Slashdot Mirror
Space Object May Be Killer - In 2030
Somewhere in the chorus, Bandwidth_ writes: "Time to start stockpiling those beans and working on your Y2K shelter again. Astronomers have confirmed that object 2000 SG344 has a 500-to-1 chance of hitting earth in the year 2030, a much higher probability of impact than any object before it. Scientists aren't certain what it is, but it's most likely a tiny asteroid or it could be a leftover Apollo rocket booster. It is not a major threat, damage would be contained to a localized area in the 1 to 3 megaton range if a collision were to ever happen." As jamie points out, this probably ought not worry you unduly, but it is the first nonzero-rated object on the Torino scale.
N2UX points to an MSNBC article on the object which points out that the threat has now been downgraded to a more comforting level.
Taking into account new precovery data of the object taken by the Catalina Sky Survey on 17 May 1999 (see http://cfa-www.harvard.edu/mpec/ K00 /K00V15.html), the NEODys team has
calculated that the 2030 impact scenario is no longer real (see http://ne wto n.dm.unipi.it/cgi-bin/neodys/neoibo?objects:2000SG 344;main .)
As a result of the new data, there has been a dramatic improvement in the orbital uncertainty. In fact, the nominal miss distance for this object is now given as 0.0346 AU on 22 September 2000 (22.89 UT22.19). What this means is that the object will come no closer to the Earth in 2030 than 3 million miles! In other words, the claim that this object may hit the Earth in 2030 has now been completely ruled out - less than 34 hours after the IAU and NASA decided to announce a "significant impact risk" to the world.
It was unwise of the IAU and NASA to rely on the 1999 one-night stand data by the LINEAR team. The IAU/NASA impact announcement was premature and alarmist.
(Thanks to B. J. Peiser for the above.)
You have an interesting theory there, however, I have a few questions:
1.) How exactly would microwaving an asteroid help us?
2.) Where would you get a microwave oven that large?
3.) I was not aware that piss was alive, and if it is, why would I want to celebrate?
4.) Why do you want to blow an asteroid? Granted, it's a sexual deviancy that probably hasn't been tried before, but sheesh! What next? "Alt.pictures.erotica.blowjobs.asteroid"?
5.) Who's Nuff and why should we pay attention to what he said?
"The dead do not shoo-bop-aloo-bah." -- Kai, 'Lexx'
Uhhh... how is something *not* colliding with the Earth going to kill a lot of people?
"The dead do not shoo-bop-aloo-bah." -- Kai, 'Lexx'
Yeah, and it really sucks when they get a segfault. The HST starts taking pictures of George W. Bush's naked butt!
Ugh!
"The dead do not shoo-bop-aloo-bah." -- Kai, 'Lexx'
Do we need the sign bit? I was always under the impression that time_t was an unsigned long:
#ifndef _TIME_T
#define _TIME_T
typedef long time_t;
#endif
Hmm... maybe not. :-)
A few complicating factors show up, too. If the object isn't coming straight down (almost certainly it isn't), it will be hitting the atmosphere at an angle. Depending on the angle and the density of the object, the impact point can shift thousands of miles. A real life example is the reentry of umanned spacecraft. They hit the atmosphere at *very* low angles, so, even though we know the orbits of these object well enough to predict their positions to within meters, by the time they reach the ground we can't even predict where they'll hit within hundreds of kilometers. An object like this potential asteroid, where we don't know the orbit to anything like the same accuracy leaves the predictions with results like "it'll hit around 33 degrees north latitude somewhere within a few thousand kilometers of 25 degrees west longitude". The predictions will be probability graphs across a map of the world. One of the biggest uncertainties is the density of the object.
"Bite me, it's fun!" - Crowe T. Robot
My browser just ping-pongs between two different MSNBC web servers and refuses to load a page.
<plug> click here: http://slashdot.org/article. pl? sid=00/11/02/1639247 -- my first accepted slashdot story. Too bad it's old news and didn't make the front page. :-) <plug>
> ...damage would be contained to a localized
> area in the 1 to 3 megaton range if a collision
> were to ever happen.
Seems odd to measure the "localized area" in "Megatons".
