting to such a thing within a week, if this is all the advanced notice we are going to get. And no, I don't count seeing Armageddon as adequate preparation.
This "nice big rock" is one-half of a kilometer in diameter. In perspective, that is not very big compared to the earth. To what extent would there be damage if a rock of this size actually did hit earth, and wasn't a miss of a mere .0317 AU's? (The asteroid, btw, is a very long distance away - about 12 times as far away as the moon, hardly what I'd call near.)
mmm...physics...
Exactly! That's just what the asteriods want us to think. See, once we've spent all the world's nations' emergency budgets on asteroid-fighting equipment... that's when the Alien invasion comes!
So, we've got to convince the world's leaders to save their Asteroids quarters for fighting Space Invaders instead!
Hey! What're you all laughing at?!? This is a perfectly legitimate discussion here! We're even forming Political Action Committees as we speak! Now, if only we could find a good PAC Man...
(Score: -1024, Grooaaaaannnnnnnn..., my head hurts...)
At this point in time, Spurious George would like to apologize for the wholesale massacre of several beloved cheesy 80's arcade icons, and would like to squarely pin the blame on the aliens... Next time, we promise to wear our aluminum wrap helmets, to, ahem, "foil" the alien mind control devices...
(Loud "WHAP" noise, followed by the sound of slimy space creatures slurping and crunching the remains of Spurious George's mangled corpse. Audience cheers. Momentarily. Then the dark shadow of a near-Earth asteriod appears overhead. Panic ensues. Loud "crunch" noise. Audience's response is justifiably lukewarm. The End. Don't say we didn't warn you.)
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hack (reality);
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With all this talk about a Missile Defense program which is almost completely pointles s, I'd be more interested in a asteroid defense system.
On a side note, with all the treaties against space based nukes, has any country ever tested a nuke in a vacuum? Maybe that would ignite our atmosphere and in a Twilight Zonian twist, the asteroid wouldn't hit the earth and we would have been destroyed by our own ignorance. Or not. Depends who is writing it and who is producing.
This is not the way to build a lasting empire.
You mean, how many have collided and seriously disrupted life on earth? None within recorded history, much less modern history.
I don't really ever see us stopping that 10km wide thingy coming at us at 100,000km/h, at least not with the technology today, perhaps when we develop technology to bend space-time on a planetary scale the odds will be better..
Personally, I'd rather see us become more aggressive in our attempts to colonize other worlds as means to insure our survival as a species.
Stupider like a fox! - H.S.
You mean, how many have collided and seriously disrupted life on earth? None within recorded history, much less modern history.
None within recorded *human* history. If the theory is true that the dinosaurs were killed off by an asteroid (I'm not saying that it is or isn't true), then your argument here proves false.
=================================
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Hate to break it to you.. but that "face" upon closer inspection turned out to be a more natural random formation of rocks that look nothing like a face.
The human brain has a very large section specifically for perceiving faces. It hunts for faces in the visual field, and will spot them in virtually any pattern that vuagely suggests a face. It also attempts to identify identity, emotion, and a number of other factors.
So everywhere we look we see faces - in light sockets, on the lids of cans of grated parmesan cheese, and in the shadows of topographic features on Mars.
One description of this effect, and an interesting exercise utilizing it, occurs in the book "understanding comics" by Scott McCloud. The exercise:
- Draw a random squiggly closed curve. (Think "amoeba".) It looks like a random squiggly closed curve.
- Add an "eye" composed of a small circle with a dot in its center, somewhere inside the closed curve (preferably near an edge). Now it looks like a "comic book" head.
As for Mars: Shortly after the "Face on Mars" flap started NASA published another photograph from the same probe, which had found a feature that might as well have been a deliberate sculpture of Kermit the Frog.
IMHO there is enough interest in the "Face" site (both by believers and debunkers) that NASA should spend a little of a probe's time to re-image it, and publish a radar topographic probe and reflectivity map.
Plug that into some existing software and you could do a virtual flyby and walkthrough of the site. You could set the viewpoint and illumination to replicate the original image (to see that it was the right spot), then wander over and around it, illuminating it from other angles, to see what it's really like.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
no, what i meant is this: according to some organazation, i forget their name, we only activley scan 40% of our sky for astroids and comets, etc. (forgive me if im off, im saying this from memory)
they move in the night sky because THE PLANET ROTATES.
