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120,000 km Is Still Too Close
texchanchan writes: "BBC report: '...on 14 June, an asteroid (maybe as big as 120 meters in diameter)... made one of the closest-ever recorded approaches to the Earth.
..' but was only discovered three days later. This is well within the moon's orbit. 'If 2002MN had hit the Earth, it would have caused local devastation similar to that which occurred in Tunguska, Siberia, in 1908...'"
Without Tunguska, what would we compare these things to? Krakatoa?
"Would it kill you to put down the toilet seat?" -- Maya Angelou
And they only have a matter of days/hours to prepare, I'd rather now know. Just let it and let me in die.
but was only discovered three days later.
Id like to thank the United States government for CUTTING BACK funds to search for stuff like this. I think currently we map 5% of the skies? No wonder it was discovered 3 days later, it was in the other 95% of the skies we dont have enough money to look at.
In college, really poor, need a flatscreen.
Has anyone done the calculations to determine where the thing would have landed if it had impacted Earth?
Every time we hear about one of these it's closer than the last time.
Is somebody aiming these things?
but was only discovered three days later.
Three days too late if you ask me.
In college, really poor, need a flatscreen.
"that the space object was only detected on 17 June"
I didnt really want to know that.
----- Whats wrong with this picture? http://www.revoh.org:1234/whatswrong
... to reach this point, when we understand our odds were so crappy. Oddly, we managed to live through a lot of these events before, and have survived a few thousands of years of recorded history without a problem.
Something tells me that the people pushing this fear either have an interest in investments in related science or in (gasp) selling newspapers or advertising space!
If we get hit by a big rock, we'll dust ourselves off. If there is an ELE, we'll have a challenge. Maybe the best thing for the human race, all things considered. At least it could give us a unified rallying point....
-- Mal: "Well they tell you: never hit a man with a closed fist. But it is, on occasion, hilarious."
I thought it was a little windy lately....
"Just because you're a genius doesn't make you a smart guy!" -- Narrator, Powerpuff Girls
maybe the US gov't would like a asteriod to destroy some big buildings with a couple thousand people in it before they actually do anything about it.
or of course they could actually _get_a_clue_ and start taking prevenitive measures BEFORE bad things happen. oh and all of the people who say the odds are a billion to one of this happening were probally the same people who said AIDS wouldnt become an epidemic and terrorists wouldnt attack the use.
"Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I'm not sure about the the universe." --Albert Einstein
If it happens very infrequently,
and you cant do anything about,
and cant really see it,
you just waste a lot of mental energy.
wasn't there a speculation that the terrible devestation in siberia was caused by a small piece of anti-matter?
GoatPigSheep, the 3 most important food groups
Obviously such an Earth/Asteroid collision would be devastating to the surrounding area, but wouldn't a Moon/Asteroid have some Pretty Bad effects of its own?
I almost failed high school physics back in my day, but it seems to me that we ought to worry about collisions with asteroids this size for both the Moon and the Earth. ~23,000 mph (from the article) is pretty frickin' fast and 120 meters is not terribly small. Seems like that could carry a whole lot of energy.
If this is not a problem, how big of an asteroid would we need (roughly, of course,) to cause a problem?
Sharpies don't just sniff themselves.
"Well, our object collision budget's a million dollars. That allows us to track about 3% of the sky, and begging your pardon sir, but it's a big-ass sky."
Do you see the sig? Do you have it in your sights? Why yes, Miss Moneypenny...
What I'd like to know is what was the asteroid's effect on earth's seismic activity during the past few days.
Every time we hear about one of these it's closer than the last time.
Is somebody aiming these things?
Analysis shows that they are originating from a far-away planet. An ugly planet. A bug planet.
GMD
watch this
When in doubt, parenthesize. At the very least it will let some poor schmuck bounce on the % key in vi. (Larry Wall)
We'll see any real asteroid threats about 3 days sooner.
OddManIn: A Game of guns and game theory.
C'mon, we all know that, no matter how close an asteroid comes, the governments of Earth aren't going to change a single thing about trying to detect them. It's kind of like (srry for this, but it's all I could think of) terrorist attacks...we don't actually do anything about terrorism until we take a gigantic hit.
Until an asteroid actually smacks into Earth, the governments (specificly U.S) will continue to cut back funding for searching for these things. Hopefully, when an asteriod finally DOES hit us, it'll be one of the smaller ones, and only knock out a few thousand/million people.
--
http://nemilar.net - Not your grandmother's soup kitchen
Here's a link to some information about one of the most famous and asteroid/meteor explosions in history. It landed in Tunguska, Siberia.
We had to destroy the sig to save the sig.
Yeah, right! The author has no idea how carefully STScI checks the HST pointing to make sure you don't look anywhere near the Sun...
The only way to detect these suckers coming in from the Sun side is radar or spacecraft telescopes at the Lagrange points, not earth-orbiting scopes. Those are just a handful of objects, though: for the vast majority, I expect robotic camera surveys are quite sufficient, if someone coughs up the money.
Alas, if one of these hits the earth, then "the terrorists will already have won"(TM) - or rather, they won't need to win.
"I will take the Ring," he said, "though I do not know the way."
These guys have obviously not tried my three alarm chilli and some of my homebrew. Talk about destruction... thank god there were no open flames near by last time.
That thing in Tunguska was a root that
self destructed because nobody would hug it.
Hug a root today!
if the asteroid approached from the direction of the sun, or generally there abouts, it would have been hidden by the sun's glare to astronomers. some say to use radr, but our curretn radr ranges would give enough warning. we only saw it because it passed the horzin and was lit by the sun behind Earth. sorry but thgat be the laws of physics
Well then just what in hell are we paying all those astronomers for, anyway? And for that matter, all those astrologers? Next time I spot an astrophysicist tooling around in a Porsche I'm going to give him a piece of my mind.
Silly americans.
They say that we couldn't see this one because it came from the direction of the sun- but it also wasn't big enough to cause any global damage, just to mess up about 2000 square km.
See, I figure, anything big enough to do some real hurt coming from the direction of the sun, we should be able to notice by the eclipse...
"Gee, I didn't hear anything in the news about an eclipse- and since when did the moon get that shape?"
Run for your lives if you ever see an unscheduled eclipse, folks. Though I don't know where you'd run to, only that running would surely get your mind off of your impending doom.
Have a nice day!
Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms should be the name of a store, not a government agency.
"2002MN"
Does that stand for "Near Miss 2002" (in reverse, of course, so as to not sow fear, uncertainty, and doubt)?
If you lived in Tunguska in 1908 you probably wouldn't be so glib.
But I agree, worrying about it is useless... All the indignation seems to ignore the following two facts:
1) If the gub'ment did know about it, they would tell us.
2) There is anything they could do about it if they knew about it. Morgan Freeman ain't President and Bruce Willis ain't going to save you folks!
As an astronomer friend of mine used to say -- "If there was an asteroid heading for the earth why would they tell us?".
I am not a number! I am a man! And don't you
But I stepped on it.
that was a close call! Between the flyby asteroids and the 82 degree weather we're having in DC, I sure could go for some beer right about now. ;-)
Isn't there is wild conspiracy theory about Tunguska which says that the impact wasn't caused by an asteroid but by Tesla's experiments with long range energy weapons ?
You are the dot in slashdot !
How far out would we have to notice an asteroid in order to figure out how to shoot it down? Astronomers have talked about repurposing an old warhead to destroy or alter the path of a planetoid for years, but do plans really exist?
I shutter to think of the red tape involved in launching a missle, let alone the science and engineering behind getting it to hit the object. An ICBM designed to nuke something on Earth wouldn't have the power to escape Earth's orbit, so a Delta or something similar would have to be used. NASA doesn't have spare Deltas, built and fueled on the launch pad ready to go!
So don't worry about it... as has already been said in this discussion... our species has survived small impacts like the one in Tunuska and worse.
120,000 km sounds close, but consider this:
The Earth is about 7,926 miles (12,756 km) in diameter. Roughly 12,000 km, or about a tenth of the flyby distance. The chance of any object that comes within 120,000km of actually hitting the earth is about (0.1)^2, or roughly 1%. This is still unsettlingly likely, but it's not exactly doomsday.
I used to bulls-eye womp-rats in my pants
And it appears to have crashed into the BBC's web server...
2,000 square kilometres is a lot of destroyed real estate if one of these things ever hits a populated or coastal area. Give the Defense Department the responsibility for defending us against these things. They are the only ones that might get the budget to do it.
Then it's getting close to what a rogue Forrest Ranger can do in Colorado!
Computer Science is Applied Philosophy
Use a massive array of Hubble-like (but much cheaper) telescopes to scan space. When an asteroid on an intercept course is found, target it with a high intensity COIL (Chemical Oxygen Iodine) or similar type laser. it would probably have to be space based.