Appears to be yet another sample of that new "goals 2000" english the White House is so proud of.
Treatment, not tyranny. End the drug war and free our American POWs.
See my user info for links.
Who cares if an asteroid impacts the Earth in 2070 if humanity has exhausted both it's fresh water and fossil fuel supplies? What about pollution, the ozone hole, or global warming?
People will read a story about an expected asteroid impact in 70 years, and think, "Hmm, well, that's far enough away we don't need to worry yet." Or, "We need to build a defense system for our planet!"
The problem is that if you put it off, who knows what will be happening in the future. If you're in the middle of a global war, famine, water shortage, etc. how much time will get spent on trying to protect the planet from incoming asteroids? Or, let's say we build a global defense for interstellar objects... then when the nations of earth go to war and annihilate each other trying to acquire the last of the planet's fossil fuels, the defense we built will have nothing to left to defend.
Having a "long term" outlook on the state of the world means looking 100 years or more into the future, and trying to plan your actions so future generations will benefit. You can start by taking public transit to work tomorrow, or being more conscious of your use of water resources. Then when the asteroid comes to destroy humanity, at least we'll still be around to be concerned about it.
While the new orbital calculations have ruled out the 2030 event, they have also increased the likelihood of encounters in years after 2030....
:-) If the object collided with Earth in 2030, the chance of encounters after 2030 would have been zero. By not hitting Earth in 2030, the likelihood of encounters after 2030 have increased from zero to something greater than zero...
Well, duh!
"Lies, damn lies, and statistics"
... and those dates are near 2039 ... maybe those darn nasa scientists should upgrade their systems to a 64bit architecture now ... And we wont have problems in the next <bignum> years :)
--
1% APY, No fees, Online Bank https://captl1.co/2uIErYq Don't let your $$$ sit in a no-interest acct.
We should take all the worlds supply of macintosh computers and send them in a space shuttle towards the asteroid to divert it. That way we would have solved two problems, 1) the earth wont get hit by a asteroid 2) people wont have to bare to see the brightness of a blueberry imac.
"10 The third angel sounded his trumpet, and a great star, blazing like a torch, fell from the sky on a third of the rivers and on
the springs of water--
11 the name of the star is Wormwood. [1] A third of the waters turned bitter, and many people died from the waters that had
become bitter."
Hmmmmmmmm....
Every MSNBC link that's posted here in /. doesn't
work for me. My browser just ping-pongs between
two different MSNBC web servers and refuses to
load a page. Does anyone have a link which actually works?
Technical details: Netscape 4.72 on Solaris, running w/ cookies off, behind two layers of proxy (one Junkbuster, one corporate). It also fails to work on my machine at home (Netscape 4.7x on Linux, proxied through Junkbuster only).
Unhelpful comments about using a crappy browser gleefully ignored.
--Joe--
Program Intellivision!
Program Intellivision!
"One day after sounding an alert, astronomers said additional data had eliminated any chance that a recently discovered space object would collide with Earth in 2030. The revised forecast shows the object passing no closer than 3 million miles. "We're still watching it, but the 2030 event is not a concern anymore."
News changes quickly these day, eh?
George!
After the Y2K media hype, I think that(the media) will get a hard time making a doomsday issue again(sorry you have to find another angle to attract viewers/readers). People will just say,"hey, look at that Y2K thing, nothing happened"
:-)
Of course the difference here is that with the Y2K thing, a lot of time and money was used to prevent it, not just monitor it.
--------
It's worth noting that nearly all asteroids have a much greater chance of laning in the ocean. Since the earth's surface is 80% water. Although tsunami's would suck just as much.
an MSNBC article on the object (...) points out that the threat has now been downgraded to a more comforting level.
It's a good thing we can trust them to tell the truth; after all, Big Brother would certainly consider it worth the risk of causing a huge panic by telling us the truth if they really did think we were in potential danger...right?
- HunterZ
Arguing about vi versus Emacs is like arguing whether it's better to make fire by rubbing sticks or banging rocks.