And so do all the sagans-and-sagans of "fixed stars". So how do you differentiate the incoming object from J. Random Ordinary Nova?
If you're VERY LUCKY you spot it while it's still far enough out that the orbital mechanics makes it appear to move slightly relative to the stellar background. But when it's far out it's a lot dimmer, looking like the rest of the asteroidal junkpile. It doesn't take a very big rock to create an extinction event.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Ultimately, the scariest aspect of this is to be reminded we don't have an organized program monitoring for killer asteroids.
Didn't you follow the link to the ? What do you think found THIS one?
You might argue that it's underfunded, will take too long, might miss something significant, might not spot a collider in time to do something about it, or that it will only spot asteroids and not comets (or at least not in time).
But I recall a decade ago when we DIDN'T have such a project in place AT ALL and I'm MUCH happier with the current situation.
Every time they spot a new one that comes anywhere near close enough they get another opportunity to publish an estimate of the number they HAVEN'T found. A nice argument for a few more bux for telescopes and observers.
Just think: If we stop one extinction-event rock, humans and technology will have prevented vastly more environmental damage in a single operation than has been caused by all the humans since we first appeared. Take THAT, Earth First!
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
These things just don't go past once and then leave, they *ORBIT* the sun. Guess what that means? They cross earths orbit twice for each one of their "years"
That means the chance of a collision incresses with time. How many of these "small" rocks that cross earths orbit are there? Who knows...
The delicate balance of the Solar System took billions of years to establish, and I wouldn't want to mess with that.
Question...how come we can go thousands of years without looking into the sky, yet all of a sudden, because we're looking, we're finding all this shit "coming close"? Just seems too much of a coincidence.
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AARGH! Hit the wrong button. Let's try again...
Ultimately, the scariest aspect of this is to be reminded we don't have an organized program monitoring for killer asteroids.
Didn't you follow the link to the NEAT project? What do you think found THIS one?
You might argue that it's underfunded, will take too long, might miss something significant, might not spot a collider in time to do something about it, or that it will only spot asteroids and not comets (or at least not in time).
But I recall a decade ago when we DIDN'T have such a project in place AT ALL and I'm MUCH happier with the current situation.
Every time they spot a new one that comes anywhere near close enough they get another opportunity to publish an estimate of the number they HAVEN'T found. A nice argument for a few more bux for telescopes and observers.
Just think: If we stop one extinction-event rock, humans and technology will have prevented vastly more environmental damage in a single operation than has been caused by all the humans since we first appeared. Take THAT, Earth First!
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
it is going by earth at about 0.0317 AU, a close call by cosmic terms but definitely a miss.
I disagree with the characterization of 3% of the distance between the Earth and the Sun as a "close call". I'd save it for things that come a LOT closer - like the big one that passed inside the orbit of the Moon in the last decade or so.
But rest easy, since "there is absolutely no danger of a collision." As if they'd tell us
But they DID tell us last time they had one where the preliminary figures put the Earth inside the uncertainty boundary of the initial orbital calculations. ("They" in this case was a researcher, not NASA administrators {who didn't even know about the object yet}.)
It caused a flap, and maybe the researchers won't be so quick to talk to the press NEXT time. But once an object is spotted a call goes out to astronomers all over the world for possible previous spottings, to refine the orbit. That's a big audience (and includes lots of amateur comet spotters). Once the numbers are out anybody with the tools can crunch their own confirmation and/or look at the object in the sky and make their own measurements. So I wouldn't sweat being kept in the dark.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
You are right with your first sentence,
the astroid was only discovered a view days before.
But your conclusion, we would not see it and it
would just get larger is false.
It's no problem to have an asteroid comming from
a random point on a random course crossing the
earth orbit just at the moment when the earth
is at the crossing.
In fact most asteroids just have a course like that.
Imagine an asteroid with aphel nearer to sun
then earth and perihel farer away from sun as
earth.
Ther are at least two crossings (in 2D space,
in 3D space there might be no crossing!)
Depending on your distance to the crossing,
earth and the asteroid approach in a 90 angle
to that crossing.
However, you can turn the orbits of the asteroid
and the earth in a way you like and get
nearly each angle from 0 two 90, but as
fas as I know not greater because all
bodies orbit into the same direction.
