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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.
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.
Thanks
Bruce
Bruce Perens.
"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
My
Quux26
My
Quux26
www.crashspace.net
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)
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
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
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.
Our moon is 3476 km in diameter and is constantly 0.0026 AU from the Earth.