So, life is short, well live it! We shouldn't bother about it knowing that this space object will only fall down by the year 2030. I don't really care about it, knowing I'll be hitting 47, working in a office and having a monotone life. Anyway, by that time, well, things will change a LOT : The volume of liquid water will be grater than those days due to planet warming, parks will destroyed, people will kill each other massively, but the best thing will certainly be that all kind of "OS" that Microsoft makes will be forgotten or put in museums next to war equipements, showing to future kids the error humanity contracted during the last 40 years!
After being kidnapped by aliens, they kicked him out after a lot of whiskey and too many renditions of Heartbreak Hotel.
Well, check the link to http://www.msnbc.com/news/485240.asp?0nm=-21C
they got a cute little flash animation that basically shows that it's a wedge shaped area.
Also, they say that the guy who announced the 1 in 500 and then downgraded it said that they are supposed to issue warnings within 72 hours after first noticing a possible threat and that it took them 80 hours to finish crunching the data.
He claims that to be the reason for the initial wrong warning and why their initial statement was way out of range.
Guess they are trying to point out that they need bigger supercomps and more funding?
...
"Never trust a statistic that you have not forged yourself"
attributed to Rockefeller [sen.]
While the new orbital calculations have ruled out the 2030 event, they have also increased the likelihood of encounters in years after 2030....
The media attention was due to an early announcement; NASA is no longer saying that there is any chance in 2030. There is, however, a 1-in-1000 chance in 2071.
Please click links in stories before posting.
My mom is not a Karma whore!
Don't be fooled, it's the feather and the stone...
In space, it matters little what your size is, as there's bugger all drag (which is proportional to area facing the flow).
However, the issue of how far they can wind forward a >2 body problem is pertinent.
I guess if they're giving probabilities, they must have worked out some kind of a bell-curve, a probability map of where it could be in space. We just have to assume that the perturbation theorists have given the prediction the thumbs up.
FatPhil
Also FatPhil on SoylentNews, id 863
according to a news story on bbc on-line, this is alarmist, and the object will miss Earth in 2030.
d _1006000/1006305.stm
The link:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/sci/tech/newsi
The story:
Astronomers say reports that the Earth would be struck by a small asteroid in 2030 were wildly exaggerated.
Less than a day after sounding the alert about asteroid 2000SG344 a revised analysis of its orbit says it will in fact miss the Earth by three million miles.
Astronomers are still watching the object, which was discovered in September and thought to be a mile (0.6 km) across.
Some scientists have criticised the way the information was released before it had been thoroughly confirmed.
Threat rating
Asteroid 2000SG344 was the first object to have a threat rating of greater than zero on the 0-10 Torino scale of threatening object from space.
It was discovered on 29 September by astronomers David Tholen
and Robert Whiteley using the Canada-France-Hawaii 3.6-metre
telescope on the island of Hawaii.
Shortly thereafter, pre-discovery observations taken in May 1999
by the Linear sky survey were also identified.
On Friday the International Astronomical Union issued an alert
saying that the object had about a 1 in 500 chance of striking the
Earth on 21 September 2030.
No object has ever been rated with so high a chance of impact.
Had it struck our planet the results would have been devastating, an
explosion greater than the most powerful nuclear weapon.
Sky survey data
After the announcement astronomers began looking at sky survey
data to see if the object had been picked up but not recognised in
earlier observations.
It was found and its past position allowed a more accurate
calculation of its orbit to be made.
The result: in 2030 it will miss us by three million miles, or 12 times
further away than the Moon.
The new orbit reveals a slight risk of a collision with the Earth about
2071 but it is thought that when the orbit is better known that risk
will disappear as well.
Currently asteroid 2000SG344 is about nine million miles (15 million
km) away and getting more distant.
'Premature and alarmist'
Because 2000SG344 is in a similar orbit to the Earth it has been
suggested that it might be an old Saturn upper stage rocket of the
type that was used in the early Apollo moon missions.
If it is man-made and did strike earth the effects would be very local
and limited.
Some scientists have criticised the IAU and Nasa for releasing
warnings about the asteroid only for them to be rescinded less than
a day later.
Benny Peiser of Liverpool John Moores University said it was
"extremely unwise" of them and the warning was premature and
alarmist.
