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Stopping Killer Asteroids
Drog writes "Earth has had a few near misses with asteroids recently (although "near hits" would be more accurate). It's just a matter of time, though, before we detect one with our name on it. In this New York Times article, experts discuss the various ways that we might go about saving our planet. Remarkably, nuclear detonations are not a good option, as they would break the asteroid into many pieces and merely increase our odds of being hit. And a detonation some distance away may simply be absorbed by the asteroid with virtually no effect. Instead, say scientists who study asteroid hazards, a gentle sustained push is what's needed (slow and steady wins the race). Some of the approaches have been discussed in science fiction for years--a mass driver, an electromagnetic machine which hurls dirt from the surface, an orbiting parabolic mirror to heat up the surface and create a plume of vaporized material. All of these methods require one thing, however. Time. At least several decades warning."
we're never going to have to worry about a metoerite .
If you get an error, type "OVERRIDE" or "SECURITY OVERRIDE" and then try the optimize command again.
sorry.. but if you drop several thousand multi kiloton nukes on the sucker It'll be nothing but a nice meteor shower to watch.
a single bomb? that's stupid... fire the entire cold war aresnal? nothing will be left of it.
Aah...not to worry...for we will always have Bruce Willis willing to sacrifice himself to save Earth.
So what do we do today??
Pray. And give money and support funding to any program that maps the sky for asteroids. Cause if any are on their way (I'd say 30 years or less), well... we're just f*cked.
Good quote, too many chars. Seriously, the slashdot 120 char limit sucks!
Time is something we don't have people. We've got 18 days to train a bunch of dumb oil riggers, launch them into space, drill a big deep shaft for a nuke and blow that asteroid in two so it passes cleanly on either side of the earth or else we are FINISHED! Let's get to it! Please, put the romantic subplot on hold for the time being. 18 days is very little time to ready a shuttle much less save the earth from extinction so we need all of you on your toes.
Nature's "reset" switch for Earth. Sometimes you just need to stop what yer doin' and reboot. 'At's what I say.
(although "near hits" would be more accurate)
Gotta love George Carlin:
Speaking of potential mishaps, here's a phrase that apparently the airlines simply made up: near miss. They say that if two planes almost collide it's a near miss. Bullshit, my friend. It's a near hit! A collision is a near miss.
[WHAM! CRUNCH!]
"Look, they nearly missed!"
"Yes, but not quite."
-- Dr. Eldarion --
I thought more pieces would have more surface area. More surface area would produce more friction traveling through the atmosphere. More friction would create more heat and thus be able to burn up asteroids that would otherwise not totally burn in the atmosphere.
Is my science wrong?
As long as you can guarantee Tea Leoni is underneath it, I say leave it alone.
I thought Voltron was responsible for threats of that nature.
As for pushing them aside, there are several options. You can deflect an asteroid. You can perturb the orbit. You can also lateralize the velocity vector. One approach that I haven't seen talked about much is bending the worldline of the asteroid such that it no longer intersects Earth's worldline, but that method may require some scientific advances beyond our current technology.
Just my $.02.
I'm reminded of an episode of Stargate SG1 (Failsafe) when Anubis sent an asteroid towards Earth.
"O'Neill: I've seen this movie, it hits Paris."
Are you local? There's nothing for you here!
Obviously, said experts haven't tried driving in the Washington DC rush hour.
Be excellent to each other. And... PARTY ON, DUDES!
Colonize other planets.
It is important not that Earth will be hit by an asteroid, but that civilization, our species, as we have come to enjoy (and/or lament) will be annihilated.
Remember the eggs in one's basket proverb?
...something i read on www.zetatalk.com.
Creapy.
... I think we simply need a beowulf cluster of.. ohhhh... nevermind...
I was thinking, many of the options we have are merely theoretical. I'd like NASA to spend a few of my tax dollars actually *testing* out 2 or 3 of these ideas on a real asteroid to see if they really work.
For example, will a near nuclear blast really be absorved by the meteor without it changing its course? How much of a force will it be needed to push an asteroid with rockets or the like?
So let's test now so that when the real thing comes and we launch our savior to space, we don't find out in the last minute that it fails.
On a side note, this shouldn't be a NASA-only effort, I think the European Space Agency and many other countries should ship in as well, as this concerns all of mankind.
Frankly, many smaller fragments would probably be better than a large asteroid. I would like to hear the reasons why a large, thermonuclear device would not be a good idea.
As an example, take two identical cars. On one car, drop a bowling bowl on the roof. On the other car, drop pebble with the combined weight of the bowling bowl. Now compare the damage.
Besides, more material would burn up in the atmosphere if there was a hail of smaller rocks rather than one large rock. The surface would be greater - as simple as that.
Any physics geeks care to give me some numbers?
Stop the brainwash
1. Well-made
2. Cheap
3. Fast
Pick two. In this case we'd choose options 1 and 3. Or like the exchange in the preview for soon-to-bomb "The Core" (paraphrased):
guy #1: "How much would it cost to finish your boring machine in three months?"
guy #2: "50 billion dollars."
guy #1: "Will you take a check?"