Regards,
angel'o'sphere
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
Yes. It is actually f=mv^2. Very different, considering that these things are whipping around and the 30,000 (17,000 mph) kph range. Another interesting point is whether or not the thing is solid, a lump of gravel, porous. Very important to know how it's going to react when we hit it. An interesting question is what would happen if it shattered? Would a shotgun blast of material be as lethal at a large stone?
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
One example: Shoemaker Levy 9
Wellll... that's a comet, but Jupiter still gobbled it up.
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Out of curiosity - how does this work anyway? Is it the _average_ distance between the earth and the sun? There's no way it is always the same distance, unless the earth's orbit was perfectly circular.
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grep "xercist"
Just put your head between your legs and kiss your ass goodbye.
Bruce
Bruce
The real Burce Perens has Slashdot ID 229006. Anyone else is an impostor.
The new national missile defense will protect us from these stupid rocks. NMD is the answer - it will shoot lasers and blow up the rocks, thereby providing alternative entertainment for those bored of the regular TV sitcoms.
w/m
"As if they'd tell us -- even now, I bet Bruce Willis and Liv Tyler are suiting up."
Script suggestion for *Armageddon II: Liv Lives*; Scene !!!, Liv and NASA Geek in her dressing room just before flight.
"Liv, can I zip you up? Please?"
"Umm, no, you little geeky pervert. You and that puny little Perl script you have the nerve to call an application can get the hell out of my dressing room. Don't even *think* about *applying* that thing to me."
"No, don't worry I've already seen them in that topless scene you did in *Stealing Beauty*. I'm not trying to cop a peek or feel, I just want to help you save the world from that asteroid through whatever highly unlikely and unscientific methods those hack screenwriters have dreamt up without consulting technical experts who didn't get their degrees from Joe Bob's College of Astrophysics and Auto-Repair."
"Oh. Okay, then, zip me up."
"Wow, your lips are so much more beautiful and soft-looking in person. They're just like Julia Roberts' lips, only on an *attractive* face."
"Oh my God, is that a slide rule in your pocket or...ohh, we have to bring you with us! Maybe the sight of your enormous..."T-square"...will scare the asteroid away into a more elliptical orbit! Or at the very least our all-female crew can ravage you in a desperate attempt to cover up for poor screenwriting by depicting lots and lots of gratuitous sex!"
"But what about Bruce Willis, he's part of your crew too?"
"Well, he gets to ravage you too. It's in his contract."
"Umm, err...okay, you're worth taking it in the ass from a deranged scientologist foolish enough to divorce Demi Moore's breasts. I mean, Demi Moore."
[Kissing and groping]
"So, you like my lips, NASA geek. Everyone does. It's the one thing I got from my Dad--well, that and Alicia Silverstone; we used to share her on alternate Thursdays."
"Oh no....that's right you're...Steven Tyler's daughter! I forgot! Oh, my God, I can't look at those luscious lips without thinking about your dad. Oh no, it's like kissing Aerosmith! Acchhh, I'm going to be sick! I feel like I just made out with Aerosmith...gross..blechh....barf [much vomiting. NASA geek exits stage left, leaving a trail of vomit and shouting "Nooooo, I just made out with Aerosmith! Yuck!]
"The more corrupt the state, the more numerous the laws."--Tacitus, *The Annals*
Do you mean "What are the chances of us getting hit with a rock that will end all life on the planet if not the planet itself"? Then the answer is non-zero.
We shouldn't overstate the liklihood, but we should not understate the consequences of that unlikeliness. After all, the dinosaurs did become extinct because they didn't have a space program (Sagan, I believe).
.02
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Thanks
Bruce
Bruce
The real Burce Perens has Slashdot ID 229006. Anyone else is an impostor.
Thanks
Bruce
Bruce
The real Burce Perens has Slashdot ID 229006. Anyone else is an impostor.
Not to mention blowing a planet into little bits would do little if anything to affect its gravitational influence on its surroundings, since you'd still have the same amount of mass with the same center of gravity.
But then, you have to break a few eggs to make an omelette.
jeez. from now on, I promise to remember to log off of slashdot *before* I leave the computer lab
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hack (reality);
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Perhaps they've been shooting by all the time but we've only just started noticing- the car that splats a bug isn't the first car to drive by. Tunguska, 1908, is a recent possible impact site. The theory is a 60 metre asteroid blew up in the atmosphere 5 miles above Tunguska, in Siberia. It didn't even make it to the ground, yet the 15 megaton equivalent explosion flattened the forest for thousands of square miles, and the seismic shock was felt in London. Hardly a world shattering event, but it would have been pretty devastating over a builtup area.
