Slashdot Mirror
How To Handle A Killer Asteroid
SEWilco writes: "This Nando/AP article points out that there's a discussion under way of how to proceed when an Earth-impacting asteroid is discovered. The focus is the proposal "The Comet/Asteroid Impact Hazard: A Systems Approach" (Chapman, Durda, Gold) which has been circulating for several months. It's a summary of what is known, what is undecided, and what needs to be done to prepare. I do note that the discussion is assuming that all of the human population remains on Earth, except for the possibility of off-planet planetary defense facilities." I thought we were well-prepared for this already, thanks to the flurry of asteroid movies of a few summers ago. We send Bruce Willis, or possibly William J. Clinton, with a handpicked suicide crew equipped with drills and nukes, right?
This is all very cool, but I have to wonder if anyone has actually done this - like read a newspaper in space through a telescope on earth.
The first, and in fact, only serious and complete study of this question was the Icarus project done at MIT in the late 60's. Their final conclusion? You load a Saturn V up with as many nukes as you can and hope it works!
"This provides a perfect example of why libertarian govenrments do absolutely none of the tasks a real government should do!"
...Like spending money destroying asteroids...I wondered where all my tax money was going...Dumbass
Govt:"We spent your money on this contraption to keep asteroids away"
You:"How's that work?"
Govt:"Well...You don't see any asteroids do you?"
You:"I'll take a dozen"
This is one of these things where you cannot exagerate TOO much, because the estimated age of the universe is in the range 12-15 billion years.
When Hubble looked at Asteroid Vesta, it had a resolution of about 5km/pixel. So you're basically claiming your telescope has 100,000x more resolution than Hubble? Come on.
And it looks like the astronomers there had a lot of fun with you.
>Queensbury rules instead of punching for the balls without gloves,
Wait a minute--when you nuke someone, it's M of Q as long as youuse a missle?
>I don't like the idea, either, but it's the only useful thing the military industrial complex can do
The Pax Americana (or Pax Atomica; take your pick) is the longest period of general peace (yes,there were exceptions) in europe since the Roman empire fell. That's a serious benefit (at least for Europe. But we got good trading partners and avoiding yet another war over there out of the deal).
Today, though, there's no serious threat of a massive European war; just a few skirmishes here and there. But I'd still rather spend money on being to big to fight than havingt to fight . . .
hawk
hawk
> Wouldn't said diety just send his giant cow
nah, a deity might send a giant cow, but a diety would only have skinny cows . . .
:)
> done this - like read a newspaper in space through a telescope on earth.
And I thought *I* was cheap. Some folks will do *anything* to sa ve a quarter . . .
hawk, not the master cheapskate any more
Actually, I'd trust a randomly selected group of Randites to be able to better run an asteroid deflection program than today's NASA. Their inability to accomplish anything remotely resembling cheap launch (considering the twin fiascos of the shuttle and X-33) really gives me the creeps in situations like this. The pretend-private-corporations/ cost-plus contractors aren't making the situation any better.
(currently testing something about signatures here)
Because trying to get something like that into a stable orbit would be very hard and require a lot of fine control. Just nudging it a bit so that it would miss the earth would require that much control. After all the total number of paths that *DON'T* hit us is rather large.
Erlang Developer and podcaster
No...McGuyver would use dirt, gun, the tag from his shirt, and the glow-in-the-dark part of the watch.
The A-Team was always finding the old cars and powertools whereever they were.
fully equipped workshop come asteroid-destroying-nuclear-bomb-factory
No...there would be some rusty pipes, a transmission and muffler, and an air compressor. From that they would develop the asteroid-destroying-nuclear-bomb-factory.
Sorry - TVLand had an A-Team marathon recently.
We don't have enough nukes to blow the Earth into space dust. We have enough to wipe out human civilization, and, if we used them carefully, probably enough to wipe out human life (and most othger large animals with us). I doubt we have enough to wipe out all life on land, and I'm sure we don't have enough to seriously damage the structure of the planet.
Also, delivering them to an asteroid is significantly more difficult than delivering them to another spot on Earth
I think you're being rather pessimistic. If we get a few years warning, say 10^8 seconds, plausible even now, and almost guaranteed with a quite affordable SpaceGuard type project, then a velocity change now of even a meter per second would be enough to change a hit to a near-miss.
Now suppose we could use nukes to split off a 100m cube of rock and shove it away. To get the desired 1 m^s-1 for a 1km^3 asteroid (a big one) we need about 1000 m^s-1 for the other chunk, representing an energy of 2.5 * 10^15 J, or the equivalent of about 30g of matter, which, if I recall correctly is about 3 Megatons.
Now, any such system is going to be hugely inefficient, but if even 1% of the energy of some nukes can be used to split off such a "chunk "of rock, we only need a handful of standard warheads.
Getting them in-place and dug in within a few months of detection would be hard, but not necessarily impossible, and 10 years and a few billion $ would build the infrastructure to make it fairly routine if necessary.
When a killer (be it a mad man, a bunch of bees, or an asteroid) is coming after you, what'd you do?
For me, I'd run like hell.
As for WHERE to run... I dunno !!
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
You forgot about the laser reflectors. At least one was placed on the moon by the Apollo programme; carefully shaped chunks of glass with corner-reflectors. You shine a laser at the moon, time how long it takes for the pulse to come back, and you can work out the distance to staggering accuracy. They're getting a little dusty by now, but as they require no power they're still working fine...
Evaporate the oceans? I think you're overestimating the power of nuclear weapons as well... You might succeed in irradiating and heating up the oceans a bit, enough to seriously effect marine life, and vaporizing a few million gallons. Certainly, you would cause some kind of "nuclear winter" or "nuclear greenhouse" depending on which theory turns out to be right, and probably succeed in killing off most of the higher life forms on Earth. But I suspect the oceans themselves would be largely unchanged.
