A Rock Moves In Space

theBrownfury writes: "The BBC is reporting here that a very large Earth collision course asteroid has been discovered. This asteroid, NT7, was first observed on July 5th and current data suggests an impact date of February 1st, 2019. NT7 is 2kms wide and on date of impact will be approaching Earth at 28km/s. An asteroid of this size is large enough to cause continent wide destruction. However astronomers are still cautious in reporting this asteroid as the orbit of NT7 has not been fully verified. Current data on NT7's orbit suggests it orbits the Sun every 837 days and travels in a tilted orbit from about the distance of Mars to just within the Earth's orbit." The BBC article's headline (and accompanying illustration) are more alarming than the story itself seems to warrant: this asteroid has been given a 0.06 on the Palermo technical scale, which means it shouldn't bump getting run over by a llama off your list of worries.

Comments

Lemme guess...

[Pig Hogger]

... the asteroid is full of guys with sneaked box cutters...

Okayyy...

[Pig Hogger]

Suppose it really ends up on a collision course. Now, we can do our best to nuke it off-course at least until passes through the Roche limit.

Now, who foots the bill? Definitely, the US is going to insist that they only pay 5% of it, as this is their percentage of the world's population.

But the rest of the world is gonna insist that they pay relative of the percentage of their wealth (wealth that, for the most part, has been sucked from the rest of the world anyways).

Since it's gonna take a long time to resolve this, better start ASAP bickering that...