The laser will ablate away material from the surface of the asteroid. This in turn will give the asteroid a delta V (or thrust) in a vector that nudges it out of its collision course.
Obviously the earlier we see the asteroid the better, otherwise there might not be enough time to thrust it out of the way.
"There are laws that enslave men, and laws that set them free. " - Sean Connery as King Arthur
SOWNED FRANCE!
No politician will spend the money on this until it's already too late. No amount of lobbying is going to change this, and the amount of money isn't even that large. IIRC some of the projects were only looking for a few million dollars. You don't need hordes of astronomers - you just need the automated equipment to locate and track asteroids in the sky. Much of the technology already exists, projects like NEAT and others have been very successful.
Until there is a major loss of life due to an impact, there isn't going to be an research. Just hope that you're not under it, that it's not mistaken for an "act of terrorism", triggering a thermonuclear war, and that it's not much bigger than a hundred meters or so, like this one. Unless, of course, you're willing to live like a pauper and do the work yourself. I'm not.
There really is little you can do. So don't worry about it. The odds aren't really that high, but you don't know when your number is going to come up, either. Hopefully China will put a base on the moon and play "mine's bigger than yours" to everyone's benefit.
Makes you wonder if all the hoopla surrounding SETI; all that computing power; and all that money might be better spent scanning the night sky for dark blobs that might end life HERE as opposed to looking for little green men on hopelessly far away stars.
..don't panic
That they did know about it, but didn't want there to be mass panic?
If you knew a rock bigger than a football field could hit somewhere (but no one knows where), and cause death and destrution that puts 9/11 to shame.
Would you panic?
Couldnt we build something similar to SETI that would distribute the load among thousands of cpus to compute the chances of these near earth objects trying to knock us out of existance ?
:(
I understand SETI being useful and all that, but its gonna be a sad day if those Aliens reach us a couple of days after our extinction.
They might just think that cockroaches ruled the planet
Rapid Nirvana
This is why the US government needs to get Bruce Willis under contract.
It was heading someplace, say Los Angeles, we could just keep quiet about it and do the world some good for a change.
That a rock in space detected as an asteroid is part of a bigger cluster?
People are always moaning, "Why won't the government do anything? Why oh why???"
./'ers should develop an open-source software package for using relatively inexpensive 'robotic' scopes (available off-the-shelf these days) to look at patches of sky and compare subsequent images looking for moving objects.
...ala Seti@Home but of course requiring more technical skill of the users...could be very effective...and, needless to say, fun!
The technology is there to build automated telescopes and image processing/search software to look for these things.
Maybe instead of whining about it, some enterprising
Such an effort, if implemented by enough people,
The earth is 12,000km in diameter (approximately). The asteriod is 120m in diameter and passed within 120,000km of earth. Working in just two dimensions because that's how the earth will appear as a target to the passing asteroid, then:
1) "surface area" of the earth is:
A = pi * r^2 = 3.14 * 6,000^2 = 110,000,000 square kilometers
2) The area within the 120,000km radius is:
A = pi * r^2 = 3.14 * 60,000^2 = 11,000,000,000 square kilometers
3) The area of the asteroid is in practice infinitesimal compared with either of these measurements.
So to some approximation, the chances of the asteroid hitting earth if it travels within 120,000 km of the planet is:
110,000,000/11,000,000,000 = 0.01 = 1%
This is certainly not a zero probability, but it is still pretty small.
Of course this ignores a lot of factors, including the Earth's gravity well and the relative vectors of the two objects. A real calculation would reveal different probabilities.
But even when one of these asteroids passes this close - which is only known to have happened 6 times since we've been able to record these events (about 50 years?) - there is still only about a 1 in 100 chance it will hit the planet.
I'm going to be worrying a lot more about travelling on the highway than I am about asteroid collisions.
Sailing over the event horizon
Especially those of us with relatives who lost their lives saving Europe. Yeah.
Or, super-duper good hotel rates, Metro passes, Tube passes, etc. Or, maybe the Brits can get off their high horses and act POLITELY towards Americans. Considering how we saved them, it's not that much to ask.
"Would it kill you to put down the toilet seat?" -- Maya Angelou
That image in the article is quite out of scale.
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
France's solution to unemployment is to make it so you can't work more than 35 hours a week.
...
That actually makes sense.
Fifty years ago, half the population of the U.S. was employed in agriculture. Today, it's less than 2%, and they grow more food than the country can eat. And many of them are paid not to farm. If you suddenly put nearly half the working population out of work, then add in all the women entering the work force who didn't used to be there
I think we're starting to approach the kinds of problems that have until now only been considered in speculative sci-fi. When we only need about 10% of the population to work to provide for everyone, what will the other 90% do for a living? And how do we pick which 10% it's going to be?
Nope, no sig
So we haven't had anything really nasty happen for five thousand years? Big deal. The last big round of extinctions occurred maybe 40,000 years ago. Maybe it'll be another 40,000 years, but I wouldn't bet the future of my species on that assumption! These are regular events. If you believe some theories of evolution, such disasters helped create our own species.
But if they didn't find out about this one until 3 days after it passed, then isn't is probable that some other one(s) have passed closer? And don't they mean that this is the biggest one that could have caused massive damage. I believe that small ones hit the earth on a somewhat regular basis.
The more I learn about science, the more my faith in God increases.
Check out British lives lost, as a percentage of population, in the World Wars, vs. American lives lost as a percentage of population. And then come back and tell me about the British "high horse." The sacrifices Britain made in 1914-1918 and 1939-1945 (note that the Americans weren't even involved until 1917 and 1941, respectively) are really mind-boggling.
(If you want to talk absolute loss of life, of course, the Russians have the UK, the US, and everyone else put together beat.)
And yes, I'm an American. And a veteran. I'm proud of my service (including Desert Storm) and I certainly don't want to minimize the American contribution to winning the World Wars. But to imply that we were the sole factor in "saving Europe" is ahistorical nonsense.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
Did they ever say how those bugs were shooting the asteroids?
I mean, could the bugs even do space travel? I assume so, weren't there other planets they were suposedly fighting on? (at the end of the movie)
I never could figure it out. I would love to see the creature that threw those things though.
Preperation A: Shrinks Asteroids. As well as relieves the burning associated with Astroid impacts.
Hey, I'm not saying they had a hard time, they could just be a little thankful, and less hoity-toity to Americans.
Thanks for your contribution, BTW.
"Would it kill you to put down the toilet seat?" -- Maya Angelou
Your calculation is simply computing the volume of space which we would consider a near miss. However, since the asteroids travel in a line the more meaningful measure would be a ratio of not the volume, but rather the area. Imagine an asteroid is headed toward us, the earth would look like a circle in the center of the near miss zone. Thus a ratio of (pi * 244000^2) to (pi * 4000^2) seems more appropriate when considering the odds of the rock hitting us. Still, I agree with the gist of your post: the near misses are still a lot more common than the hits.
Assuming this was made of rock, hit land, and only moving at 10Km/sec, It would have been accelerated by gravity during the fall to somewhere around 11.2Km/sec and yielded a crater something on the order of 1Km diameter and 0.2Km deep. (a bit smaller than the crater in arizona) It would have also caused a magnitude 6.6 earthquake.
for other possibilities, see: this page
These stories usually crop up when someone in the space business needs a bit of publicity to support their latest funding demands.
Having said that, it does always get some newspaper headlines.
The odds of a catastrophic meteorite hit are pretty small, certainly smaller than the chances of really big earthquakes.
However, at least you know that you are living near a volcano or on top of a fault and can learn to live with it (or move). The thing that worries people about meteorites appears to be the fact that they could strike anywhere, any time, without warning.
Has anyone actually seen serious proposals to DO SOMETHING about the meteorite menace? or is it all just hot air
Now we notice that there are lots of rocks whizzing by the planet, because we're bothering to look. But just like the microbes, it's always been so. We're only upset because we're noticing it.
This is the way the universe is. Get used to it. It is not headline news.
Of course.
I suppose that would then make my current issues with this job of mine a moot point.
There are some odd things afoot now, in the Villa Straylight.
CLIT and KLERCK, who were working for the NSA and NASA respectively, told me about it via email.
It wasn't announced to the general public for fear of causing instability in the Middle East.
He obviously has good connections throughout the galaxy. That's why he can't be found - he is not longer on Earth.
So some things are falling from space - big deal. Some organisations love to crash satellites into the Earth whenever they please.
Bah.
I assumed some bug probably shot some energy blast out of its ass to aim the asteroid.
Also they said that the bugs used asteroids to "hurl their spores into space". So I guess their method of space travel was to send an egg-covered asteroid to another planet.