Let's just call it a 'Zappa'...abbreviated as 'Z'. the Moon is 1 Z away from the Earth. :)
The delicate balance of the Solar System took billions of years to establish, and I wouldn't want to mess with that.
<P>
The delicate balance of the Solar System!?!?
Are you freaking kidding me? It would take a wandering planet or brown dwarf to upset this 'Delicate Balance'
<P>
To sum, even if we tossed all of the nukes known to man at Mars, you'd get a nice light show, and a lot of glass souvenirs, and that's it.
<P>
Later
Erik Z
Democrats or Republicans. They are both taking us to the same place and they are not afraid of us anymore.
The delicate balance of the Solar System!?!? Are you freaking kidding me? It would take a wandering planet or brown dwarf to upset this 'Delicate Balance'
To sum, even if we tossed all of the nukes known to man at Mars, you'd get a nice light show, and a lot of glass souvenirs, and that's it.
Later
Erik Z
Democrats or Republicans. They are both taking us to the same place and they are not afraid of us anymore.
We all know how much of an "expert" Kaku is about catastrophes as he predicted that Cassini would bring about the end of the world.
Here's a great site with info about this asteroid: http://meteors.com
Imagine if it eventually got tired of being 0.0026 AU and decided to come closer. Hrmmm... I wonder if we have any special telescopes continually observing the moon.
I could not justify my existence if I were a turkey farmer. Would I terminate myself? Undoubtably, yes.
Would you want your daughter dating an earth-crossing asteroid?
Hell no! I wouldn't want her dating a nigger, either.
Thanks
Bruce
Bruce
The real Burce Perens has Slashdot ID 229006. Anyone else is an impostor.
The Earth is a lovely and more or less placid place. Things change, but slowly. We can lead a full life and never personally encounter a natural disaster more violent than a storm. And so we become complacent, relaxed, unconcerned. But in the history of Nature, the record is clear. Worlds have been devastated. Even we humans have achieved the dubious technical distinction of being able to make our own disasters, both intentional and inadvertent. On the landscapes of other planets where the records of the past have been preserved, there is abundant evidence of major catastrophes. It is all a matter of time scale. An event that would be unthinkable in a hundred years may be inevitable in a hundred million, Even on the earth, even in our own century, bizarre natural events have occurred.
In the early morning hours of June 30, 1908, in Central Siberia, a giant fireball was seen moving rapidly across the sky. Where it touched the horizon, an enormous explosion took place. It levelled some 2,000 square kilometres of forest and burned thousands of trees in a flash fire near the impact site. It produced an atmospheric shock wave that twice circle the earth. For two days afterwards, there was so much fine dust in the atmosphere that one could read a newspaper at night by scattered light in the streets of London, 10,000 Kilometre's away.
-- Carl Sagan, Chapter IV "Heaven and Hell", Cosmos (ISBN: 0-349-10703-3)
Corner cubes are funky to play with. If you look at one with one eye closed, your pupil will always appear exactly at the corner no matter how you twirl the thing around.
The next time this paticular "object" will be comming close will be September 21, 2109.
And that will be 0.043 AU which is FURTHER away than the one that happened yesterday (Sept. 1, 2000).
(IF they are correct about it's current orbit, if they are SLIGHTLY off on the orbit, we could all be toast.. j/k..
Let me postulate a theory:
1. There was life on Mars. One of their largest structures, which only partially survived, was a face.
2. The Martians thought, "The danger from the sky will never hit us," and 200 million years ago they didn't see it coming.
3. The impact was so great, they all perished; so great, in fact, that it blew chunks of the planet into Earth's path.
4. The building blocks of life were contained in ... Nah, that's going too
far. ;-)
Nice conspiracy theory, even without 4. This tells me we need to devote more resources to our "eyes."
Thing 1
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I feel fantastic, and I'm still alive.
I agree, but how do you educate the public about an impact with a rock that will turn the air to fire, possibly fracture or obliterate the planet and cause our home to become as sterile as a Backstreet Boys liner note without inciting fear?