I expect it from the local newspaper and tabloids who have nothing better to write about. But I don't want to have "THEE WORLDE WILL ENDE!" thrust into my face on /. of all places.
We're all sensible enough to realise that if there were the remotest chance of it happening, the world would club together and nuke/laser/persuade it off course as necessary. And anyway, I'd put the likelihood of the world being ripped apart in a Nuclear war before 2030 at more than 500/1 anyway.
We're more than sensible enough to know when the media is just spinning to fill column inches. There's enough to talk about without this.
Fross
Only 1-3 Megatons? I fart bigger that that! =)
end communication
What if the technique misfires, and brings the asteroid on a much more disastrous course than it is now? Like, a 30% chance of a collision in 2010 ?
so does this mean that we have to
send a team of redneck oil drillers
up into space, and nuke the object
from the inside?
as long as we get to leave Bruce
Willis up there to die, i'm all for
it.
. at my signal -- unleash hell .
Actually, I think they're slightly different. An "N in M" probibility means that the probability p of that event occurring is given by p = N/M . Here, N specifies the relative number of outcomes that represent the event under consideration, and M represents the relative number of total number of possible outcomes.
In contrast, "M to N" means that if you performed M + N trials, one event would occur M times and the other would occur N times. Here, M and N represent the relative number of outcomes of two distinct events, with no statement made about the total number of possible outcomes. Often, the number associated with N is the event in question, and the "other event" is merely "the event associated with N didn't occur." In that case, the probability p that the event associated with N occurs is given by p = N / (N + M) .
So, by this argument, 1-in-2 odds is equivalent to 1-to-1 odds. The idea is that the first nomenclature specifies the likelihood of a single event compared to the total of all events, and the second nomenclature specifies the likelihood of one event relative to another event. Got that?
At any rate, with a 1-in-500 chance, the difference between 1-in-500 and 500-to-1 is negligible.
--Joe--
Program Intellivision!
Program Intellivision!
I'll just make sure to be on the other side of the earth with a tv
Must destroy mankind! (His watch alarm goes off) Ooh, lunchtime! -- Homer Simpson
Unless it's a Apollo rocket, in which case world governments probably won't be too happy with the States. ;)
Not when there is a atmosphere to get through speed is only has a small effect if the acutal thingie that is trying to enter the atmosphere is of a small mass then it will take a shorter time to burn up than something that is dense....But the biggest factor is the material that it is made of e.g if its a big block of Granate it wont burn up but if it is a booster that is made of metals that are designed to burn up we dont have any problems either way we will find out in 50-1,000 years.
Shoot again, of course.
I'm no expert, but as I understand it the recent Pakistani and Indian nuclear tests were picked up on seismographs thousands of kilometres away. If that is the case, a megaton impact would be picked up by seismographs, and the media would *certainly* be interested. Heck, the asteroid scares that have been publicised attract plenty of media attention, why wouldn't a real collision?
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
Oh man! Thanks for making my day! My dad bought that *exact* car (color and all) when we were kids and used it to tow us and a camper all around the 5 great lakes on a 3-month oddessy of camping, poison ivy and broken bones (brother fell at Warren Dunes in Michigan and broke his collar bone).
Geez, never thought I'd see one again. That POS promptly turned into a scabbed, scaly pile of rusing sheet metal and groaning iron about 2 &1/2 years after it was purchased. I've never seen any model of car go to rust as quickly as a 70's Ford Torino.
Thanks for the flashback.
We can order a bunch of pillows off ht internet
As x approaches total apathy I couldn't care less.
...because if George W. gets elected, he's big oil, and we can have him send Bruce Willis and his leatherneck oil riggers up there to drop a nuke in it and kick its ass. Failing that, we'll find a bunch of old geezers who know how to take apart that there Apollo booster. Mebbe we can get John Glenn up there--he's old enough to remember how all this crap works.
Failing all that, though, "Surf's up, dude!"
TOTKChief, who can't view Armageddon without screaming, "You bloody fscking idiots, you can't throttle a solid rocket like that, and you damn sure can't re-light the bastard!"