XJS*C4JDBQADN1.NSBN3*2IDNEN*GTUBE-STANDARD-ANTI-U
Maybe these things should hit the space agencies doorstep, lets see them wriggle their way out of this one :D
----- Whats wrong with this picture? http://www.revoh.org:1234/whatswrong
I tend to agree with the poster that said that governments will only take notice when one of these actually does hit the earth. I imagine it will happen sooner or later, it being more a question of when than if? A 500 meter asteroid would make quite a mess if it impacted near to an inabited area. It would make GW's anti-terror plans to naught in seconds. Perhaps that would be a good thing.
I saw one of these this morning on the way to work. Except there was a woman driving it. While talking on a cell phone. And it said Ford Expedition on the back. Actually, come to think of it, it seemed more dangerous than an asteroid.
OK, I think we've all seen/read/heard the theories of what would happen if a large asteroid hit Earth, but what if a giant asteroid hit the moon?
How big would it have to be to knock the moon from its orbit? Or even alter the moon's orbit at all? And if so, what impact on our environment here would it have? If we had no moon, no tides, etc., what would that do to earth life?
Few years back, I spent three months there on business. I can't tell you the number of times I would be sitting in a pub, and an old pensioner, would come up to me and say "Thank You." To which, at first, the would get a blank stare.
Then, he would go on and I would realized that I was being thanked for something that my countrymen did fifty years ago, simply because I had an American accent.
When was the last time you thanked a citizen of France for that help, back in the Revolutionary War?
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
Y'know, we always talk about the sort of devistation an astroid of size would cause, if it were to impact with the Earth. Let's say this one impacted with the Moon. What sort of ramifacations should we expect? Could it cause enough of a shift in the orbit of the moon, to change our tidal patterns? (And what would that do to our oceans?)
Of course if it were to completely knock the moon out of it's orbit, that might be an even bigger worry for us down here, should it fall from it's long-standing orbit. Or even if it spun off into space. Imagine our nights, without the light of the moon.
Awk! Pieces of eight. Pieces of eight. Pieces of seven... ERROR: General Protection Fault. [Paroty Error.]
For the benefit of the non-English, a football pitch is a football (soccer) field. That was about how big the asteroid was according to the article.
When will this planetary madness end?
8:03 P.M. EST
Bush declares a "War on Asteroids".
Bush: Our nation faces a threat to our freedoms, and the stakes could not be higher. We are the target of enemies who boast they want to kill -- kill all Americans, kill all Jews, kill all Christians, kill all Muslims, and kill all mankind. We've seen that type of hate before -- although they're near misses, the only possible response is to confront it, and to defeat it.
This enemy tries to hide behind a peaceful cosmos, yet its murderous intent is obvious.
We will, no doubt, face new challenges. Make no mistake. Although we have absolutely no idea where you are, when you'll come, or even how big you are - wherever you are, whether in our solar system, in our galaxy, and outside the galaxy, we WILL track you down, and we'll defeat you.
Thank you.
[APPLAUSE]
We're leaving Mother Earth
To save the human race
Our Star Blazers
Searching for a distant star
Heading off to Iscandar
Leaving all we love behind
Who knows what danger we'll find?
We must be strong and brave
Our home we've got to save
If we don't in just one year
Mother Earth will disappear
Fighting with the Gamilons
We won't stop until we've won
Then we'll return and when we arrive
The Earth will survive
With our Star Blazers
Forget about US govt. Its budget is gone. US now cannot protect even own people - no need to speak about whole planet.
Yeah, that part never made any semblance of sense to me. How can a species with no technology whatsoever hurl a rock across the galaxy and hit a tiny planet? And wouldn't it take centuries at least? Probably more like hundreds of thousands of years, and that would be from a close star.
Is this discussed in better detail in the novel?
"Mind, as manifested by the capacity to make choices, is to some extent present in every electron." -Freeman Dyson
Did they ever say how those bugs were shooting the asteroids?
I have never read the book -- I only saw the movie. I, too, was a bit baffled at this. However, I remember reading a very interesting letter to the editor in the LA Times when this movie came out. His claim was that all the critics who were blasting the movie as a violent fantasy were missing the "real point" of the movie -- that it was an anti-war film. In the movie, there never was any explanation for how these bugs were supposedly launching and steering these asteroids towards Earth. In fact when you first see Klendathu you see the bugs possess no technology. Yet, all that was needed was for the leaders to claim the bugs did it and everyone was willing to go to war with them. The author of this letter was pointing out that this same kind of mindless acceptance of a convienient scapegoat was the same stuff that the director (a German) saw first-hand growing up in Nazi Germany. To further hammer the point home, director Verhoeven peppered the film full of rediculous propaganda commericals.
That letter made me look at that movie from a different perspective. It is chilling that in the film, no one questions whether the bugs were even capable, let alone willing, to commit such an act of aggression against Earth. I'm sure we can all think of examples here on Earth of peoples being too eager to go to war without a good reason.
GMD
watch this
before.... think about it, what would happen if they told us that a astroid was heading towards earth?? ppl would start panicking.. So i bet they hided it from us until they knew for sure that there was no danger.
And the largest thermonuclear device ever exploded in the atmosphere period was done by the Soviets in 1961 [hiroshima.jp] and was ~50MT.
What's even spookier is that the Russians detonated this Largest Nuclear Weapon Ever while there was a no-nuke-test treaty in place with the US! Needless to say, the Russian's action was a dramatic end to the treaty. Here's one example in history where a treaty meant absolutely nothing.
GMD
watch this
I would actually like to correct this a bit. While the law does specifically say that, one has to understand that the Arkansas River is governed by a very large number of locks and dams called the McClellan-Kerr Arkansas River Navigation Project which consists of 17 locks and dams (12 in Arkansas and 5 in Oklahoma, diagram of the system ). Since this is an entirely managed waterway, one has to have laws on just how to manage said waterway and this is one of them. Oklahoma has a similiar law governing the level of the river through Tulsa. As this section of the river travels primarily through sparsely populated areas, it would be possible to intentionally flood certain areas simply to allow populated areas to NOT be flooded. Before you quote stupid laws or other government actions, make sure you understand that the really stupid ones almost seem to make sense until you actually think about them ( stupid stupid stupid and oh so many more past stupid laws that one CAN'T laugh at even in a literal interpretation). Jeremy
Do yourself a favor and think about it. Scary stuff this may be, but how is it news?? Enlighten me.
What's in a Sig?
By your logic, we can ignore red lights and pass through them without slowing down since we never actually get hit.
Until we do.
Astronomers know that these objects have missed us, but that's not what interests them. The guy running the red light probably has a good idea how many near misses he has had, but astronomers really don't because there's never been more than a very poorly funded effort to find these objects. So they track the near misses, especially the very near misses. From the orbital mechanics, we know that anything that gets within 100x the distance between the earth and moon *can* hit us, and something as close as this object *will* eventually hit us even if we got lucky this time.
As an aside, this is similar to the QA technique where you deliberately introduce 10 or 20 bugs into the source code and track how many are caught by the testers. If they only found 3 of 20 bugs, but they reported finding 30 bugs in total, you can be fairly confident that there are 170 other bugs in your code including the 17 you introduced.
For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong. -- H L Mencken
I concur that there is "some probability" (though I disagree with another reply who suggests the probability is not miniscule... I believe it is and since there is no hard data on these events nor is miniscule a terribly meaningful hard classification, it is utterly pointless to use that classification) that something will occur as a consequence of some random bit of interstellar flotsam or jetsam slamming into the planet.
On the other hand, what consequences? The worst that we are aware of was an ice age that screwed the dinos. (possibly)
And it seems our unevolved ancestors survived. If we can't survive the same (as a species, I don't mean as individuals), then we sure haven't evolved in the right direction.
The second worst I can think of is Tunguska. Did the world stop when that happened? Did even the nation state it occured in collapse? No and No. Would it suck to see Ottawa, Toronto (well maybe not so much), Washington, Chicago, or Paris blown off the map? Yes, yes it would. But would it bring the world to an end? Probably not. Would it kill off mankind? Probably not.
Would there be consequences? Hard to see how extensive. Tunguska didn't cause a war. And anyplace that got smoked by a rock would get a huge rescue effort from the rest of the globe. Not much consolation if you live there, but still helpful in rebuilding and saving those that could be saved around the edges.
Then, step a step further out and say: What can we do to stop it? If something the size of Texas comes for us, I doubt we can shoot it down, or that it would do that much good. If something smaller comes, odds go up. But we are not even accurately tracking all this debris!
And once you pass a certain low-end threshold, it isn't worth addressing - it'll either burn up or the hole it will punch into the planet isn't large enough to (globally) be concerned about.