I understand what you're saying - we don't want to shoot ourselves in the foot about this (like we did once already) - but public funding sucks. I don't see how you bring this to people's attention w/out being accused of the Chicken Little/Cassandra complex.
.02
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Don't listen to him! It's them Aliens talking!
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We probably don't need to be too worried about a complete extinction, Armageddon like, asteroid - the chances are very small. There have been a significant number of smaller asteroid strikes though. There was one in Northern Siberia in the early 1900's that flattened an area roughly the size of Greater London (2000 square kilometers or so bigger than many cities). There have been 2 or 3 others in the last thousand years or so as well, but I can't remember where. With a greater world population and cities that are more spread out then their is a chance that the next one will get a fair few people. No it's not worth insuring your house against, bu it is more likely than global extinction.
- A.P.
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(Disclaimer: these numbers should be taken within a fudge factor of 10!)
;-)
10! = 3628800
I'm sure you can be more accurate than that
Woz
The Gamblers' Fallacy only holds for events that can truly be considered "random," such as dice roll results or coin flips. The physical distribution of asteroids (combined with the other factors that increase or decrease the likelihood of a convergence with our own coordinates) is not purely random. In a purely random distribution, it would be possible for all belt asteroids to exist in one tight cluster, whereas in real life such a distribution would be so unstable that it would either coalesce into a single body or more likely break apart into a more entropic distribution in short order.
I don't know how apt an analogy this is, but: Think of two consecutive poker hands separated by a significant shuffle. Since the more ordered groupings that result from the first hand are returned to the deck intact and then shuffled, it is far less likely that you'll draw a hand identical to any of the first dealt hands than it would be to draw the given hand from a fresh deck. Hence the cards do have a memory of sorts, or perhaps more accurately, a short-term amnesia.
IANAM,
Ludwig
one substantial hit in 1,000,000 years. That gives you the odds of an asteriod hitting you tommorow of 1 in 365,000,000
But it would kill 5,000,000,000 people. That's an average of 5000 every year.
So the chance that an asteroid kills you beats the chance that an airplane-crash kills you.
You know, all these porklips movies represent a danger in their own right. When the Big Rock (or the Deadly GM Weeds, or whatever it was God used to deal with the Mastadon and Spiro Agnew) finally puts in an appearance, will people just shrug and say, "Hey, I saw the movie. This is even less convincing!"
man this is 3 times now every time i get on top of my car and start curseing for it to bring it on and every time the end is to much of a wuss to mess with me, either that or the sight of me naked on top of a car curseing with a bottle of tequila in one hand is to much for it bear :)
Oh God, it nearly missed us!.
Stealing blatently from George Carlin.
--- Never hold a dustbuster and a cat at the same time ---
Setting his threshold to 5, Sparky eliminated most of the trolls on /.
After checking my source material, I've confirmed those odds were per-planet, not per person :).
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On the whole, I find that I prefer Slashdot posts to twitter ones because I don't get limited to 140 chars before
> The only true source of energy in the universe is fusion. This could be in reactors, or in some clever harnessing of a star Clever ways of harnessing the power of a star: 1 - Photovoltaics 2 - Photosysthesis -> Decayed Plant Matter -> Petroleum
Its pretty delicate... from our standpoint (and a chaotician's). Want to annihilate all life on earth? Easy. Send an asteroid a few miles wide, and make it hit some land. Blowing up Jupiter and Mars might just make it a little easier for that to happen.
Kardashev Level 1 - civilizations using the entire power output of a planet
Kardashev Level 2 - civilizations using the entire power output of a star
Kardashev Level 3 - civilizations using the entire power output of a galaxy
Our own civilization is still somewhere under the K1 level. Getting to K2 would require something along the lines of a "Dyson sphere" to collect the energy output from the Sun, especially that above and below the plane of the ecliptic (which is currently radiated away from anything in the solar system which could use it).
Oddly, Kardashev did not extend his analysis beyond galactic scale. Perhaps he thought that getting to K3 level would be a big enough challenge :-).
Relating the Kardashev scale to Kaku's scale...a K1 civilization would probably be somewhere between 0 and 1 on the Kaku scale. K2 civilizations would probably be between 1 and 2, and K3 civilizations would probably score between 2 and 3. So there's a good correlation. (I agree, a civilization that scored 4 or 5 on the Kaku scale would probably be so far beyond our comprehension that it would be impossible for a mere 21st-century human to comprehend...)