--
-- Geof F. Morris
If you get your hands on released US Nilitary documents from years past, they track, and document 3 - 5 major collisions every decade! Major, megaton impacts aren't a once every few thousand years issue, they happen about every 3 - 4 years. Just bear in mind they are most likely to impact near polar regions, and there is a SHITLOAD of empty space on this planet, so no one ever seems to notice.
hell, events such as the Tunguska blast are predicted to happen every 200 years or so.... some people just need to stop watching those disaster movies. Should I mention that New York City sits on a pressure slip quake fault that triggers every 250 years or so..... and the last recorded quake in NYC was about 245 years ago, and the experts say it was like a 9.3 on the richtor scale..... Or would that cause a massive media hype as well......
--Nuintari
slashdot : where an opinion can be wrong.
If this actually happens, we won't have to worry about the 32 bit/UNIX time
bug problem in ~2036!
Hey, just a few questions for those who might be experienced in this field.
If they found out that something like this were going to hit the Earth for sure, how well could they predict where it would come down?
My second question is, would this object do a lot more damage if it landed smack in the middle of the ocean?
Thanks.
The Torino Scale, as presented in the link provided in the story, is useless. It tries to rank objects on a scale of 0 to 10 based on the damage they would inflict if an impact did occur, yet it simultaneously tries to rank based on the likelihood of collision, though these factors aren't necessarily correlated at all.
Basically, an object gets a 0 if it is extremely unlikely to hit the Earth and|or wouldn't inflict any damage if it did. An object gets an 8, 9, or 10 if it's certain to hit the Earth, and|or would inflict continental or global devistation.
The Torino scale doesn't give a way to categorize objects which are certain to strike the Earth but pose no danger, nor does it facilitate ranking objects that could prove catacalysmic, but have only a marginal likelyhood of impact.
Looks like something more suited to a bad asteriod movie than a NASA research site.
Kevin Fox
Kevin Fox
You can see that none of the objects in the table has a period of 353 or 354 days. Perhaps an object with a longer period got slowed, or one with a shorter period got accelerated, by Earth-Moon approaches. Or Apollo 12's lost stage ended up here...
500-to-1 odds sounds like extremely precise calculations..heh. Wonder if they are betting on it in vegas.
The Idea.org
Yup armageddon 2 starring Leslie Nelson and Ben Affleck. This time grandpa goes into space first to destroy that wacky asteroid .. but it turns out that the big rock is full of nubile girls!! and mayhem insues..... ughh I can see it now.. lets hope it hurries up and lands on me.
"I am a kernel in the linux army"
I really hope you didn't really mean that, since that would mean that the probability of collision is ~99.8%!
Presumably, what you meant is "500-to-1 chance against hitting earth". That's a little more sane -- whew! -- but still very slightly inaccurate. The original article stated that the object had a "1-in-500 chance" of collision, which is equivalent to a 499-to-1 (not 500-to-1) chance against.
--
begin 644
Not really. The article is discussing the odds of an extraterrestrial object hitting the earth. Someone asked about the terminology being used to state the odds that that will happen. This post explains the terminology.
--Joe--
Program Intellivision!
Program Intellivision!
Thanks! That gave me the solution I needed. The key: Append "&newguid=42" to the URL for the link, and the page loads since it thinks I've visited the msid.msn.com site and gotten a GUID from Microsoft. As long as I randomize that GUID with every visit, it's a meaningless number.
Maybe I can hack together a simple server that I can redirect msid.msn.com to to generate pseudo-random GUIDs with automagically...
--Joe--
Program Intellivision!
Program Intellivision!
Higher that those that *did* hit earth?
If Chaos Theory has taught us anything, it's that we must kill all the butterflies.
Maybe we could ask the Martians for their space defense technology. They seem to be pretty good at shooting down all those NASA probles we sent them !
My fellow geeks:
Now is the time to play the "Only if you were the last man on earth" card.
Go for it!
You might get lucky.
It should be noted that the Torino scale is the probability of a 1970's Ford Gran Torino
station wagon being propelled into low Earth orbit, if the impact were to occur.
--K
Hey. It had to be said.