OTOH, what will it cost us to address rocks the size of Texas? Answer: a big damn checkbook and very damn deep pockets. We're staggering even trying to get a not-so-useful, scaled-back, quickly-probably-obsolescent space station up and that's an effort (of a sort) of the international community!.
OTOH, we've got a war on drugs, a war on terrorism, the refief of Africa, peacekeeping and peacemaking all over the globe, a global aids crisis, the funding of new biotech that could save many many lives, etc.
All of things can make valid claims on our time and effort. Should we spend the money where we're pretty sure it can be immediately beneficial and life saving, or throw it at something we're a long way from being able to handle? We've laboured in ignorance for thousands of years, another hundred probably won't matter a lot. And maybe by then, with other tech advancements, the cost of attacking the problem will drop.
I'm not entirely saying there is no risk. I'm saying the cost of addressing it EFFECTUALLY is very high. That same money can far more beneficially be expended dealing with other terrestrial crises. At some point down the road, the problem will be more cost effective to deal with, and hopefully a few more key crises will have been put to rest on Earth allowing us to focus more of our attention on these external potential problems.
Of course, a rock could drop on me tonight. If so, unless it was the size of Texas, most of the universe would just keep on ticking. And I wouldn't be around to care.
Then again, once you hit karma cap, what's the point in living anymore? *grin*
-- Mal: "Well they tell you: never hit a man with a closed fist. But it is, on occasion, hilarious."
I don't care. As long as it slams Redmond...
Incoming asteriod is a point particle.
Diameter of the Earth is 12,000km.
Asteroid will pass within 120,000km of Earth's center (possibly less).
The question then becomes:
Choose a random point within a circle of radius 120,000km.
What is the probability that this point lies within a circle of radius 6000km?
In other words, what are the relative sizes of the two circles?
(pi * 6000^2)/(pi * 120000^2) = 0.0025 = 0.25%
-- Brian
The most rabid believers in American Exceptionalism are the exact same people whose policies are destroying it.
Wouldn't the "closest" approach title belong to one of the asteroids that actually struck us?
A bit more seriously, I thought that there was actually at least one near-impact in Colorado in the 1970s where an object passed through the upper atmosphere, producing a fireball visible in daylight, before escaping back into space.
For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong. -- H L Mencken
a miniature black hole (a naked singularity for the physicists out there)... an asteroid would do even more damage. Not only would trees and stuff be levelled, a large cloud of dust would go up, obscuring the sun for a while, maybe even days. Asteroids go really freaking fast, and when they hit the ground, they basically vaporize. And vaporize anything they hit.
Time is an illusion, lunchtime doubly so. --Ford Prefect
I mean, the Law of Averages would dictate that sooner or later, something has to crash into Redmond to compensate for all the things that crash coming *out*, right?
In Soviet Russia, Chuck Norris will still kick your ass.
Yeah - the Klendathu in the books are _nothing_ (well, almost nothing, they are bugs) like the movie portrayed them.
About the only things that were the same between the book and the movie are:
It's occasionally on different planets.
Character names (but not necessarily their sex - and definitely not their sexual proclivities) are largely the same.
The good guys are called the Mobile Infantry.
The bad guys are referred to as bugs.
Carmen is a space pilot.
Johnny Rico is an infantryman.
Buenos Ares gets smeared.
The book is about 3 orders of magnitude better.
Yup, in the novel the bugs had big nasty spaceships, along with missiles, individual personel beam weapons, an organised social and diplomatic structure and were generally very technologically advanced.
The movie is a piece of rubbish that's sole benefit is that a big chunk of cash got sent Ginny Heinlein's way.
I don't think you realise just how different the book is compared to that mess that got hurled at the screen by Verhoven.
You have obviously never read the book (like you said). I have not actually seen the movie, its to much of a bastardization. But the book was all about societal responsablity. If anything it glorified war and military service as an honorable way to take responsability for your fellow man. I agree with much of this btw. To say that Starship Troopers (even in its bastardized movie incarnation) has any anti-war sentiment is just stupid.
I'm a programmer, I don't have to spell correctly; I just have to spell consistently
Anyone remember this FUD from CNN three months and one day ago? That asteroid came from the direction of the sun as well.
At any rate, our scientists are getting better. Last time they didn't know about the asteroid until four days after it missed us. This time they learned of the asteroid three days after the fact. At this rate, they should be able to tell us when we've been hit by a killer asteroid on the same day it hits us.
I would think that if it produced a fireball, it would burn up completely, instead of re-escaping. I suppose it would depend on how large it was.
Time is an illusion, lunchtime doubly so. --Ford Prefect
Good thing that nothing like this would ever happen here in the USA.
But masters, remember that I am an ass: though it be not written down, yet forget not that I am an ass.
There'll be an uproar over the INS finally approving the student Visa for a Mr. Ass T. Roid. Why can't our government find out about this stuff before it's too late dammit!!!!
You know what would be ironic? If a good size asteroid hit the Earth, enough to kill millions of people but not billions, say, and that explosion mistakenly triggered a Russian nuclear attack on the U.S., and then the U.S. responded, and all the combined nuclear weapons and asteroid damage wiped everything out. In addition to being ironic, it would suck.
Mike van Lammeren
It will challenge your head, your brain, and your mind.
The closest asteroid ever recorded to approach the Earth, passed within 0 meters of the Earth when it actually struck the ground. What's up with this closested recorded stuff?
I love the movie. Sure, it's an utter disservice to the book, but if we ignore the title the movie remains a great social commentary.
What Verhoeven and his cronies did with the movie was turn the Federation into an actual fascist state. As the linked webpage states, Verhoeven's statement that...
"The philosophy of Heinlein is certainly in the movie. Whether I adhere to that society myself is something else, but it is the philosophy of the world he described, and we took that from his book."
...is total bullshit. Purposely or not, Verhoeven et al got Heinlein's philosophy all fucked up. So the movie ends being a pretty good action flick, with a kinda anti-war message from its over-the-top portrayal of a fascist state, if you really try to analyze it. Of course, there's really no point in doing that, because Heinlein's novel discusses a lot more stuff a lot better, and Verhoeven didn't pick up any of it in the 5-minute read he gave it before directing the movie.
I wish the "bugs" or "buggers" would quit screwing around with practice shots and score a hit. We need something to thin the herd anyway, and if we're lucky the survivors won't have to deal with the same limiting mindset that's hamstrung the current emerging technological society. Until humanity as a species bootstraps itself to the point of interplanetary civilization and somehow unfetters itself from all the theological/governmental/societal bs, it's not worth saving. Somehow I don't think the cockroaches are going to have the same problems we've had trying to colonize other worlds--unless of course they all roll over as a species and let the clerics tell them what to do...
Every new form of media has it's own Requirimento
No, we're not doing enough to track down Earth-killer asteroids, but we're probably going to choke on our own Union Carbide/Dow/pollutant noxious gasses, nuke each other, or otherwise make the planet uninhabitable (to us anyway) long before we get the cosmic smackdown.
Yeah, that would be wild. But what would be even crazier is if it wasn't an asteroid but in fact a particle-beam weapon fired from a spaceship in American airspace to strike Russia, triggering a nuclear war all in an attempt to prevent Lord John Worphin and the red lectroids from crossing over into the 8th dimension!
Now that would REALLY suck!
GMD
watch this
Yeah, but they are wrong. A black whole would have gone straight through the earth, and erupted (probably violently) through some other spot on the Earth. Seeing as how that second event has absolutely no basis in evidence, etc.
we should cut the entire funding! it's the biggest waste of time to "search the skies" for things that we will never reach in this lifetime. start worrying about problems on this planet before we go polluting others.
This object did come kinda close. If you make the analogy of the average height of a human equals the size of the earth (5 to 6 feet), then the moon is roughly 200 feet away. In this scenario, the asteroid is roughly like a very high speed BB Pellet (or smaller) wizzing by at a distance of 30 ft or so.
If 5-6 feet equals 13000 km, then 10 km/s is 4 or 5 m/s. The 100 m size of the object scales to around 0.01 mm. Think piece of dust in a light wind, not high speed BB pellet.
Physicists correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't distance alone too little information to infer a "near miss" on? I mean, it's not as if these are particles traveling in a straight line through a 3-D space occupied incidentally by earth. In other words, there might be a large number of velocity vectors that bring asteroids "close to" earth but aren't likely to hit it, because they're slingshotting around the Earth's gravity well. So it's not enough to know merely how far away it was, but in what direction it was traveling, how quickly, and what its mass was.
The chances of getting hit by one that is big enough to have a significant effect are very small and I'm not sure the cost is worth it. Sure look for the really big ones which presumably easier to spot but looking for every one that might do some damage will be expensive.