Eric
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Be who you are...and be it in style!
Its nothing new to most people that a catastrophic impact is just a matter of time. Tomorrow, next year, whatever. And if its not a meteor or asteroid, it could very well be a large volcano, etc. Regardless, the survival of our species will be threatened.
I highly recommend Michio Kaku's "Hyperspace". In this book Kaku describes a very real and valid method by which we can classify a civilization based on its understanding of physics, even though we have no data points besides our own. This understanding of physics will have a direct result on how any civilization utilizes energy in surviving a variety of inevitable crisis.
This is from memory, so it could be totally wrong. But, you'll get the idea:
0. Level Zero. This civilization depends on natural energy deposits in its environment. It is unable to survive a large scale disaster, despite any technical or artistic accomplishments it has achieved.
1. Level One. This civilization is able to harness true sources of energy production on a large scale, as opposed to only harnessing local energy reserves. The only true source of energy in the universe is fusion. This could be in reactors, or in some clever harnessing of a star. A level one civilization will be able to utilize and direct enough energy to survive a planetary disaster. This could be by diverting the disaster, or by relocating enough resources to a safe area of a solar system and rebuilding.
2. Level Two. This civilization can utilize and produce enough energy to survive a solar system disaster. This could be a massive solar flare, death of a star, or destruction of the solar system by interstellar collision between neighboring stars, supernova, etc. Survival of such a disaster would imply the ability to manipulate a planet or star, or the ability to move about a group of solar systems with relative ease. Planetary engineering and terraforming would be taught in the freshman physics lab class.
3. Level Three. A black hole is sucking up half the galaxy? No problem, these guys will move to the other side of the galaxy, or, maybe they would move the black hole to a safer place.
4. Level Four. All the resources used up in the galaxy? No problem, we'll go find more useful galaxies to plunder. Traveling about the universe would be no problem.
5. Level Five. The universe has existed for so long that protons are starting to decay. The universe is coming to an end - either in the big crunch - a repeat of the big bang, or the big chill - matter in the universe expands to the point of oblivion, kinda like a fart in a wind tunnel. A level 5 civilization would step into a different universe, or would engineer their own.
From our perspective, a level 5 or 4 civilization would look like the Kingdom of God. We probably wouldn't comprehend it.
A level 3 civilization would be something like Isaac Asimov described in his Foundation Trilogy.
A level 2 civilization would be like Star Trek or Star Wars.
A level 1 civilization would be like the early episodes of Star Trek.
A level 0 civilization would be like the dinosaurs that used to roam the earth, and its current inhabitants of strangely naked apes, otherwise known as humans. We're not even close to being level 1. Our economies are so dependent upon oil that its sad, and we have no idea whats going on in our own solar neighborhood. We're trying though. With any luck we'll get to level one before mother nature or our own stupidity does us in.
-Neandertal
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The shareholder is always right.
Probability of hitting earth for an asteroid closer within the .0317 AU range: (Re = radius of earth, Ra = radius of asteroid)
pi*Re^2
------- = one chance in 560,000
pi*Ra^2
Though it's not likely a certain asteroid hits earth, with about 50 such asteroids every year, let's expect the earth to be hit by this kind of (large) asteroids about every 10,000 years! That's quite often compared to the age of the earth.
(Disclaimer: these numbers should be taken within a fudge factor of 10!)
Opus: the Swiss army knife of audio codec
If you want to get a feel for the probabilities, you might want to read Rain of Iron and Ice by John S. Lewis. A section of the book gives the results of multiple computer simulations of the chances of the Earth being struck by various size objects as fictionalized descriptions of the results. Many large objects can hit the ocean without being noticed, except by any sailors unlucky enough to be in the area.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
Of course, this only works if you can find lots of people crazy enough to pay $1000 to get an asteroid named after them. But just think: you could get your name on the doomsday asteroid!
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The shareholder is always right.
But, they would be bits. Prime for hitting Earth. Same centre of gravity, but far more spread out. And influenced a little more by the gravity wells surrounding them (and to stop those bits from coalescing back into planets (over a looong time), you'd have to blow them right up).
Assume we spot one that's heading straight towards us on a crash course: how fast can whip up some tactical nuclear weapons, put them on a rocket and fire them towards the rock?
