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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...'"
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.
Every time we hear about one of these it's closer than the last time.
Is somebody aiming these things?
... 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."
If it happens very infrequently,
and you cant do anything about,
and cant really see it,
you just waste a lot of mental energy.
We would probably compare it to megatons of TNT. The Tunguska event corresponded roughly to a 15-30 megaton explosion. By comparison, the largest thermonuclear device ever exploded in the atmosphere by the United States was the Castle Bravo test in 1954, at 15 megatons.
Toronto-area transit rider? Rate your ride.
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.
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.
There are all kinds of theories as to what happened at Tunguska, up to and including a micro black hole passing thru the earth. The best one has gotta be involving Tesla and his "death ray". http://www.parascope.com/en/0996/tesla4.htm
I won't dance in a club like this...All the girls are slags, and the beer tastes just like piss! -The Specials
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...
And the largest thermonuclear device ever exploded in the atmosphere period was done by the Soviets in 1961 and was ~50MT.
ASCII tastes bad dude.
Binary it is then.
Then it's getting close to what a rogue Forrest Ranger can do in Colorado!
Computer Science is Applied Philosophy
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
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
"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
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.
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?
If this is not a problem, how big of an asteroid would we need (roughly, of course,) to cause a problem?
A problem in terms of destroying the moon? Check out http://janus.astro.umd.edu/astro/impact.html and play around with numbers.
The numbers for this one (~100 meters at 10 km/sec) hitting the moon are a 15 megaton explosion, a quake of magnitude 6.4, and a new crater. This wouldn't have any impact on the earth.
Now, if you're talking destruction of the moon, that could be a problem. According to the site, it would take a rock 400km in diameter, travelling at 55km/s, to destroy the moon. A pretty unlikely occurence, in other words.
I'm sorry sandwich! --Brak
But an asteroid this size will only affect the size of a large city. There is plenty of time to evacuate the area, assuming you have a day's notice or more. If it hit the middle of the ocean, it wouldn't be a big deal.
The other major concern. If this asteroid hit a nuclear capable country (and there are quite a few of them), if there was no prior knowledge of the hit it would be very easy to confuse a meteor stike with a nuclear attack. You would have the miles of devastation and the mushroom cloud. Imagine if it were to hit india or pakistan right now. The other side might retalliate from the perceived attack before they ever figured out it was just a meteor. The only difference would be the lack of radioactive fallout.
Even in the US, where we have suffienent technology to quickly detect and determine what is going on, it still took us half a day to get a grip on what was happening on September 11. All day long there were car bombs going off that didn't exist. The Vice President ordered a plane shot down that didn't exist. And 9/11, as tragic as it was, would be insignificant compared to the type of disaster that a 120 meter rock would cause, especially if it hit a populated area.
Knowing that Washington DC was going to get wiped off the face of the planet by a meteor (literally) 6 hours before it happened would cause a lot of panic, but it would save a lot of after the fact confusion. We would be mounting rescue efforts instead of mounting for a nuclear response against an unknown enemy.
-Restil
Play with my webcams and lights here
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]
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
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?
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."
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.
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.
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.