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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.
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
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!
Think of it like a billiard ball. If the ball is going to miss the hole by just a little, a minor nudge will put it in. The closer it gets to the hole, the more of a nudge it will need to correct course. On the other hand the deflections doesn't need to be precise the closer it occurs to the pocket. But then add to that the complexity of three dimensions.
So you'd have to have a very rare flyby of a significant object coupled with a very rare collision combined with some very unlucky and unlikely trajectory corrections that for all intent is random. I'm not holding my breath.
But the question shouldn't be "how likely during my lifetime" but "how likely during the period of which we are not technilogically advanced (or willing) to evacuate." If you ask "how likely" as an open-timed question then the answer is "1".
.02
My
Quux26
My
Quux26
www.crashspace.net
Our moon is 3476 km in diameter and is constantly 0.0026 AU from the Earth.