---
I read some of the postings on Usenet from NASA. They base the size calculation on how bright the object is. They basically have a model that says assuming the object's brightness is X then judging from the amount of light it's giving off it's corresponding size is Y. The range of sizes they give for it tops out at around 75 meters (210+ feet) assuming the same reflectivity that has been observed and confirmed on other objects.
If it is manmade - a leftover Apollo/Saturn booster stage for example - then it's reflectivity is going to be MUCH higher than a rock. If you again correlate to how much light it's giving off, a smaller manmade object will give off more in a smaller size. In other words, if it is manmade then its size is considerably smaller.
Several Saturn V third stage booster segments were sent into orbit around the sun between 1968 and 1971. I've seen reference to 5 in particular that this object might be. The third stage of the Saturn V is roughly cylindrical; 6.6 meters in diameter and 17.8 meters long. With absolutely no firsthand knowledge or proof, I'd bet that's what it is. Can't the HST get a picture of the thing?
Yeah, that was supposed to be a "G" oops
Try this one:
Object 1999 AN10 will slip by Earth on Aug. 7, 2027 at about 7 AM GMT at a distance of 0.002652 astronomical units - about 246 521 miles. Check it out for yourself at this page.
The Moon is about 246 000 miles away.
In astronomical terms, that's a bullet passing five millimeters above your head.
-------------
Someday, you're going to die. Get over it.
And no V'ger jokes? WTF? This is /. isn't it?
Isn't it read "1 in 500" rather than 500 to 1? I believe 500 to 1 means 5x 100% chance while they really mean "one chance in 500" the newspaper I get said it "1 in 500"
I heard a while back about an asteroid that would pass by very close earth around 2012 or so? Anyone have any info on this or related links?
From the article:
But no-one knows exactly how many undiscovered asteroids are out there.
Way to go Mr. Wizard.
Indeed, I shall write to my MP right away! After all, politicians just love funding programmes which will only ripen many years after they've left office... I fear anything so long term goes into the paperbasket along with Pollution Prevention, Industry Regulation and Education.
And By friday precovery data showed that the object wasn't going to hit....
Of course... because precovery data exists then it may be a sign that this isn't a man made object.
Yeah, but the "m" in that kinetic energy equation is the mass of the object, which although likely a much smaller value than the square of the velocity, is still a contributing factor to the amount of kinetic energy that a moving object possesses. Also, for reference: it _is_ this kinetic energy equation which is used when dealing with collisions between two masses, but there are many other factors which determine the type and strength of a collision.
- HunterZ
Arguing about vi versus Emacs is like arguing whether it's better to make fire by rubbing sticks or banging rocks.
This may certainly be true, but more importantly they shouldn't have to release their findings within 72 hours when the proposed impact date is 30 years from now. I mean, it's great to start planning for these things ASAP, but I think that accuracy is more important than urgency when sounding alarm bells like these. It's like having a car alarm that goes off every time someone walks by on the sidewalk... you just stop caring after a little while.
---
"No problem. I have the capacity to do infinite work so long as you don't mind that my quality approaches zero."-Dilbert
if this is true, we won't have to upgrade the kernel to function past 2038 (or is it 2034?) well, 2^32 seconds past epoch, whenever that is.
Hmmm.
500-1 odds that a 32 bit clock will be good enough. I'm comfortable enough with that to cut back the 64-bit conversion budget.
"People who do stupid things with hazardous materials often die." -- Jim Davidson on alt.folklore.urban
OK, Ok. I'll volunteer to go up in the space shuttle, drill a hole in this thing and blow it apart. There are, however, a couple of conditions:
1. I want the new Athlon 5.5 GHz with 1.2M RAM
2. I want the new 8 TB optical HD. (no Zoltrix)
3. Someone has to pay my $2400/month Napster fee
4. I don't want to pay anymore taxes.
5. Hookers.
6. Split up Microsoft.
Deal?
I AM groo
How about when we pry it out of your smashed in skull?
As people have pointed out, 1 in 500 and 500-1 are effectively the same, with one being a statement of probability and the other the bet to be placed based on that probabiliy. I think you're thinking of 500-1 versus 1-to-500. You won't see that bet often but a heavily favored horse often has 1-3 odds. That's good if you own that horse, bad if that's the odds on an asteroid hitting us.