Then again I'm not american and so it's not my money and they'de only really be looking for the ones that might hit usa.
As the saying goes 'If an asteroid falls in rawanda does anyone care'
i'll probably get modded down as a flamebait or something but....
:)
I would love it if a meteor hit the middle east and and totally killed lots of people it would be a great cleanup if you ask me
Ave Molech Setting
It sounds kind of stupid, but imagine you are just having the worst day of your life. Your car broke down, you lost your job, and your girl left you.. you can't possibly imagine anything else going wrong.
Then you learn that a 130 metre asteroid is on a direct collision course with you (assuming that scientists were able to pick it up in time) and even if you were to depart at 200MPH from your current location, there would be bugger all you could do about it.
"Hey! Unless this is a nude love-in, get the hell off my property!!"
..And what's you're gonna do about it, cry?
Get real. It's a fucking big piece of rock, moving at around 10 kps; if you saw it coming, what would you do? You didn't have time to evacuate the twin towers, and that was just some thousands of people, remind you.
As if the Middle East wasn't already unstable... I think the concern was most likely that they not cause a worldwide panic, people are prone to panic at the littlest things, why panic if you can do nothing about it anyway ? Or perhaps there's another sect of the Heaven's Gate cult out there. Just my 1.5 cent's worth
Application has reported a 'Not My Fault' in module KRNL.EXE in line 0200:103F
OK, that's a good point. But your previous post seemed to say that all cataclysmic natural events are in the imagination of doomsayers. I would certainly not put Asteroid Watching ahead of important health, environment, or defense concerns. But I would certainly give it more priority than it has. Certainly more than, say, a "missle shield" which has never been demonstrated as workable, and would be easily circumvented even if it were. I'm not even going to talk about that damned superhowitzer.
meanwhile, the the NSA and CIA are investigating whether any asteroid flight simulators were sold to anyone of Muslim faith in the past couple of years...
In SOVIET RUSSIA... erm...NSA AMERICA, the Internet logs onto YOU!
all this discussioin centering around funding for programs to search the skies is a little rediculous. the only thing that would change is this: it would not be a surprise when we get slaughtered.
personally, i think i would rather not know, than sit through all the looting, riots, and general chaos that news of this magnitude would create.
Maybe if the asteroid was on a collision course the Earth would have bent over backwards like Neo in the Matrix, and the asteroid would have whizzed by us in slow motion.
Or maybe it would be like:
Earth: Are you telling me I can dodge asteroids ?
Universe: I'm saying you might not have to...
Anyway, if a so-called ponced-up "ELE" destroys the Earth before I get to see Star Wars Episode III I'm personally going to beat it up with a big stick.
graspee
Let's place bets on how many people have to die from an asteriod impact before NASA gets funding to look out for and do something about them. I say 5,000 people or one Hollywood celebrity.
Outdoor digital photography, mostly in New Engl
When/if an asteroid collision happens, the conspiracy mongers will say that the 'official story' about an asteroid was just a gov't manufactured cover-up for a terrorist incident.
Just wait!
"He'd be a broader guy if he had dropped acid once." - Steve Jobs on Bill Gates
I seem to remember a scene where the bugs were shooting these blue asteroid things from their asses. They actually exerted enough force to make it into suborbital altitudes and hit the army transport ships. I'm sure after eating a few cans of beans, they'd be able to launch one across the entire galaxy and hit, a city on Earth without hitting anything on the way, and timed perfectly to Earth's orbit and rotation.
yeah that was my guess too.
Moon Macrosystems. Sun's biggest competitor.
and what do we plan to do once u know an asteroid is gonna hit the earth ? take cover ?
Nono, the black hole entered the earth on the other side of Tunguska, and then erupted out in Tunguska.
Time is an illusion, lunchtime doubly so. --Ford Prefect
Yeah or if the Earth doesn't pull a Matrix We can always do the Armegedon and sent Bruce Willis to space to die and save the world! Cool a two for one, Bruce dies and we live! Ahh... what a happy world!
~Entaundo
*Most* vectors do slingshot around the earth. Including this one, it seems.
Time is an illusion, lunchtime doubly so. --Ford Prefect
we should cut the entire funding! it's the biggest waste of time to "search the skies" for things that we will never reach in this lifetime. start worrying about problems on this planet before we go polluting others.
Yeah! why bother, when the things that we are looking for are coming to us anyway!
And when a few cubic km of rock drops into the pacific at 30km/s, we can deal with the problem at home, just like we should.
You are in a twisty maze of processor lines, all alike.
There is a lot of hype here.
You just do a conversion to Libraries of Congress.
Hang on - wouldn't a near miss imply that the asteroid actually hit us? Now if they called it a near hit, that would be acceptable...
... it's a government coverup, I tells ya!
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Some even argue that Heinlein's book was itself a parody of those political attitudes, but if so it was way too subtle for most people to get.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
If you want to actually get people to start "calling their congressmen" to increase funding, you have to make it more personal.
It would be interresting to see where the asteroid passed in relation to the earth. Which countries did it pass over as it went by. Where would it have hit if it had been just a little closer.
This is yet another reason why we need to build a huge array of orbiting mirrors! Imagine the advantages of orbiting mirrors!
1) Control weather patterns by reflecting/deflecting light from various parts of the planet, causing the atmosphere and water to heat up or cool down.
2) Control global warming by deflecting some light away from the earth. Also handy for preventing future ice ages by reflecting more light onto the earth.
3) Use in conjunction with solar sails to deflect asteroids away from the earth. Simply attach solar sail to asteroid and point all of your orbiting mirrors(!) at the solar sail. Should be way more effective than sending Bruce Willis up there to deal with the matter.
This message paid for by the commision for orbiting mirrors!
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
The author of this letter was pointing out that this same kind of mindless acceptance of a convienient scapegoat was the same stuff that the director (a German) saw first-hand growing up in Nazi Germany. To further hammer the point home, director Verhoeven peppered the film full of rediculous propaganda commericals.
;))
Let me just point out that Verhoeven is not a German, he is in fact Dutch. See here.
Furthermore I agree with the point the movie has some anti-war sentiments, but lets not forget that entertainment value was more important. He "based" this movie on the book, its not an exact replica of the story of the book. You cannot always make a movie of a book, without altering it a little. (See LotR). Although I must say some are more succesfull in capturing the spirit of a book than others. (Dune)
Paul Verhoeven made some excellent movies about war, such as "Soldaat of Oranje" (Soldier Of Orange) and also about violence such as Robocop.
In Robocop he does the same as in Starship Troopers, he takes some elements of the American society, blows them up a little and places them into adds in the movie. (I still want a "Nuke'em" game for my birthday
Basically the point I am trying to make is that although Verhoeven wants you to think about some stuff, and look at some social elements critically, he foremost wants to make an entertaining movie.
First, these are the largest unclassified figures released. If I remeber right, the Russians also have a Gigiton range nuclear weapon (untested?).
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For the metrically-challenged:
Catalogued as 2002MN, the asteroid was travelling at over 10 kilometres a second (23,000 miles per hour) when it passed Earth at a distance of around 120,000 km (75,000 miles).
Anything within Lunar Orbit is too damn close, IMHO.
Mod Karma -1: I sed bad wurds. If I cep my mouf shut, I wud be at riyses.
Unfortunately, Gaia is not scheduled to launch until 2010. Until then, I wonder if a spacecraft like SOHO, (particularly the LASCO instrument) could look for asteroids? I've asked one of the project scientists (via email) about it. I'll post again if I find out anything good.
In the meantime, maybe one of YOU would like to search back in the archive of LASCO images and find the asteroid? You'll be famous if you find it!
I hold it, that a little rebellion, now and then, is a good thing. -- Thomas Jefferson
"What will the other 90% do for a living? And how do we pick which 10% it's going to be?"
The other 90% will just time-share work. Think about it. If you're paid more, you can work less. Assuming owners would cut their margins a bit (every owner), then every worker would have more consumer surplus to re-invest. This would accelerate the economy nicely.
The picking would be those willing to work. Do you assume everyone doesn't want to work? I want to work. Maybe not 60-80 hours a week like some crazies, but I enjoy spending 3-5 days of a week away from home, working with a team of trained people to solve problems.
--
Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
I'm hoping we'll destroy ourselves without needing an asteroid.
You mean a year or two after the Swiss? Spain? Portugal? Sweden? All of these European counties at least initially claimed neutrality.
Oh I see. You were expecting the Swiss to get involved in a major conflict? Fat chance.
For centuries the Swiss have always maintained neutrality. It's been their method of retaining their sovreignty throughout the ages whilst the rest of continental Europe was in flux - Empires and nations came and went but the Swiss kept out of it all and, amazingly, they survived intact.
