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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 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.
...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 ====
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.
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
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.
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?
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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.
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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
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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 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...
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.
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!
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
I agree with everything else you said, but... the area a modern, 50-100 megaton H-bomb takes out is considerable. I'm posting in Philadelphia; if someone did an airburst of a major nuke in the middle of New Jersey, they'd take out Philly, New York, and all the suburbanites around; New Haven would probably be an uncomfortable place to be, too. A bomb targeted at a city is going to take out much more than just that city.
Fatalities would probably be much higher than 50% per city in the event of a global war; the complete breakdown of almost all social supports means that not only do the injured or buried have just about no chance of getting aid, but anyone in a big city is going to start getting really hungry pretty soon. Few big cities have as much as three day's food supplies or a day's water in stock; with the electricity out, bridges down, roads a mess, things on fire, water pipes wrecked, and the like, the basic tools of survival are going to get pretty rare. FEMA isn't going to be much help as they've been blown up too, so...
As for missiles working... well, the missiles have certainly been tested a lot with no payload, and they seem pretty reliable. Many are the same ones used for space launches- the Titan series, for instance- and they launch on target about 95% of the time. The bombs have been tested quite a bit on deserted islands and such. Admittedly, the bombs and the missiles haven't been tested in concert, but that seems like a pretty simple rig-up to me.
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!
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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Because the moon hoax is not even considered worthy of consideration by any astronomer worthy of the title.
1) In a vacuum, or near vacuum, stars cannot appear in the same picture as a high-albedo object in direct sunlight unless they are edited in later. The film would have been instantly identified as a hoax if there actually were stars in the background.
2) The flag waves because of the kinetic energy imparted to the material when the astronauts are putting it in the ground.
3) The flag is held upright by a metal rod. Using the metal rod to hold the flag up was actually a controversial issue for a while, but it was decided that a sagging American flag would look pretty sad.
4) Most importantly, you don't need the Subaru telescope to see if the flag is on the surface of the moon. The Russian government would have jumped at the chance to point out such an obvious hoax, and the Cold War ended long after telescopes powerful enough to verify (or not!) the landing site were easily available to a large government. If it were all a hoax, we would have found out a long time ago.
5) It would have been a fairly easy and straightforward task to detect the origin of the video/radio signals being broadcast. Even if the Russians didn't have decent telescopes in their posession, they would have been able to triangulate the origin of the signals, just as America verified that Sputnik was actually sending out radio signals from orbit.
Anything I missed? I didn't pay any attention to the stuff they aired on TV, and I responded to the things I keep hearing people talk about.
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