What I can never keep straight is whether a positive point spread means the team is favored or underdog by that amount...
No. We just send a bunch of old geezers who couldn't get into the space program to ride the damned Ap11 booster back to the moon.
Mode (3) smart-aleck mode. Press * to return to main menu.
It would take weeks to get the HST pointed at the object because it needs to be reprogrammed each time it changes attitude.
--
Soma: because a gramme is better than a damn.
The same link now states that the object's trajectory has been recalculated, and they have now ruled out the collision in 2030. The previous story was merely an IAU technicality in reporting non-zero Torino events in no more than 72 hours of the calculation.
Damn... and I was really looking forward to Y2.03K.
That said, you would expect the more precise analysis to be something like "miss by 15 earth radii" or "miss by 27 Earth radii". But no! The latest verdict is "miss by 11 lunar distances". This is a miss by 660 Earth radii. This is waaaaaay out of the initial error bars. The initial error bars were wrong.
When the actual answer lies outside of your error bars you need to be shot. Especially when your analysis is to be published in 5 million newspapers. I don't want to hear about any other prediction from this guy again. </rant>
Well we are a hell of a lot smarter than dinosaurs. Whether this is an advantage or disadvantage, I don't know.
My Weblog
Hopefully, Israel will be demolished, so that we no longer will be bothered by all those stupid wars going on there.
He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby become a monster. -Friedrich Nietzsche
I always get 1 in 500 and 500-to-1 confused. Just to clarify: 500-to-1 is the one where we're screwed, right?
How can an Apollo rocket booster cause the same
damage as a multi-megaton explosion? Even Skylab didn't cause any damage when it fell.
Ok, so where do I sign up for the crack "Missile Defense" geek squad?
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
Phooey! The first reports were 1 in 500 chance of turning Dallas, Texas into a giant smoking crater, and now it's downgraded to a sure-miss in 2030 and only a 1 in 1000 chance in 2071. Seems like every time a big chunk of rock looms on the horizon, they pull a Pons & Flossman, get my hopes up, and then retract it all and I have to start worrying about the long term effects of my next vote again.
500-to-1 means that there is a 500/(500+1) = 99.80% chance of collision.
1-to-500 means 1/(1+500) = .1996%
1-in-500 means 1/500 = .2%
This last number is the one reported in the original article.
We need to send an unprepared group of lunatics up there to destroy it :)
give them a nuke, but no detonation counter...
javajawa# sleep
Meh
Nobody answered about an asteroid collision. Now one seems to be coming, are they going to look stupid? Well, no. When was the last time a candidate thought more than 5 years ahead? We need a system where longer term planning becomes neccesary.
Funny, when I was growing up, I was told the world would end at 6:28:15 AM on February 6, 2040....
As I grew older, though, the powers that be extended the deadline to 29940, so we're OK.
(Mac developers will understand.)
I use Macs for work, Linux for education, and Windows for cardplaying.
I fear it's more like Greg Bears "Forge of God".
Okay, so this doesn't mean we forget about it. It means we have a 71 year warning that something is coming -- and a 30 year warning that we have a chance to get a close look at it. Or a 30 year warning of the closest approach if we have to put equipment on it to tinker with its orbit.
Just like it does in all those movies. Maybe with an odd Russian for comic relief....
So long as we can have a Brit as the bad guy...
The secret of success is honesty and fair dealing. If you can fake those, you've got it made. (Marx)
Didn't anyone read Arthur C. Clarke's "Rendezvous with Rama," (1973) or Greg Bear's "Eon?" (1985)
:-)
Clarke predicted much of the technology we have today about thirty years ago; I take his ideas seriously.
(Although in Rama the object was 31/439, and was discovered inside the solar system, whereas SG344 is a fair distance further.)
Anyway, just food for thought.
I wonder what L. Ron Hubbard has to say about it?
-JB
Not to sound naive, but even though this may not be an immediate threat to the entire planet, a 1-3 megaton impact will still cause a lot of damage and kill a lot of people, especially if it were to land in a populous area.