Even today, the Swiss are paranoid about maintaining their traditional position. In recent years the subject has been a matter of national debate, and topics as radical as whether or not the Swiss military should carry guns(!) have taken place.
Most impressively, Switzerland has now (finally) become a full member of the United Nations. For years, the country held "UN Observer Status", which basically meant that it had its beady eye on the UN but was not a member of the club and never got involved. God knows what harm just joining up like the rest of the world would do - they could always have abstained from every vote.
But that's the Swiss for you - a truly strange nation.
This, of course, doesn't change the fact that, throughout history, the United States has traditionally sat on its butt and done jack shit unless its hand was forced.
The US only got involved in World War One in 1917, three years after the conflict started, and even then it only sent a token force into combat. In World War Two, it took a direct smack in the face (Pearl Harbour) to wake the US up from the dream that it could isolate itself from world affairs. Even then the US only declared war on Japan - it took Germany's declaration of war on the US for America to get involved in the war in Europe.
So, next time you (or one of the hundreds of other Stars-and-Stripes-loving revisionists on Slashdot) feel like talking about how nobody else apart from America does anything, please have at least a passing knowledge of history.
"Accept that some days you are the pigeon, and some days you are the statue." - David Brent, Wernham Hogg
Would have solved a lot of problems. Not to mention maybe convince those religious nutbags that they were wrong.
Well, the ones that wern't dead anyway.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
"If 2002MN had hit the Earth, it would have caused local devastation similar to that which occurred in Tunguska, Siberia, in 1908, when 2,000 square kilometres of forest were flattened."
r e&AD2=&AD3=new+york%2C+ny&AD4=U.S.&x=0&y=0
in case you haven't done the math yourself (and you likely haven't), 2,000 sq km is something like 1200 sq. mi., which is about a radius of 20 miles from the point of impact.
http://pbs.vicinity.com/pbs/blast.hm?SEC=25pressu
just to draw a(n) (in)comprehensible comparison, check out this map of a 25 megaon bomb being detonated over ny (or any other city)...
Satanists get good grades too...suspiciously good grades
American Daylight Bombing Campaigns.
I have to disagree. I can't speak to the total number of lives lost, but no shit the Brits lost a higher percentage-- Their country is small and Hitler was quite literally on their doorstep. The same with Russia. Since they didn't have the technology to stand toe to toe with the German advance, they bought time the only way they could-- With lives. Lots of them. The Russians didn't nessisarily kick the German's ass, it was the winter and Germany's commitment on so many fronts that did them in.
Back to the point-- Playing the percentage game doesn't mean jack here. US intervention was pivitol in the survival of Europe. Britain could have only held out for so long. Yes, the RAF kicked ass, but eventially Hitler would have OK'd the ground invasion and that would have been all she wrote. No other country could apply the pressure the US did on nearly every front. Hitler didn't get a chance to begin that invasion because we were pressing him hard everywhere and once we took up the slack in the murderously suicidal daylight bombing raids (there was a reason why the Brits were limiting theirs to the night, which did nothing for their effectiveness), Germany was finally getting stomped into a corner.
To last as long as they did against the German onslaught was feat unto itself as everybody else fell around them. Churchill's Brit's deserve every ounce of respect you can throw at them. The same with the people of Russia. The only real advantage they had on the Germans was quite literally the number of bodies they could throw into the grinder. But.... The US was the factor that saved Europe. Yeah, they may have all taken higher casualty percentages, but that's just a numbers game since larger countries generally have more people per percentage than smaller ones (Russia, the exception). Everybody took a hellish amount of casulties, but make no mistake, the US saved Europe, like it or not.
You need a FREE iPod Nano
That's what you do to em...
You need a FREE iPod Nano
Environmentalist would love you while the rest of the goes Mad Max style...
You need a FREE iPod Nano
quick, somebody warn Mars.
It's a near HIT!
Somebody hold me.
This was a small one, the size of the one that hit Tunguska. Even if it hit the Earth, the chances of a high death toll would be extremely small.
The cake is a pie
"an asteroid the size of a football pitch"
What the fuck is "the size of a football pitch". Use freakin meters, or feet or yards for crying out loud.
And when describing the size of the CPU die, use micron, or nano meters and NOT "1/1000 of a hair".
And while I am rambling, did Intel not use the "speed of a bullet" to describe the speed of their processors?
What is wrong with using proper measurements.
It has been thought of here. I recall a year or so back a story on the BBC about an experiment done and the results registering at earthquake monitoring sites but I can't seem to find it right now...
"If you are on fire you can just stop, drop, and roll. If you fall into Lava you are just dead." - my 5yr old daughter
I should do all my research before replying. Now Jump!
"If you are on fire you can just stop, drop, and roll. If you fall into Lava you are just dead." - my 5yr old daughter
RADAR would NOT be an effective means of detecting an incoming asteroid. First off, it would require too much energy to emit a RADAR pulse that could detect an object that far out. Secondly, the dish has to wait for the signal to come back, which takes a decent amount of time. Therefor, it would require a LOT of dishes to scan the sky 100% of the time. Unless you guys want to pave teh world and install dishes EVERYWHERE. Telescopes could potentially work as well, but in order to get the resolution necessary to detect these things, it would again require WAY more telescopes then we have space for. Sure, we could put then in space, but there is already enough junk up there, and we would never again be able to launch through an array of detectors to get off this god-forsaken planet. Personally, I think our best bet it to hope that nothing of major size hits us any time soon. What, is it every 10 Million years an object of substantial size hits us... I personally dont think we will a.) still be alive or b.) still be on this planet the next time something big strikes.
To dispel anyones concept of something big hitting the moon... When's the last time you looked at the moon. See those craters? Neil Armstrong didnt dig those during his stay. Those are from hits. THe only reason we dont have them on earth is because of erosion and such.
Something else to consider. 75% of the earth is covered by the ocean (give or take). The chances of one hitting land is not great. What percentage of landmass do you think is populated, or if it is, heavily populated? Not a whole lot. I would venture to say less then 5%.
Another myth to dispel. The meteor would NOT accelerate due to gravity imposed by earth. Ever hear of air friction. By the time the damn thing hit the earth, a GOOD chunk would have burned away. The lower the angle of entry, the more it burns away. Also, if it came in at a low enough angle, it would bounce off the atmosphere.
So, in review... even if a body comes within our "airspace", the chances of it doing any REAL damage are pretty slim. So, quit your bitching. You have a better chance or getting struck by lightning, or better yet... winning the lottery.
An asteroid this size hitting the earth might just save the human race.
Rationale: we need to go into space, because Earth is too small for a race of hyperfertile, nearly-immortal technological wizards, which is what we'll be within a scant few centuries. To get a foothold, we really need to start NOW. However, the space race is over, and we could no longer put a man on the moon no matter how much we might want to. So we need encouragement. To paraphrase Mark Twain, there's no encouragement like mortal terror. Blow a few kilotonnes of the Pacific Ocean into the atmosphere, or demolish a bit of desert or a slice of Antarctica, and suddenly we'll find all the encouragement we need.
So I'm barracking for the asteroids. Go, rocky lump, go! Hit the world and save it, or keep missing and doom the lot of us!
: Fruitbat :
I have discovered a truly remarkable
Maybe the planet needs a bumper sticker.
"If you can read this, you're too close."
That'll keep those pesky asteroids away.
"I took the red pill. Ha ha. You can't have it now."
Just idle (morbid?) curiosity here, if an asteroid of this size were to hit land or water, would the rest of the world be able to literally feel it, like an earthquake? IANAMNAG (I Am Not A Mathematician Nor A Geographer), so I don't know how to figure it out on my own. :)
we are building a religion
a limited edition
we are now accepting callers
for these pendant key chains
You know, If it did hit us there would alot of good source material for a post apocalyptic RPG. One of the quests would be to discover why the 'ancients' failed to provide adequate funding for the space program :)
Oh really? If it hit India or Pakistan, nice little nuclear war starts before anyone can figure out what happens. Who knows how much fallout would be produced, how far it would spread, or how much damage it would do.
Or it hits China. They're pretty nervous with us aiming out nuclear weapons at them and all, so maybe they panic, launch at us, we launch at them, and there's a _big_ nuclear war.
Or worst case scenario, it hits the US. The next day we see in the newspaper:
"President Bush announced this morning that the destruction of New York City yesterday was determined to have been caused by a terrorist asteroid. In accordance with his policy that "those who harbor terrorists will be treated like terrorists," President Bush has declared war on Mother Nature. Immediate retaliatory drilling will begin in Alaska, soon to be followed by strip-mining and clear cutting action in areas yet to be named. He has also placed a bill before congress to rollback emissions standards to 1965 levels."
This Space Intentionally Left Blank
Where's the improbability drive when we really need it`?