Most of the blast of a nuclear bomb exploding in the atmosphere comes from heated air. The actual vaporized mass of the bomb is not that large. A bomb detonating in space will result in a big flash and not much more. The radiation energy will not be efficiently converted to kinetic energy. You need to send some really big tanks of water or other working mass along with the bomb.
According to some back-of-the-envelope calculations I did with a friend it would take tens of thousands of tonnes of working mass and the biggest f**ing nukes currently available to deflect a 1km body even if it is discovered more than a year before impact.
-
Stop worrying about the risks of nuclear power and start worrying about the risks of not using nuclear power.
Why not use the technology mentioned here and build a huge NanoNet to catch it.
Before you catch it you attach a large mass, say some of the old satellites/space junk, at the end of a long NanoBungi attached to the NanoNet and set it off towards the sun.
Time this so that the asteroid is captured in the NanoNet just before the tension takes in the NanoBungi and leave the rest up to gravity and the sun.
NanoCatapult
Stupid idea! Just wait and see!
When shit hits the fan get some of these https://youtu.be/pY-GncsZ-UE
I think the problem is that if you target the actual "rock", you wind up with lots of smaller fragments. Each of which is excedingly lethal. The trick is, if I'm not mistaken, to blast to the side/front to deflect it or slow it down enough that it will miss earth.
That... and do we even know what happens when you set off a nuke in space?? has that been studied/thought out?? Anybody??
-Andy
...everyone likes to say "Now, for the first time in History, there exists a species on Earth that can do something about a earth-impact"
Unfortunately, that's just not true. Currently, even if we had bought the proper equipment, there is very little we could do to stop a 1km+ rock (or, esp. a comet) from coliding with the Earth. Basically, we've got the technology right now to see the hit coming, but not really do anything about it. Nukes and other missile-like interceptors aren't good enough, we don't have good enough energy weapons, and our space-flight technology isn't up to the task. So, basically, if we see something coming in the next century, we're fucked.
So if we can't stop it, can we prepare for it? Unfortunately, I'm going to have to say no to this is too. There's no way we could put away enough food and supplies to feed even 0.1% of the populance for the required decade or so after a major earth-impact. Most likely, the best we could do would be provide for 10,000 or so. And a modern Democracy simply isn't going to be able to sustain this kind of project - it would run hundreds of millions, and that's not going to fly with the voters. Sorry. And, honestly, is that money well spent? To spend perhaps billions over the years on something that has a 0.0001% of happening, or use the money to stop ozone depletion/polution/pick your favorite Earth Day project.
So, what's our best bet? Work like hell to get to the point where we can defend ourselves. The good news here is that spending on this kind of thing has all sorts of other uses, besides "impact defense". We need to spend lots on making spaceflight cheap to get orbital (and preferably Moon-based) stations going on a large scale. Faster and more practical space propulsion (ion engines? Space Sails?) Advances in energy and kinetic weapons that could allow us to pulverize a potential threat while still several AU away. Multiple large Hubble-like detectors scanning the heavens.
The point here is that realistically, there is very little we can do right now. However, given the proper schedules, funding, and willpower, we could have the defence capability by the 22nd century. And along the way, invent a whole lots of other stuff that we can really use. Think of it as the Moon Project for the 21st century.
-Erik
There are always four sides to every story: your side, their side, the truth, and what really happened.
I can't believe that everybody here on /. thinks that the best way to stop a very small asteroid on a collision course with Earth is to blow it up.
I'm surprised NOBODY here has thought of this solution: use a braking rocket or solar sail to slow the asteroid and nudge it into the L1 zone of equal gravitational pull between the Earth and the Moon.
Crazy? Not when you look at what composes an asteroid--a list of strategically-important minerals out of the wazoo, often of higher quality than even minerals on the Moon. It could become the base material to build space colonies between the Earth and the Moon.
Raymond in Mountain View, CA
If everybody will jump up and down at the same time, Earth's orbit will shift and the asteroid will miss us by miles. We could at least jump enough so the thing only lands in a place nobody cares about - like France or Seattle.
== Paul Rickard, Editor of The Microsoft Boycott Campaign ====
I don't think starvation is as big an issue as you make it out to be. Human's have many forms of energy that can be used to power full-spectrum bulbs to grow plants and heaters to keep us cozy and warm. As long as people can remain civil in a time of disaster, we can likely survive another ice age at this point in human development.
Well, having recently rewatched Superman II: the blast wave breaks the Phantom Zone prison that has drifted into Earth's solar system and releases General Zod and cronies to come and plague a powerless man of steel and the rest of Earth with horribly bad acting and worse dialog...
been done,2 57 &mode=thread
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=01/04/28/017
The problem with nuking them is that it's not predictable how they'll break apart, and thus, rather than having one big asteroid that may or may not hit, you'll have lots of smaller, more radioactive ones, some of which would hit, some of which wouldn't.
Which would be bad. Maybe not as bad as getting hit by the whole thing, but for a sufficently large asteroid, it wouldn't make much of a difference to us.
Let's assume a rocket weighs 1000tons (I don't really know, I'm just guessing). The force to move it just to get it out of earths orbit would consume near 700 tons of fuel (70% of the fuel to a rocket is consumed in the first 11 minutes, and that's just to get out of orbit). 700 tons to move an average of 500 tons of rocket for 11 minutes.. A relatively small asteroid (that might be oh, say, the size of 4 to 5 football fields), which is probably the smallest we'd be concerned with, would weigh about 1.6 million tons. To push on it hard enough even to make it start spinning would take (by the calculations above) 1600000*700/500 or 2.2 million tons of fuel.. And that's just for 11 minutes of burn time without considering getting that much INTO space (did I mention the rocket would have to weigh far more than the asteroid?). Though, it does have valid upsides:
1) Usage of all available fuel, ever, makes cars instant antiques. No more 2 bucks a gallon fuel, that's for sure.