Actually Newton explains it pretty well with this:
Force = mass x speed
So there you have it, the bigger the mass or speed, the more nukes your going to need to match the necessery force to stop it. So the real question here is how big of an asteroid can we actually stop?
Actually, as someone else already pointed out, the change to be killed in an asteroid collision is pretty high compared to many other ways of dying. This is because even moderate hit can kill millions and the largest ones could kill most or all of the human race!
This is also a reason we should prepare for the possibility: There are quite a many rocks out there capable of destroying our civilization if not human as a species. Even while the probability of that happening next 100 years is low, if we miss one we might not get another change. Ever.
And they measure that distance continuously. It used to be true that the Earth-Moon distance was known with better precision than the distance between London and New York, in fact.
If the goverment said that there is no danger, I would watch out.... After all, antrax vac. is safe hu?
hmm... for fun I enjoy launching DDoS attacks against 127.87.42.5
I don't know if that makes me feel more secure, though, at least we can see the asteroids coming, but our understanding of mantle dynamics isn't up to predicting Deccan Traps style volcanic events yet...
I have written over 900 book reviews
And besides, it was worth it to get to a quote in the epiloge: "A meteor hit a parked car in New York City -- what else was it going to hit?"
"Pinky, you've left the lens cap of your mind on again." - P&TB
"I can see my house from here!" - ST:
I bet Bruce Willis and Liv Tyler are suiting up.
What the hell do a half elven princess and a dead guy have to do with anything???
Uh, Tim...if anything Liv Tyler did some suiting down in that movie.
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- JoeShmoe
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-- I wonder which will go down in history as the bigger failure: the War on Drugs or the War on Filesharing
Does it scare anyone that some of these rocks get this close before anyone noticed them?
- I don't care if they globalize against free speech. All my best free thoughts are done in my head.
Kary Mullis, winner of the nobel prize in chemistry, in his book "Dancing Naked in the Mind Field" states, we as a planet should be working on the astroid problem What good is technological advancement if we can be wiped out tomorrow by a big rock. Our survival in the universe should be job 1. All our other differences and bickering seems kinda petty in comparison to the threat of gigantic rocks in space. Let's use Star Wars technology to combat an asteroid, or there won't be a planet to live on, let alone dominate. Good idea, don't you think?
an enigma wrapped around a paradox driven by a paradigm shift
Not to rain on the chicken littles, but...
.0317 AUs (3% of the distance between the earth and sun).
There's room for a lot of 1km chunks of rocks in
I remember a segment on Space (Canada's Scifi network) where they put two balls on a field and started hitting tenis balls between them, with a baseball bat. Chunks of rocks, even HUGE chunks of rocks are very small in comparison to even the distance between the earth and moon.
If we haven't had a serious hit in the last 2k yrs what do you think the chances of us getting one in the few years since we've had the technology to see them?
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Remove the rocks from my head to send email
On the whole, I find that I prefer Slashdot posts to twitter ones because I don't get limited to 140 chars before
Gravitational nudges by Earth, Mars or Jupiter can potentially set such asteroids on a collision course with our planet, says Yeomans.
That's the last straw. It's for precisely this reason that we as a nation (needn't be specified -- you know who we are) must fulfill our manifest destiny and blow Mars and Jupiter up off the face of the earth. I don't care whether we have to blow them into a billion little asteroid-sized pieces, and I don't care that Jupiter is primarily gaseous in character. We defeated the British, the Mexicans, and the Vietnamese, er, umm, I mean the Evil Soviet Empire, so the least we should be able to do is destroy two unsuspecting and poorly defended planets.
Just think of all the money we'll save by not having to fund manned missions to explore what will no longer exist!
I think I saw that movie...
:)
Good thing this is just Slashdot, so it isn't real or anything...
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
That's the last straw. It's for precisely this reason that we as a nation (needn't be specified -- you know who we are) must fulfill our manifest destiny and blow Mars and Jupiter up off the face of the earth
Well, you might have a little more trouble blowing up Mars than you would with Jupiter. After all, the Great Old Ones of Mars grokked long ago that the 5th planet from the sun was a lost cause, and that's how we got the asteroid belt in the first place. Don't piss off the Martians. Share water with them and grok in harmony.