Boston Museum of Science
What this guy does, is he takes a good quality telescope (size isn't all as long as it gives good pictures), he VIDEOTAPES (or records to computer, something in the range 30 fps) the viewing session. Then he goes through the video frame by frame and takes the best frames (the atmospheric disturbance is such that occasionally you get crisp images and occasionally not). Then, he combines the good pictures with Photoshop or something similar to increase the S/N ratio and give a better overall image. That's it!
smash(nitpick ;)
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
...trying to pull a Han Solo on an unsuspecting Earth.
People will pass up steak once a week, for crap every day.
Yeah, I guess there is no difference.
So... you see no difference between these two offers (punishments)?:
a) You die
b) You die with 15 innocent children.
Wow, that's f*cking twisted and heartless, man. Objectively correct, though... are you a robot?
They're saying they didn't detect it, to get more funding for their futtile sky investigations.
Would be more usefful funding, AIDS vaccine research?
No, what's stupid is saying something like To say that Starship Troopers (even in its bastardized movie incarnation) has any anti-war sentiment is just stupid. without having actually seen the film in question.
Actually, the movie wasn't real bad, in and of it's self. I just wish they hadn't called it Sarship Troopers. I don't think RAH would really have minded, though; I think he would have been shocked if the movie came even close to the book. BTW, Starship Troopers is on the list of 10 books my son absolutely has to read before I will help him buy a car.
Why, yes, I AM a Pagan Libertarian.
Especially those of us with relatives who lost their lives saving Europe.
Perhaps you should stop living off the backs of others.
Or, maybe the Brits can get off their high horses and act POLITELY towards Americans. Considering how we saved them, it's not that much to ask.
And perhaps you should open your eyes while you're at it - who the hell do you think is standing shoulder to shoulder with the US on its new-found war on "global" terrorism? Yes, Britain. The same Britain that was politely told to take a hike by George Bush Sr. during his term in office when it asked for the help of the US government in stopping the flow of funds from US citizens to the IRA, which was busy blowing up British politicians, soldiers, policemen and civilians. why? Because denying US citizens the right to fund terrorist groups murdering innocent men, women and children was considered "a violation of their first amendment rights".
Brits act politely towards Americans? Perhaps Americans could start doing the same towards Brits (and everyone else).
"Accept that some days you are the pigeon, and some days you are the statue." - David Brent, Wernham Hogg
Starship Troopers is on the list of 10 books my son absolutely has to read before I will help him buy a car.
Good idea!
May I ask what the other 9 books are?
Redmond has my vote.
Hey, don't pick on Nintendo! I love the GameCube!
'Course, none of this has any bearing at all on recent events. It's pure fantasy. Oh yes.
"None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free." -- Goethe
I haven't read the book either; does it have the same concept that you only become a full citizen (with the right to vote) if you join the military? See, over here in euro-weenie land, that's what we call "fascism". Vorhoeven's Dutch isn't he?
"None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free." -- Goethe
Others have suggested that Heinlein was, in fact, a fascist.
"None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free." -- Goethe
You trust him to have the grounding to not take all the sentiments in the book literally? to expect that of most young men of age to get a car is somewhat wishful.
Or do you want him to be a fascist nutball? with a car... that he can drive...fast...at people...
You trust him to have the grounding to not take all the sentiments in the book literally?
You're right. Better to hide the book from him lest he have any bad thoughts.
way off topic the academy awards gave best special effects to ET over BladeRunner in 1983, and they gave Titanic best special effects over StarShipTroopers in 1999. Idiots.
I used to have a better sig than this, but I got tired of it
The earth goes around the sun at about 18,000kph and the sun has a relative velocity of 70,000kph with both a linear and sidereal trajectory that has us heading in the apparent direction of the constellation Hercules. Is anyone, at least, looking in THAT direction?
Yes, that is one of the points in the book. But without reading the context you can come away with a misunderstanding about the that statement. I would really suggest you read the book so that you can draw your own conclusions. I actually ended up agreeing with allot of what he put forth in the book.
I'm a programmer, I don't have to spell correctly; I just have to spell consistently
I haven't read the book either; does it have the same concept that you only become a full citizen (with the right to vote) if you join the military? See, over here in euro-weenie land, that's what we call "fascism".
In Starship Troopers, you get the right to vote AFTER serving for two years in "public service". The "public service" MAY be the military, but probably won't be. I believe the number mentioned in the story was 98% chance of it NOT being in the military.
Over here we call "fascism" a system of government where the means of production are in the hands of individuals, but the control of those means are in the hands of the government. Has nothing to do with votes, or lack of same...
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
The movie that is of course.
I remember first watching this when I was out of town on a contract. I thought I'd watch some mindless SF carnage that was just fun and that I didn't have to think about. After all everyone I knew who had seen it said it was just mindless fun.
Right. So what did I get. A VERY disturbing movie based on segments from WW2 propaganda movies, in particular Nazi. Remember the guy who went into Military Intelligence, who always knew what was right for you ? Well he turns up in a Gestapo uniform and in one scene executes a prisoner of war on live television as an educational exercise.
All the uniforms and the flags and insignia are so Nazi-like it made my skin crawl.
The creepiest part though was that so many who saw the movie cheered it and believed the bit at the end that goes "and you just know they will win" ... so rousing all we'd need is a round of "Uber alles".
Sure it's not Heinlein's version. But so what ... it could have been worse, it could have been totally Hollywoodised into pablum.
Pete
Bitter and proud of it.
Kinda reminds me of some conflicts going on right now.
WTC going down. "It's the Terrorist Ben Ladin who we have financed and trained."
I think there should have been at least a trial before bombing a country and killing thousands of Civilians.
Oh, forgot they are our enemy because Mr.President said so...
From Merriam-Webster:
"a political philosophy, movement, or regime (as that of the Fascisti) that exalts nation and often race above the individual and that stands for a centralized autocratic government headed by a dictatorial leader, severe economic and social regimentation, and forcible suppression of opposition"
Nothing about means of production. "Means of production" is an obsession of the Communists. But somehow I don't think you are a Marxist. :) And in Nazi Germany big business did very well indeed thank you.
Bitter and proud of it.
"Hoity toity?"
"Thankful?"
You have a nerve. Name your closest ally - the ally who never lets you down. The ally who even now is the only country wholeheartedly helping to cover your sorry asses in Afghanistan.
The short memories aren't just on the British side of the Atlantic, my ignorant America friend.
> For an analysis of that, see ChrisW's Starship Troopers page [kentaurus.com].
Yeah, I read that 'analysis'. Pathetic, frankly.
> If anything it glorified war and military service as an honorable way to take responsability for your fellow man. I agree with much of this btw.
I am sure you do. I believe Hitler did much the same.
(I now self-invoke Godwin's Law and retire from this thread).
http://www.redmeat.com/redmeat/1999-03-29/index.ht ml
Thanks to everyone who pointed out my error. There was no official treaty in place at the time. I had my facts wrong.
GMD
watch this
You know what would be ironic? If a good size asteroid hit the Earth, enough to kill millions of people but not billions, say, and that explosion mistakenly triggered a Russian nuclear attack on the U.S., and then the U.S. responded...
Nope. Not gonna happen. Why? Two-Phase burst. Nuclear detonations have a characteristic visual signature:
1) Initial EM burst (Mostly hard gammas and X-Rays, but also visual)
2.) Air burned opaque by X-Rays, shockwave causes air compression and ignition.
An asteroid impact would lack this signature and
not be registered by the satellites that watch for this type of event. As asteroid airbursts of kiloton and greater size occur with regular frequency, they would certainly know the difference.
Simplistic summary by non-Physics major. Feel free to poke holes in it.
Wanted: One witty yet thought provoking
You're right. Better to hide the book from him lest he have any bad thoughts.
Pah, forcing him to read it to get a car is not the same as him picking it up at his local library because he though it looked interesting.
I'm not comparing Heinlein to Hitler here (that would be OTT) however, what if a man forced his son to read mein kampf, or the old testament, or the SCUM manifesto, or The little red book... any book with strong political leanings in order to help him buy a car? Such things should definitely not be censored however to force someone to read them as an eligibility requirement for help is idiotic.
Oh well, at least it's not Heinleins later dirty old man stuff, the kid wouldn't think he had a chance with women what with all those withered but irresistable wise old men around to seduce them.
I'm sure of it! My tinfoil hat supplier overheard one of their conversations on his new tooth-telephone.
I have a number of problems with current search technology and researchers on "Discovery Channel" popularizing Asteroid impacts. Lord knows there has been enough cheesy programs on the "Science" and Discovery Channel about the topic.
.5 Kilometer dirtball at 37Kph ANY DAY.