2) One large ass firecracker.
3) We could use redmond as a launching pad. That would probably sanitize the area nicely.
"What's all this asteroid jibba-jabba?!"
"I pity the foo who tried to set up us the asteroid!"
"1-800, then Colle.." oh, never mind...
--
"It's tough to be bilingual when you get hit in the head."
In regards to 4) and 5)...
You could work up some even better conspiracy theory about how the US and Soviet governments were in cahoots about the whole Cold War, and are nothing but puppets of [pick your favorite supervillan, big corporation, oil conglomerate, or alien civilization]. Hey, it's just as likely as most of the other theories...
--
"It's tough to be bilingual when you get hit in the head."
--
We have enough nukes to blast the surface of this planet to pieces a couple who knows how many times over. But destorying a planet is tough, this isn't Star Wars, if you placed every working nuke on this planet, over the entire surface, evenly spread, and blew em all off simmoltaneously, the diameter of the earth wouldn't change all that much. Might knock a few steep mountains down, vaporize all organic material, and maybe even evaporate the oceans, but the rock would be largely uneffected...... it might liquify a lot of it for a short period of time, but you'd at best be left with a very igneous rock based shell.
People tend to think of nuclear weapons as just big conventional bombs. Nukes are thermonuclear fireballs, they have enough concussive force to blast buildings down, but not much else, and rock is pretty resistant to heat. Regular bombs rely a lot more on the concussive forces, which is why they leave big craters, and blast rocks apart.
Don't get me wrong, nukes have concussive force, but their big claim to fame is the heat and range, not the "knock down" capabilities. those are just handy side effects.
--Nuintari
slashdot : where an opinion can be wrong.
Didn't he say that in a bar sometime? ... What's a stack?
------
I'm an assembly guru
A hundred years from Judgement Day, oil will still be diggable with a shovel - just head for the ruins of the cities and throw the plastic, styrofoam, and polyethelene over a fire to make oil. Metals will also be widely available where the cities once were, and in many cases, already refined.
IIRC, this type of "mining" (most valuable commodity: copper wire) is already taking place in the mostly-abandoned military complexes of Siberia.
This is a self-limiting situation. If there's enough food for 3 million survivors for three days, and 90% of them starve, the 10% remaining have a month's worth of food.
That month is long enough for the clued survivors to leave the cities for the farms on the countryside. The unclued ones, well... I guess it's self-selecting as well as self-limited.
With a lack of infrastructure (particularly fuel), modern factory farms will be starved of production capacity. That's where the urban survivors come in - to haul tractors, combines, etc, and/or use their skills at repairing equipment.
You end up with a much smaller economy, but it's still a functional economy. Land is valuable, as are mechanical/electrical skills. Those without such skills can trade labor for food.
Everything I just said applies just as well in the event of asteroid impact (i.e., multiple fragment impact, not K/T-boundary impact!), and better, because you don't have the issue of fallout affecting crop yields and the health of the laborers.
Bottom line: It (be it global thermonuclear war or a series of asteroid fragment impacts) would majorly suck. But homo sapiens would, in all likelihood, survive - not just as a species, but as a technologically-advanced species. I would conservatively estimate time to restoration at 50-100 years.
Think my 50-year figure is nuts? Look at the major cities of Europe. Better yet, Japan. 55 years ago, most of those cities were little more than smoking craters.
Think my 100-year figure is nuts? We didn't have electricity 100 years ago. (Oh, wait a minute, California still doesn't! ;-)
But we did make the transition - from an agrarian society with a small urban component into a nearly completely-urbanized techno-society - in the past 100 years.
Moreover, the first time around, we had to derive all the science from first principles before we could even think about building the technology. This time around, we'd have the science stored in books everywhere, and working prototypes for damn near everything we need, stored in the attics and basements of damn near every home that was unaffected by the blast and/or looting. My 100-year estimate is probably woefully pessimistic.
General realativity, wormholes, space-time warping, etc. http://www.hawking.org.uk/lectures/warps.html.
-sd
>We send Bruce Willis, or possibly William J. Clinton, with a handpicked suicide crew equipped with drills and nukes, right?
almost.. this time, dennis tito gets to watch from close by..
//rdj
No one can understand the truth until he drinks of coffee's frothy goodness.
--Sheikh Abd-Al-Kadir, 1587
Yep, and I'm puttin it on my American Express card too!
But I was thinking if an astroid hit the earth and the dust blocked the sun...
The ICE age that followed wouldn't mean the end of life on earth, it would just mean few things woudl survive.
For starters, most of the lower plants would die. That would then in turn kill the lower ends of the life cycle. Creatures that don't mind turning vile and canabalistic will live on as it eats the weaker, and the ones dying off of starvation.
Eventually we would get down to the last few humans.
Most would die of starvation, but some would turn to eating just about anything, even if it meant canabalism.
If you think about it, the population of China alone is enough to keep the strong over there fed for quite a long time.
Only the strong stomached will survive.
"Everything you know is wrong. (And stupid.)"
"Everything you know is wrong. (And stupid.)"
Moderation Totals: Wrong=2, Stupid=3, Total=5.
Declare the asteroid to be in violation of the REcording Industries Copyright, and send all the RIAA lawyers after it.
I'm sure they could litigate the asteroid out of existance.....
