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Stealth Asteroid Misses Earth
Paradoxish writes: "Gah. According to cnn.com an asteroid hiding in an astronomical blindspot nearly blindsided Earth. The scary part is that scientists didn't notice it until four days AFTER it passed by. Apparently, it would've been similiar to the Tunguska explosion. Scary." As long as they keep missing Earth, we're OK.
That's great. Just wonderful. Our species keeps squabbling over the same pice of dirt for 5,000 years in the Mid-East and completely misses one of the top threats to humanity. We have the technology to give us some protection against this type of thing. Let us implement it since we apparently got a 2nd chance.
if governments would listen to scientists who are interested in preserving the human race, instead of businesses that are interested in enslaving it.
Most likely, some equipment picked it up. The problem is that there are not enough people and computing power to monitor it all. With the exception of the seti@home experiment and other distributed computing projects, all the telescopes and observatories on earth can only monitor approximately 1% of the sky at any given time. When you take this into consideration, I'd bet that there have been several meteors that have gone unnoticed completely. In this case, Ignorance truly is bliss.
What's the point if an asteroid is going to hit what are we going to do exactly?
I know I'm going to hell, I'm just trying to get good seats.
Thanks for telling me how dead I'd be if it hit here. Couldn't you have talked about it hitting somewhere where I don't live? Like Kabul, or something? Maybe Baghdad?
They were trying to get you to imagine what the devastation might have been like. Thanks to the presidents Bush, one does not need any imagination to envision what Kabul or Baghdad would look like.
"Don't blame me, I voted for Kodos!"
OK time for some back of the envelope math to counter the hysteria.
.12/667 or around 1/5600. Then IF it hit it would be more likely to do no damage than not depending on the impact zone.
461,000 kilometers was the distance it missed by. The projected target area of that circle is PI*R^2 or about 667 billion square kilometers.
Radius of the Earth is around 6360 kilometers give or take. Projected target area of the Earth is therefore about 0.12 billion square kilometers. So the probability this class of object would collide with teh earth is roughly
Of course they don't just count objects inside the 1.2X distance to the moon, range when they scream "near miss". Inside the moon, beyond the moon, they all count for the headlines.
Excuse me for not losing any sleep.
The nuclear arms of the US and the Russian Confederation are now in a "Launch of Response" configuration which is a step back from "Launch on Ready." The practical result of this status is that the respective Presidents have less time to decide whether or not a percieved event is a first strike. IIRC for russia, that means about 10 minutes from detecting a missile launch (in order to guarantee a 'sufficient' counterstrike). We've come pretty damn close to anihilation before. In the mid nineties, a Finnish research rocket almost triggered WWWIII (Boris Yeltsin chose not to launch a response, despite the fact that the Russian military could not be sure they were not seeing a first strike). This is scary, what's even scarier is that the Finns told the Russians to expect a rocket launch!
I found this info in a Scientifica American article: Taking Nuclear Weapons off Hair-Trigger Alert, November 1997.
Is Russia's satelite and observation network functioning properly? They can't even pay their soldiers reliably (though they seem to be feeding them all these days). Do you think they'll be able to tell the difference if a rock lands anywhere near anything 'strategic' on Russian territory?
Let's improve our detection technology now.
Of course, the nuclear weapons are the real problem and we need to get away from the insane "Launch on Response" posture.