IMHO most of the researchers on these programmes put forth a view that is entirely incorrect, and if I may say so, arrogant and simplistic. In particular with regards to the actual search process, technology currently available in computer automatated telescope technology:
For example:
1) The United States Air Force and Jet Propulsion Lab, use computer based search systems with dedicated wide angle telescopes. When they talk about them on the Discovery Channel they confidently talk about scanning the entire sky in about 5-8 years and cataloging the entire sky and ALL earth crossing asteroids down to some guess about size given the equipment and what astronomers consider a size range that is dangerous.
This assumes the local region of what is basically the domain of what are called Apollo Objects, is static in this search frame. (i.e. it doesn't change with regards to size of objects, number of objects, and relative velcotiy of such objects in the search time frame period.)
Preposterous, drivel, stupidy almost on the same scale as the problem of Asteroid Orbital Collision Detection.
I don't believe that after completing a search after 8 years the total population of asteroids will not change in another 8 years, or, in even a years time with regards to size, velocity, and number.
This is a flaw in our understanding of the inner solar systems population of these objects and how this region of space even comes to be populated by such objects.
You will notice I left out composition, which is a wild card in impact hazard object classification. We simply do not know what will be worse, a iron asteroid 5 kilometers in diameter or a dirtball of the same size. The Iron asteroid sounds more devastating doesn't it?
Too bad, but density is not what the game is only about. I wish it was that simple, really. To listen to these Discovery Programes/Science Channel shows on cable, that seems to be thier only concern.
Too bad too, because it doesn't work that way. I for example woud take a 1 Kilometer diameter Iron Asteroid at 20Kph than a
We do not know what the rate of repopulation recovery is in this region of space or the objects in question, composition.
This is their first mistake, one of many. For brevity I will stick the ones they make popular on TV programs/Hollywood Films.
2) Their second mistake, is of course reliance on primitive and extremely simplistic computer algorithms that compare photographic evidence to make them feel warm and fuzzy. (i.e. Oooo, we GOT that one...or even make such stupid statements like: we have 30% of all objects catagorized. Sure YOU DO.)
I totally believe you Mr./Ms. Stanford Univerity Researcher. I feel so much safer now.
What they do not tell you is that searches cannot be automated in almost 40% of the sky, simply because the sky is too crowded with extra galactic targets, earth junk already in orbit giving false positives and the Milky Way. The Milky Way has so much clutter in a single photograph, that no computer search algorithms now in existence can correctly screeen out this clutter 100%.
That is, without possibly destroying the evidence in the photo of a earth crosser during the "filtering process".
I have first hand experience in trying to find a solution to this problem, and the only solution is not too use a computer but to manually check each and every photograph in this region of the sky. (Milky or 20-30 degrees either side of the galatic equator.)
I have not doubt in the near future (20-50 years) as computing power grows, this will be overcome not 100%, but too an acceptable risk level that we can accept the results of a PRELIMINARY search of the Milky Way, when the computer says: "No, no Earth Crossing Candidates found in this preliminary search."
That time has not yet arrived unfortunatly.
3)Their third mistake of course, is not the arrogance of these primitive systems that are currently built, or on the drawing boards for that matter, but the simple fact that we have no way to search for such objects during the day time, have way too few of such systems in the first place. (Although they do point out correctly, that thier are few RESEARCHERS on this issue. Probably why they use such BAD ONES in the field on the program.)
Commentary about Probability and Governments with Super Weapons of Unprecedented Scale
My fellow Slashdot Users: The sheer size and scope of the problem, detecting and averting an asteroid impact, is quite frankly a "bet the farm" sorta game. I am not talking about if's of course, but when's a large impact happens, we all go BYE BYE.
To understand what I mean and the difference here, you have to understand probability. Most of the people on these Discovery/"Science" programs don't understand exactly what probability is and what it means in this particular and very special case, asteroid/comet impact that triggers a large extinction.
Why is this a special case of probability? One that is not the same as getting a lottery ticket for example or letting your sister drive your brand new car and wrecking it?
Simply because when they say we can relax on these TV programes and that the odds are a simple matter of "1-100,00 means it ain't going to happen any time soon. So we can breathe easy." They also compare it to "winning the lottery" as one researcher put it and that we have nothing to be afraid of near term.
What they don't understand or communicate in these programs is that a 1-100,000 chance means a low probability, yes, but if it does happen, kiss your 9-5 Job good bye, your house, your car and all your little frivilous, stupid concerns about getting up in the morning and figuring out which tie to wear.
Forget about Osama Bin Laden and his little games to detroy Modern Civilization and plunge us back 5,000 years to living in caves again.
Forget about Democrats, Republicans and platform issues.
Forget about Ice Cream.
Forget about Slashdot.
This is NOT the same kind of probability or RISK that you or someone takes when you go to buy lottery tickets.
It is quite different, in fact.
If you don't win, for example you can play again. If your number comes up other people can play the lottery too.
This isn't the CASE PEOPLE with this sort of probability game.
If Homo Sapiens # comes up, today, tomorrow, or the next day, we won't be around to try again.
I am not going to get into the what to do even if we do detect such an asteroid or what could be done.
(Hopefully we actually have people who can integrate a N body problem properly to figure it out...thats a risk too with todays Politically Correct Universities and thier adversity to rewarding or even recognizing excellence in Mathematics. Anything else for that matter...but I digress...).
Hollywood seems to think, unfortunatly, so do most scientists, that we could actually within the next 30 years divert the path of one of these objects.
I think there is a bigger chance that someone will patent the weapon idea and hold the world ransom for 20 trillion dollars. It will be tied up in the courts for 20 years before it can be built.
But I digress....because:
It won't happen. The technology doesn't exist, and it it has never been tried or tested. We can't even go to the moon again, lacking the political will, let alone divert a small planetoid from destroying us.
However, what has been tried, and what we know does work, is putting other people onto other bodies in the solar system. We have done that. We can do it again, of course, we will have to start from square one again, as most engineers from the apollo program are pretty much dead by now...)
I am suggesting we have a better chance of survival as a species in dealing with this problem of annihilation, by getting ourselves at home in Space, or on the moon or on Mars.
This would be far less risky, and far less expensive in spending money to develop a WEAPON that could divert such an object.
Don't forget, we would have to test the weapon to see if it works. This weapon, would have the capability to deflect a planetoid as WELL AS DIRECT a planetoid with the intent to destroy or protect an entire planet's surface from impact. We could test it on Jupitor I suppose or some terrorists could break into the control facility and hold the entire planet ransom...
Either is a possibility.
But quite frankly, two human settlements is far better an investment, than any money poured into a weapon possessed by a Goverment, that could be THAT destructive.
I now return you back to the reality of buying Lottery tickets for that 1-100,000,000 chance of getting that Power Ball, vs 1-100,000 chance you will even be here to collect it tomorrow...
Hack
(Up on the mount looking up...and waiting...)
Got Geometrodynamics? Awe, too hard to figure out? Too bad.
I don't like overtime. I have a life! I normally work 40 hr/wk. I am on night shift #12, with one day (night) off in the middle. 144 hours in 13 days is life-sucking.
But I still have time to read slashdot.
Revisionist history, hmmm?
Let's see, according to my US public school education, WW II was almost directly attributable to the harsh sanctions that Britain and France insisted be imposed on Germany after the close of WW I. Had the leaders of those two farsighted and humanitarian nations followed the leadership of the American president, the Second World War might have been avoided.
Additionally, it sounds as if you believe that France and Britain declared war on Germany after the latter's invasion of Poland solely because of a love of the Poles (and humanity in general), rather than a hatred of the Huns and a fear of Germany resurrected as a European power (which would consequentially threaten French and British power in Europe, and potentially the imperial interests of those two countries worldwide). Of course, you are welcome to hold this belief, but you really should provide data to support it in an argurment, especially considering your cynical interpretation of America's involvement in the conflict.
In any case, the point is that Germany's ambitions in Europe in the first half of the last century were threats to the designs of the other European powers of the day, but not (or, at least, not so directly) to those of the United States. Therefore, it was not an urgent matter for the US to spend lives and treasure to thwart those ambitions when war broke out.
Also, don't forget that a significant portion of the population of the US was of German descent, and it was no means certain that these citizens would be more disposed to back France and England rather than Germany in those distant, foreign wars.
Property != Amusement
You people treat human beings like plants and amoebas which have no other activity than some meager existence.
People have a right to the pursuit of happiness (personal fulfillment) which can include gratification (extraneous fulfillment), both of which should not be confused with satisfaction (psychoneurosomatheocratic fulfillment), the need to scratch every itch, however dangerous to you or others around you.
The message on the other side of this sig is false.
Has any military or govermental come up with a effective deterrence to actually destroy, or at least deflect a killer asteriod?