Feed the need: Digitaladdiction.net
Um.
Look at the averages of impacts through the fossil record, far back beyond the KT boundary. There have been quiet periods before. Suddenly an asteroid or a comet gets nudged or bumped in the outer solar system, and Earth has an exctinction event.
Do you forget that recently we watched a previously uncharted comet smack into Jupiter, Shoemaker-Levy 9? Less than 2.5 million years ago the crater Tycho was carved out of the lunar surface. There's always Tunguska to think about.
Statistically speaking it is a very safe bet that something already *is* on a collision course with the Earth, we just haven't noticed it yet. Just because no cataclysmic impact has happened within the incredibly brief space of time encompassed by recent human history, you make a very dangerous assumption that this somehow makes such an event less probable.
That's like someone who lived on the slopes of Mount Saint Helens' om May 17th, 1980 saying "it hasn't erupted in my lifetime, so this means it won't erupt in the future." The next day a gentleman named Harry Truman was proved fatally wrong and buried under several thousand feet of mountainside.
I for one feel it is safer (and more sensible) to err on the side of caution than to be unprepared.
Get off my virtual lawn, you damned virtual kids!
Heh, regardless of whether or not the asteroid struck near us, if we look at it streaking through the sky it would be the last thing we saw.
Hint, as we learned from nuclear explosions, very energetic events can radiate significantly brighter than the sun. To keep your eye's lenses from frying your retinas, look away and cover your face with your hands.
If you manage to save your eyesight, when the brightness fades you may be in for quite a show. The problem is that if you are too close, by the time you see the oncoming shockwave it's way too late to do anything. And this doesn't take into consideration the ejecta thrown into the atmosphere or even into low orbit by the blast.
Search "tectites, rain of mud, rain of fire" on Yahoo. I suspect the environment gets really biblical after an asteroid impact unleashes a few times the combined total of the world's nuclear arsenals in a fraction of a second (it has happened several times in prehistory.)
Get off my virtual lawn, you damned virtual kids!
Certainly, we should deflect an asteroid that is headed for earth impact. But why not park the thing in a high earth orbit and mine it or use it as a base for a large space station?
--- even the safest course is fraught with peril
Oh dear god, for a moment I thought he was talking about an asteroid.
Wouldn't said diety just send his giant cow over to eat them or throw them in the ocean or something? An asteroid is such a crude way of dealing with the problem...
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
There are only a few thousand functional nuclear weapons on the planet (8-10 thousand at the upper limit, less if you don't consider most nukes in Russia 'functional', especially since a lot of fusion weapons have shelf lives of a few years). If you airburst all of them over cities, you might kill half the people in cities on the planet, which, since about half the population of the Earth resides in cities, means that you'll kill perhaps 25% of the people on Earth as a maximum. Less because not all those nukes will work. When was the last time anyone actually fired off an ICBM and had it detonate a nuke on target on the other side of the world? That's right, never. No one's ever tested them in their full operational capability, since it would result in World War III. That's probably one reason we never got that far: everyone was too afraid the systems wouldn't actually work, and their bluff would be called.
/planet/ to dust. Even if you buried all of them in the core of the planet and set them off, it'd produce at most some slight indigestion. Compared to the thermal, kinetic, and magnetic energy contained in the Earth's core and mantle, nukes are nothing.
In any event, that's just people, to say nothing of blowing the
You don't need to 'take out' a small rock, anyway. Just deflect it ahead of time, which depending on how much advance warning you have, may entail strapping some ion engines to it, or detonating a bunch of fusion bombs next to it to nudge it away.
This is a self-limiting situation. If there's enough food for 3 million survivors for three days, and 90% of them starve, the 10% remaining have a month's worth of food.
Perhaps for dry foods (sugar, meal etc.) and cans. Fresh food will quickly spoil and as electricity disappears refrigerated and frozen food will become unedible fast too.
With a lack of infrastructure (particularly fuel), modern factory farms will be starved of production capacity. That's where the urban survivors come in - to haul tractors, combines, etc, and/or use their skills at repairing equipment.
Hardly. There will be an acute shortage of fertilizer, pesticides and fuel. People will have to plow with horses (if such can be found), or pull it themselves. Furthermore, after an impact or nuclear war, the climate will very likely be much worse (nuclear winter, anyone?). Food yields are likely to be perhaps a tenth of what it used to be, if you are lucky.
Bottom line: It (be it global thermonuclear war or a series of asteroid fragment impacts) would majorly suck. But homo sapiens would, in all likelihood, survive
Yes.
- not just as a species, but as a technologically-advanced species.
No.
Of course it depends on the magnitude of the catastrophe, but were all nukes used we can say goodbye to technological civilization for at least several hundred years, perhaps forever.
Think my 100-year figure is nuts? We didn't have electricity 100 years ago. (Oh, wait a minute, California still doesn't! ;-) But we did make the transition - from an agrarian society with a small urban component into a nearly completely-urbanized techno-society - in the past 100 years.
You forget that during that time there were at all time, even during war, a functioning society. And most important of all - then we had access to easy, cheap-to-extract deposits of ore and energy (oil etc.). They are consumed now, and the only reason we can use lower-grade deposits is our more advanced technology now. But after a nuclear war, that doesn't exist anymore. So a new technological society would be much harder to build up again than it was in the 20th century.
It is more likely than not that the first 20 years or so would be chaos, with people scavenging supplies of fuel, spare parts and food as long as they can, with gangs of bandits preying upon them. In that time the Earth's population falls to 10-20% of the current.
As more and more ancient high-tech breaks down and there is no one who knows how to repair it anymore, and as the stores run out, people are more and more forced to live of the land, using older technology. Probably mostly 19th century tech with some 20th century parts. There might be some reintroduction of higher tech, like electricity from, say, hydro or wind power. At least some 80% of the people are farmers, possibly under bondage to earlier bandit leaders turned warlords.