-The Reverend
-The Reverend (I am not a Nazi nor a Troll)
=(.\')=
Actually, it's moving (very slowly) further away. The Apollo missions set up "mirror boxes" (can't remember the offical name) that allow us to shoot a laser beam at them and bounce it straight back to the source. The time taken is used to mesure how far away the moon is. I think this is the only experiment from Apollo that is still usable today.
Plug for the Summer Science Program: I was there in 1998, and I think it's quite a cool program. We (about 35 high school students) tracked known asteroids using a medium-sized telescope, developed photographic plates in a darkroom, and wrote C/C++ programs to determine the orbits of our asteroids based on the data we had collected. Oh yeah, and we visited JPL. Hint: go right before taking calculus and physics, so you can slack off for a semester when you get back to school
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The shareholder is always right.
Spacebob has a quick review of this book here.
Does anyone have any historical information as to what the largest asteroid or meteor which has come close to the earth in the last 25 years or so?
Also, what has been the closest call within that time period...
It just amazes me that we have these large asteroids wizzing by the earth all the time but none of them are ever close enough for a collision.
Nathaniel P. Wilkerson
NPS Internet Solutions, LLC
Nathaniel P. Wilkerson
www.haidacarver.com
Do you know anything about the precision of the corner cube they use? I can imagine that over such distances when the edges of the cube are not exactly 90 degrees, when the beam comes back on earth, it might have a huge deviation. How large is the receiver?
0x or or snor perron?!
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The shareholder is always right.
No one should worry about being struck, personally, by a comet or asteroid. The threat to an average person from disease, car accidents, accidents in the home, and from other natural disasters is much higher...
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The shareholder is always right.
This really isn't a near anything... It's a huge miss.. Don't get paranoid...
The only thing preventing rocks from pounding earth into dust is chance..
Space is big... The Hitch Hikers guide to the galacy had it right....
Earth is a really tiny target...
Now to get worryed... that is ALL that protects us...
That and we have NASA...
(Hay Rob Limo want help your buddys at NASA when it comes to justifying NASAs budget? Tell em about near misses we keep having and how NASA may be all we have if we ever get something that is NOT a near miss.. we can nuke it if we know about it... thats were Nasa comes in)
Ohhh maybe thats where the Mars landers went... they weren't landers.. they were bombs sent off to blow up asteroids heading into earth... We were never told..
Anyway... don't get complacent... but don't get paranoid...
Random chance is what keeps us from going splat...
and that is like security by obscurity...
It slows down.. it limits.. it dose not prevent...
We are ok... relax...
If a real rock comes... then break out the nukes...
I'm thinking something like the bunker buster we develuped for the Golf War and a nuke... then we plow the missle into the heart of that larg rock and smash it to partical dust...
I don't actually exist.
The galatic councile refuses to allow us to shoot certen people into space.
If we did they'd attack us with some rather nasty wepontry..
Such as CDs of vogon poetry...
I don't actually exist.
I know this is OFF TOPIC, but here wishing it'll take out all the Penis birds if it hits.
-Rather use my mod for pushing the good, not skeet shooting....
"retro-fitting for the unwitting"
I'm describing "historical" times. You're describing "prehistorical" times. It's a simple matter of definition. And if you can find any dinosaurs who "recorded" their mass-extinction, then I'll give you a cookie. Certainly, there've been lots of important asteroid impacts in prehistorical times, as anyone who's been to Arizona or Mexico knows.
0.0317 AU = 2,948,100 Miles = 4,746,441 Kilometers
AU = Astronomical Unit, which is the same as the distance from Earth to the sun, approx. 93 million miles.
But we never went to the moon! The boxes arent there!
If it had been on a collision course we wouldn't have had enough time to do anything about it.
Asteroids on a true collision course don't appear to move in the sky; they just get larger. This makes them harder to detect than one which moves relative to the background of stars. An asteroid on a true collision course might not even be recognized as a threat until it was way too late to do anything. It is the punch you don't see that gets you.
Lucifer's Hammer describes this very well, scientists/politicans try to tell people all the time that the comet is going to miss... You can guess the rest :>
J.
Our moon is 3476 km in diameter and is constantly 0.0026 AU from the Earth.
we need to be ready for these times of crisis. i suggest that we start to looking NOW for a crew of aging oil tanker workers with no space experience that will be able to fly up and land on the asteroid and blow it up. we can't wait until the last minute!