Though the odds are 500 to 1, that still means there's a 500 to 1 chance that millions of lives could be lost. Sure millions aren't billions, but they are lives, and even if a tiny number of lives are lost, it will still a catastrophe. Of course, with the population explosion in full force, chances are that any potential life loss will be dramatic.
Of course, should this 500 to 1 object land in a non poplulous area, at least it will open the eyes to world governments that there are threats other than those immediately on earth.
But what are we going to do when there is one that is likely to impact... I know there have been some great ideas about nuking them (not pulverizing them, just set off a nuke next to one and it moves out of the way a little bit, enough to miss the planet).
Is anyone actually working on building something capable of shifting an asteroid's trajectory?
Don't like my sig? I don't either.
This Torino scale seems pretty strange. It needs to be two-dimensional. Damage vs. log(Likelyhood).
But now we have a new name for the release of windoze 2001 or the election of (insert dreaded politician's name): We'll just say '10 on the Torino scale'
Sounds good. More jargon that only geeks will understand...
I see that this looks much less likely to hit us (assuming no change in orbital velocity, the sun does not go supernova, etc.).
Assuming we have an extinction-level impact, this could be an excellent solution for two pressing problems: the 32-bit UNIX epoch that rolls over sometime in 2038, and the U.S. Social Security systems impending meltdown.
With any luck it will nail the U.S. Patent offices and solve yet another sticky problem.
"But actually trying to use m4 as a general-purpose langage would be deeply perverse" --ESR
This begs to bring up the topic once more of whether we should build an international space defense system. Of course, we should be able to pick things out 20-30 years beforehand, but still - what if we caught something less than a year beforehand?
The initial piece in "Rendezvous with Rama" by Arthur C. Clarke posed this type of question, and he posed a rather interesting possible solution.
Hopefully, we can prevent ourselves from going the way of the Dinosaurs - or those shitty movies that were made in the last few years.
- passion
Also how can it be either an asteroid of a Apollo leftover? Even the tiniest asteroid is much much bigger than any space rocket.
With all this talk about the possibility of Extinction Event Asteroids and stuff, why not take a poke at some of these smaller asteroids/debris to try out techniques that could spin-off into something that might actually work? Heck, I'd have more confidence in something that was actually proven to work than something that "might theorectically work but we won't know until we try it". I'm sure some of the nations who realize that the extinction of the human race might not be a Good Thing (tm) would be willing to pitch in the dough and recourses to work on the technology before we actually have to use it...
Mike
...then we won't have to worry about fixing the unix date problem.
they don't even know how big it is! They can't predict the movement of an asteroid thrity years from now, including how it will interact with any as-of-yet undiscovered objects that may cross its path, like comets and the like.
Next thing we hear is all the presidential candidates saying: "Look, we need to develop an asteroid defense system in forty years or we're toast! Vote for me!" (or are they already saying that?)
# debian/rules
...it side-swiped skylab but this was covered up by the mainstream media.
=googol=
"...object 2000 SG344 has a 500-to-1 chance of hitting earth in the year 2030, a much higher probability of impact than any object before it."
Gee, and I thought we were 100% sure the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs hit the earth. Guess I'd better take another stat class...
P.S. Anybody replying trying to lecture me about the nature of statistics will have their house promptly burned to the ground.
Hmmm, interesting. I read the "real" article as well, only a few hours earlier than you.
When I read it it still stated there was a chance for impact in 2030. I noticed the page changed a few hours after I submitted the story. You can't really blame me for not being able to edit my story submission.
But thanks for pointing out the update to everyone else.
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Scientists aren't sure what is is yet??!?!?!? IT MUST BE ALIENS!!!! AAAAAAAAAAAAHHH!
Calmacil
I can't seem to face up to the facts, I'm tense and nervous and I can't relax... --Talking Heads
You can have my asteroid when you pry it from my cold dead hand...
||| I still can't believe Parkay's not butter.
Energy = 1/2 *m* v^2
so it's the velocity, not the mass that does the damage. A small Ap11 booster at 50km/s would be a bout a nuke. Watch "Armageddon" for the effects of a nuke hitting a major city.
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