In a few hundred years some more advanced, somewhat technological society might arise, but it will never approach today. The resources needed are already gone.
/Dervak
I mean, enough other species will keep on going. Wait a minute, probably more than are likely to survive with humans about...
... we just pick a select few, leave and watch all the lusers go from a distance!
hc
Policy: a common substitute for good management
the telescope can take clear pictures (I have one, but it was given to me on the condition that I not distribute it) of large stellar objects 50 billon lightyears away
Please explain this to me. It would take 50 billion years to the light to travel from that object to Earth. IIRC, the universe is only 15 billion years old, so how can you have a picture of one of these objects?
--
This space left intentionally blank.
We have enough nukes to blow the earth into space dust x000 times over, but we don't have enough nukes to take out a small rock.
WTF?
Someone explain that to me.
========================
63,000 bugs in the code, 63,000 bugs,
ya get 1 whacked with a service pack,
--- Grow a pair, liberals... stop letting the Republicans bully you!
If everyone stood outside with their AOL cds, and reflected the sun toward the meteor, maybe that would burn it up before it got into the solar system.
Treatment, not tyranny. End the drug war and free our American POWs.
See my user info for links.
All we need to do is strape a bomb to RocketGuy and the rest should just work itself all out in the end. I'm the OOP in Moop.
I put the m in oop.
How is this possibly anymore offtopic than the original post which is currently modded up? I guess it's hard for some to realize there is actually a place called the real world where everything doesn't revolve around DECSS, the RIAA, and the MPAA.
Now, just a little while ago we had an article about the use of an asteroid as an offensive weapon. The article went on to describe how they could maneuver it to hit the Earth and obliterate the country's enemys. Today we have one on how to get the asteroid to avoid Earth.
Couldn't someone put the two together and instead of redirecting it to HIT, maybe how to redirect it to MISS? or is that asking too much.
DanH
Cav Pilot's Reference Page
Cav Pilot's Reference Page
UNIX - Not just for Vestal Virgins anymore
I think an astroid on a course for the earth is the universe's way of sending a SIGTERM to us humans.
when you gotta go... you gotta go.
Let's send B. Willis to blow up the damn thing. We'll get rid of both...
list ;gun, ammo, can goods, can opener,bread, milk.....
________
Does anyone actually have a Java program designed to control air traffic, or for the operation of a nuclear facility?
Do note that this happend in 1997, damn assie drivers, I told you that thouse convict s couldn't be trusted. ;-)
________
Does anyone actually have a Java program designed to control air traffic, or for the operation of a nuclear facility?
________
Does anyone actually have a Java program designed to control air traffic, or for the operation of a nuclear facility?
I saw that too somewhere. This page is a NASA site that lists the various projects currently going on to detect and catalog NEOs (Near Earth Objects). I'm fairly certain that one or more of the links from that page will find the exact quote. It's like a few dozen people at the most IIRC.
For a pretty good wow factor, this site has an online calculator that gives you the destructive force for impacts of different sizes and compositions of asteroids/comets/other BNRs (Big Nasty Rocks).
D
(As long as Liv Tyler is in the movie adaption, I don't care how they stop the asteroid.)
Mad Scientists with too much time on thier hands
The first, last, and only tech news site on the net
The only reason for including is the amusing difference in the way Time makes it seem *exciting* in a way the others didn't.
mick
...woooo, killer asteroid
A better idea.
Put all the above mentioned parties (although there may be a few people on tv I'd leave out) on a rocket and tell them there's an asteroid coming.
Then start the countdown and ensure that the firing mechanism requires they all learn to act.
Then watch the fireworks.
mick
...particularly Chuck Norris.
You could always make the asteroid itself a story on slashdot and let the millions of hits pulverize it.
mick
Duck and cover!!
MG
Randomly distributing Karma whenever possible.
I have a shotgun, a shovel and 30 acres behind the barn.
1q2w3e4r5t6y7u8i9o0pqawsedrftgthyjukilo;p'azsxdcf
Suddenly there's a high demand for a spot on the next trip up. I think this is the point where everybody realizes that $20 million is a small price to pay to get a bird's eye view of the biggest *boom* in human history. And as an added bonus, you get to live! Until supplies run out anyway.
...I'll procrastinate tomorrow...
We also need to send Steven Seagal, Kevin Costner, Chuck Norris, Wesley Snipes, Charles Bronson, Mr. T., Der Ahhhnold, anyone who's ever been in a long-distance TV commercial, anyone who's been on Springer, everyone who's been on TV more than once, and the cast of Dawson's Creek.
Let them all nuke it as Tito watches from orbit. It's the only way to be sure.
--
Freeper Logic
or possibly William J. Clinton,
My favorite scene is where Bill draws the short straw and Dubya accompanies him to the asteroid's surface. Once they get there, Bill yanks the Bush/Cheney patch off of Dubya's pressure suit, kicks him out the hatch, re-enters the ship, and dusts off. I never get tired of Dubya nuking himself as he tries to dictate a memo into the detonator.
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Freeper Logic
All we have to do is be sure to put our best and brightest scientists/generals/politicians into deep mineshafts. After the dust clouds settle, they can re-emerge and re-populate the Earth. It would take about 100 years for this seed population to expand and re-build civilization to it's current level. Remember, the dust clouds would choke out human life, but the factories, mines, and machinery would still exist and be able to be pressed back into service.
Of course for such a small number of humans to seed an entire planet, there would have to be an abnormally high ratio of females to males. After all, a male can impregnate a woman every day, but a female can only be impregnated once a year or so. In order to establish a decent genetic balance(prevent inbreeding) we would need say, ten females to every male.
Unfortunately this means abandoning monogamy, for the men at least. A regrettable loss, but necessary.
Or maybe I should stop watching so many movies.
Steven
-- I have marked myself unwilling to moderate-- I don't have other accounts to artificially inflate the karma of
Actually, Mr. T Always said, 'Shut up foo!' This proves that Mr. T was a computer geek at some point in his life!
Keeping
Telescope relosution is limited by the diameter of the telescope. My old physics book (Serway - don't have it handy) had a formula in it where you could calculate the smallest detectable object given the aperature size and distance to an object. From what I remember, we don't have telescopes large enough (on Earth) to spot objects the size of people located on the moon. There was a slashdot article (someone in this thread links to it) that points to an article where scientists have photographed the moon landing site. However, these photots where taken by a moon orbiting spacecraft, not from Earth.
I dont know exactly, however thanks to the wonderness of the atmosphere, there is a maximum resolution you can get - light is refracted and reflected, merged and diverged, by different temperatures and water content at different layers in the atmosphere.
This is one of the main reasons hubble is a success - no atmosphere == unrivaled view. The only problem is with steller dust.
An asteroid might be some form of divine vengeance. I don't think anything woulld piss of a deity more than the RIAA.
Uhh...the odds of being hit by an asteroid at any particular time -- now, 100 years from now, 1000 years from now -- are the same. The odds of being hit by an asteroid at *some* time are very high. The odds of being hit by an asteroid at any particular time are low, though I'd say far from nil. I think hiding our heads in the sand is not a very prudent approach to planning. You could use the same arguments about earthquakes -- "They don't happen very often, so don't bother to plan for what happens."
As far as blowing up the sun, I guess I'll let that concept pass without comment.
-- We all have enough strength to endure the misfortunes of other people. La Rochefoucauld
Ahem...it wasn't several billion years ago. It was 65 million years ago. The earth itself, and the Sun, are themselves only several billion years old.
In any case, it needn't be a huge extinction asteroid in order for it to be a HUGE problem and danger. Even a relatively smallish asteroid impacting in the wrong place could be devestating globally. Don't think in terms of ONLY big-ass dinosaur killers. Just a big rock or comet, too small to devestate the world the way the dinosaur killer did, would still be a horrible danger and have disastrous consequences. Such smaller objects are more likely than a dinosaur killer but still important to know about in advance...and easier to deal with.
In Bushworld, they struggle to keep church and state separate in Iraq as they increasingly merge the two in America.
This matter could contain anything, especially if it's from the depths of the universe (even the solar system) from forms of life, right down to highly hazardous chemical compounds which may not exist on earth already, but do so in outer space.
Anyone remember the fuss people were making about sending other planets microbes from earth sent probes or vehicles by accident.
What about the opposite!!!
I'm gonna buy lots of canned food and then sell it to everyone for a profit. Seriously though, I think we need to look at the moral side of this...
What do you think a fair price would be for a can of soup??
about the next large asteroid to hit the earth as we looked up and saw it streaking across the sky. So any effort at prevention should start with stepped up methods to detect earth crossing asteroids first. With funding being cut at NASA so we all can get a tax cut, this is not likely.
I was sorry to learn that Gene Shoemaker had passed away
Take the cheese to sickbay, the doctor should see it as soon as possible - B'Elanna Torres, "Learning Curve"
Plans to blow up asteroids always sound cool, but it's best to assume the worst. So stop drooling over those cool nukes, and prepare for what could be the most important task once you are the last male of female on this rock.
I intend to live forever, so far so good.
We send Bruce Willis ... with a handpicked suicide crew equipped with drills and nukes, right?
Good god I hope not. If I have to sit through that again, I think I'll welcome the asteroid.
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Bleah! Heh heh heh... BLEAH BLEAH!!! Ha ha ha ha...
About now is when we should be building a monitoring infrastructure. I believe a significant amount of cataloging is already going on.
It doesn't take a rocket scientest to figure this one out...the thing that will save our collective asses is time. The sooner we detect something on a collision course with Earth, the better. A small force applied over a long time (rockets, thrusters, whatever...) has a better chance of succeeding than a big force over a short time (nuke). Kinda like compounding interest...once you get the thing moving in one direction it will keep moving in that direction, and keep accelerating in that direction as long as you apply the force. Given enough time, you could send the offending object anywhere.
:)
So invest in early detection. When you do find something on a collision course, well, certin death has a way of motivating those who control spending. Then again, there's that time thing. We still have 30 years before this thing hits, we have time to budjet it in later...
So we end up at the big force over a short time, when there's only a few months left before the thing hits...
After all, if those who control the money understood basic physics (or could even get a basic understanding with the compounding interest analogy) they wouldn't be in politics.
I'm going to go back in my box and will think within the limits of my box: MS Sucks Linux Good I read too much Slashdot.
I say we strap CowBoy Neal to it,
That should change its mass just enough, that instead of hitting us, it will swing out around our gravity (because it would become uneven) and go back out into space.
Listed on his asteroid page:
1. Austin Powers ('nuff said about science)
2. ArPITageddon (just check the html link)
Remember the atrickle two days ago: "For the past two years, "Rocket Guy," as he's known locally, has been constructing Earthstar 1, the rocket he hopes will carry him to the edge of space and then bring him back to Earth alive." This is the man to do this job :)
"If you keep an open mind people will throw a lot of garbage in it."
Well, if we model a comet, dirty snowball that it is, as though it were a cubic mile of hot fudge sundae...
...when you're writing a game...tweak the difficulty of "Easy" to something [your mother] can cope with. -- onion2k
Of course, goverments assign this long range detection a huge budget to enable us to take these steps. Let's see it's... well, not much more than quite a few people earn in a year actually. What's wrong with this picture?
UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
There are 3 main ways if dealing with a killer asteroid.
1) Stand Still. Look at the asteriod getting closer. Get squished.
2) Run around, panic and scream. Observe the asterioid getting closer. Get squished.
3) Jump up and down, scream at everyone for not being able to think of anything. Get squished.
Wroot
We are at the first step: we know of the possibility of being in the way of a celestial body big enough to cause enormous harm. But if we are to do something about it, we have to know where they all are; and that means all of them! All the most as it is critical that we know of any possible impact years or decades in advance.
Hence the importance of Spaceguard-like projects to perform systematic surveys of near-Earth objects. That's where the priority has to lie at the beginning (and the easiest thing to do). The steps after that being to study them at close quarters, and maybe an actual deflection test, which could even prove useful if we also are to extract construction materials from them for space installations...
Ahh, cut the guy some slack. He's a professor trying to be cool, much like the nerdy, singing high school teachers played by Will Ferrel and Ana Gastronomyficator on SNL.
He does point out that blowing up a moon-sized asteroid with a few nukes is impossible, and that doing it within a few seconds of impact of Earth is pointless. We die. Death Star blows up, Endor dies. Mother ship in ID4 blows up, we die.
I am for the complete Trantorization of Earth.
It does, however, derive from the same root word as corpse.
I am for the complete Trantorization of Earth.
my kung fu school followers and I are going to take...
But what about my John Wayne Gun-Totin' school followers? We'll make quick work of you unarmed goofballs.
I am for the complete Trantorization of Earth.
> and when you run out of bullets ?
Then I sell off your bodies to necrophiles.
I am for the complete Trantorization of Earth.
Oh, and if anyone is left standing, I'll just use the bayonette on the end of the gun.
Martial arts came about as a response to arms control -- sword arms control. There's the fantasy of movies and highly controlled sports contests, then there's the reality of hard, cold steel.
I am for the complete Trantorization of Earth.
Ehh, I'm on a roll.
I think the erection you guys get watching Raul Julia effortlessly kill a highly trained military guy is just a little too firm.
I am for the complete Trantorization of Earth.
> For a pretty good wow factor, this site has an
> online calculator
Bah! I tried to calculate how fast a testicle would have to be going to wipe out the earth. At 4cm diameter, I found out the calculator only goes up to about 72km/s as a speed. Stupid artificial limitation by the programmer. A testical going at 99.999% the speed of light might be able to disrupt a star.
I am for the complete Trantorization of Earth.
A World in a Grain of Sand / Heaven in a Wild Flower,
Infinity in the Palm of your Hand / And Eternity in an Hour.
I dunno, but replace "Govt" with "Dogbert" and I'm sold.
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www.lucernesys.comHorizon: Calendar-based personal finance
Last I read, nuking certain asteroids is futile. Some of these things have recently been found to be a clump of smaller rocks held together by their collective gravity, instead of one big rock. Simulations found that nuking it would only spread the rocks around a bit, and most of them would still be heading straight for us, even reclumping again. This is bad, and it also makes using braking rockets on them difficult. We need a better solution.
Personally, I'm counting on the aliens to rescue us at the last minute :)
Music speeds up when you yawn, but does not change pitch.
Duck under your desk! Hey if it will protect you from nuclear holocaust, surely your desk will protect you from a measely asteroid.
I had a thought... really!
The chance that any object will collide with the Earth, however, is not calculable given the amount of data we possess about intrasolar/near extrasolar objects.
We can't predict specifically when these things will hit, but we have enough data to know the odds.
What do we know? There have been many millions of years between the big ones, and the rate continues to drop off as the millions of years pass, as there are a limited number of rocks and they can only fall on a planet once.
Consider where the technology will be in even a hundred years, and it doesn't look like there's much point in hurrying to figure out how to stop these things with current technology.
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we cannot determine exact odds. All we can say is that is it very unlikely
Since interplanetary ballistics is completely deterministic, if we had them catalogued, we could predict if and when they'd strike. Since we don't, we have to settle for calculating odds from the past and a relatively small sample of current data. In a deterministic system, either we have exact information, or we have probability based on sample data, we can't have exact probability.
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While we're saying exactly what we mean...
I believe that current probabilities that a strike will hit in the next decade or century are accurate for practical purposes. We calculate that there is well under a 0.1% chance of a catastrophic meteor strike in the next century. That's plenty good enough for me.
Since the odds are that viable human colonies will be created off-Earth, and technology will advance to the point of making asteroid defense simple, within the next century, I see little point in emphasizing immediate development of asteroid defense.
We're like a 6-year-old boy who has just realized that the oak tree next to his house might fall on it, and realized the possibility of figuring out when it will fall and cutting it down so it falls the other way. He isn't really capable of doing it yet, and when he grows up a little more, he'll take such problems in stride. If he's a halfway bright boy, he'll realize this is a problem for later, and from what he knows about oak trees, probably not an immediate threat, and he won't worry about it.
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This dude checks out the movies and rates them based on science.. check it out.. some of those asteroid movies are really bad...m l
http://www.badastronomy.com/bad/movies/index.ht
To smash a single atom, all mankind was intent / Now any day the atom may return the compliment
the reasons are many. we've found other planets far away...let them take over the job of sentient life. earth failed. just need a planet-sized asteroid to blow the thing up. just make sure to get the leftover humans on mars or orbiting the sun.
--how long till the operators are jailed for anime-induced pedophelia and
Are there any plans in the works tho chip a small piece off and aim it towards Redmond? Maybe we can throw a win2k cluster at this math and we might have a solution for how to do it by the time an asteroid hits.
Why are they hemerrhoids and not asteroids?
DocWatson
MessEdUp
#/var/www/v
The only way to protect earth from asteroids is to send a little triangular ship into space to shoot them into smaller asteroids, and repeat until the remaining asteroids are not on the screen. Did I say screen? I mean't the galaxy, err what?
HOW'S MY POSTING? CALL 1-800-POSTING
However, for the A-team scenario to work, they would need to land on the asteroid, get into a gunfight with drug dealers who live there. In the ensuing firefight they expend 5000 rounds of ammunition with no casualties, and then get captured.
The fate of the world would then rest on the fact that they villains conveniently lock up our heroes in a fully equipped workshop come asteroid-destroying-nuclear-bomb-factory. The team escape (another 500 rounds ammo: no casualties), blow up the asteroid (villains tied up in the back of the spaceship so no casualties there).
The story ends with Hannibal saying: 'I like it when a plan comes together' followed by the predictable 'Shut up fool ' from Mr T. No wait a minute I forgot, they'll also have to knock Mr T out for the return journey, I pity the fool who has to do that.
Mr Churchill, If I was your wife I would put poison in your tea! Madam, If I was your Husband I would drink it!
"I was told that the telescope could clearly identify a car, allowing you to determine the model and year if it were floating in the asteroid belt. " If that is true, than why wouldn't they use it to image the Apollo landing sites and put the stupid moon hoax crap to rest?
The age of the Universe is 12-15 billion years relative to what? There is no absolute measure of time, and objects such as quasars are so far away that they approach relativistic velocities. Time, to the quasar, is "streched" out so that 12-15 billion years to us could be several times that to any object traveling fast enough with respect to earth. This is the reason that muons can reach the surface of they earth, even though they should decay long before that. Because muons travel at relativistic speeds, the time is measured differently from their perspective. In short, by your reasoning, astronomers would have already largely solved the problem of the topography of the universe if they assumed that 12-15 billion years to us limited the "diameter" of the universe to 30 billion lightyears at the uppermost limit.
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Show me a supercomputer, or even a DC network of supercomputers that can calculate the exact information given every sizeable intrasolar and near-extrasolar object faster than the events occur in RL. In theory we could calculate exactly if/when an object will colide with any other given object, not in practice. The further in the future you attempt to "predict," the smaller/farther the objects you have to take into account. The vast majority of impacts will happen thousands (or millions, or billions... until the sun expands and consumes the earth) of years from now, and in order to calculate that far ahead, you'd need to catalogue every minor object as well. You would also need to accurately determine the outcome of collisions not involving earth.
I must admit, however, now that I've read it again, the exact wording of what I said was pretty retarded. What I meant to say is that we cannot consider the odds we use today to be an accurate estimate, as they are not based upon direct observation, only the assumption that what has happened in the past is exactly what will happen in the future. When I said "exact probability" (an oxymoron!) I meant probability that is derived from direct observation.
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The article really plays down the chances of a sizeable celestial object colliding with the Earth. The chance that any specific object will collide with the Earth is astronomically small to say the least. The chance that any object will collide with the Earth, however, is not calculable given the amount of data we possess about intrasolar/near extrasolar objects. I interned at the Subaru telescope, and someone in control of that organization must feel that the threat of an Earth impact is significant because although the telescope can take clear pictures (I have one, but it was given to me on the condition that I not distribute it) of large stellar objects 50 billon lightyears away (while only halfway calibrated!), it is being used primarily for near-solar and intrasolar observation. To put that kind of magnification power into perspective, I was told that the telescope could clearly identify a car, allowing you to determine the model and year if it were floating in the asteroid belt. You could alternatively read the label and judge the depth of the dimples on a golf ball if it were sitting on the summit of Mt. Fuji (the telescope is in Hilo, Hawaii). The only reason you need something that powerful for near-solar and closer distances is if you looking for medium/small (1km diam. objs easily fit into the small category) objects that possess a very low albedo (reflectivity). An asteroid with the right composition, for instance, can reflect so little sunlight that it would be invisible to nearly all means of passive detection except when you have the power of massive magnification of the Subaru telescope type. Such an asteroid would easily be able to approach earth undetected until much too late. If I remember correctly, a fairly large low-albedo asteroid passed near the earth just a few years ago, and remained undetected until it was inside the moon's orbital path.
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IIRC, There are less "official" (i.e. gov't employees w/ access to NASA's technology) people looking for asteriods/meters heading towards earth than workers behind the counter at your local McDonalds. I cant find the link to where i read that right now, so you'll just have to believe me on this one ;)
How would a world where nobody is repsonsible for anyone but themselves deal with threats from outer space? It's all very well to claim that companies will look after their own pollution problems if they fear lawsuits, but who gets sued here? The asteroid? The cosmos?
This provides a perfect example of why libertarian govenrments do absolutely none of the tasks a real government should do!
Why not let Homer teach us something. Get the local imbecile to build a bomb shelter that isn't large enough and start praying to god. In the end none of this will matter because we all know that George W. Bush has backed out of the kioto treaty. Therefore, America will produce enough greenhouse gases to destroy the asteroid when it enters the atmosphere. Once again america saves the world from destruction. The only question that remains is, who would play the lead male role in the film and win an oscar.
Well, we could remove them with high-power lasers. This has already been proposed, and is quite feasible:
In-depth article on ORION space debris removal project
Photonics Spectra discussion of ORION project
ORION summary
ORION details
Military Discussion of LISK-BROOM
High power laser ablation conference
---- David Phipps david@infiniteresource.net