I wonder if this is something we should really be focusing time and energy on. You know, there are, at a minimum, eight other planets in this solar system that we should investigate - maybe not colonize, maybe not exploit for mineral or chemical (gas or liquid) resources; but we should look at with humans - not robots. I think we'd gain considerable real insight if we looked beyond our terrestrial sphere.
But then again; don't we have a few major telescopes in orbit; and thousands more both professional and personal (like mine) on the surface? Shouldn't we be able to note anything on an obvious trajectory here and consider our options at that point? Maybe not; I have no experience in that sort of 'ballistics' thinking and perhaps there are far too many objects in our sky to track any that might cause us serious damage.
I think with the interesting people, their lives can't possibly be wrapped up into a nice little package.
I may be alone on this one, but please hear me out.
There are many things that could put an end to life here on Earth as we know it. Some of these would end life for all 6 billion of us, or for just one or two. Life is precious; never take anything for granted, as the next moment of trechery may suddenly take it away.
I urge you all to love, listen, smile, ask questions, donate time, donate money, learn new things, and teach others new and fascinating pieces of knowledge through the beauty of education. If you do these things, you will experience great happiness and will come to realize that preventing "killer asteroids" should be at the very bottom of your To Do list.
Peace.
If you celebrate Xmas, befriend me (538
Frankly, what really worries me - and what the article really fails to address - is the fact that while there are a few programs going on in the Northern Hemisphere, there's not much happening with our buddies in the Southern Hemisphere - that means half the sky isn't really being covered well.
On another note, who wants to bet that in the event we had, say, 50 years warning, the politicians would be utterly unwilling to do anything about it for at least 48 years?
I'm the stranger...posting to
Man oh man, did I get hit hard! Not even a smile?? You moderators are BRUTAL! :-)
evil adrian
Although I'm concerned and think we should prepare for this eventuality. It doesn't bother me as much because of the environmental damage already done by Humanity on the Earth. I have dark feeling our greed and putting it off to the last minute will put us in a category below Dinosaurs cause we are intelligent and nearly able to do something about it, yet we'd rather spend our time on other issues and not worry about the big one till it's starting to heat up in the upper atmosphere.
/. when we're all gone. :)
In thinking of this Osama is a small potatos compared to a 1 mile wide rock wiping out most if not all of Humanity. The world will end and the bug that poses for the latest IE vunerability topic image will then run
~~ Behold the flying cow with a rail gun! ~~
I call Ned's basement!
Haven't we run this topic completely into the ground? I vote we deal with this when it's actually an issue. This discussion reminds me of a bunch of 13 year old geeks sitting around the RPG table talking about what they're going to do if giant robots with photon torpedos take over the planet.
I don't mean to appear as flame bait.. but.. this topic has been discussed here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.
There are some useful scenarios we could be discussing. This is approximately none of them.
-- People who hate Windows use Linux. People who love UNIX use BSD.
A good sized asteroid impact is my only hope!
It is by the juice of the coffee bean that thoughts acquire speed, the teeth acquire stains. The stains become a warning
We need to stop wrrying about every possible thing that can destroy this planet, sure we're advance enough to possibly change the out come of certain castrophic events but instead of changing the course of these events, our money will be better spent on trying to find new ways to help our current situations such as global hunger or AIDS or even find ways to reach beyond earth and begin colonising other planets...how long will the earth sustain us anyways...at the speed that we're using our resources and damaging the planet mix that with the population growth and u have a castraphic even that is much more likely to happen then an asteroid collision...
Send one of those Hollywood heroes who has saved the planet a million times from asteroids, volcanoes, typhoons, bad people, communists etc.
You can tie couple of them to a powerful rocket, point the rocket to the asteroid and press the button.
Tat Tvam Asi
I've said it before and I'll say it again, we need a distributed computing asteroid project. Seti@home is for finding aliens which may or may not exist, but asteroids do exist, and some may present a threat to our planet in the future.
With all the scientists and programmers in the world, why hasn't someone developed such a program yet?
I think it would be a good idea to start making one now, before it's too late.
Don't you?
As long as the rays of the sun are travelling in an acceptable direction for a course correction, a solar sail could easily (assuming the rock isn't rotating, and even with some correction if it is) pull the rock in a new direction over time... A harness attached at multiple points with a VERY large swivel could also be a mount point if the rock was tumbling through space...
You can't test a nuclear weapon in space - there are treaties that regulate this sort of thing, and they say space has to stay demilitarized. That means no nukes - that's one of the reasons, other than the horrible amount of radioactive pollution, that the Orion project never really took off. For better or worse, the only test we'll get is when there's actually an asteroid on the way to Earth.
I'm the stranger...posting to
The earth made it this long, but the dinosaurs didn't, and neither did the trilobites, or the megatheria, or the wixwaxia... Extinctions happen, and I'd like to prevent ours if at all possible.
-aiabx
Just this guy, you know?
Associated Press: Paris, France - It has just been announced today in the capital of France: Upon learning that if any asteroids are on their way to collide with the earth in under ten years, it would cause complete genocide without the ability to do anything about it, France has unconditionally surrendered to all extraterrestrial foreign bodies. The French, so proud of their culture that they will surrender to maintain it, regardless of rule, support the decision of their government.
Frenchman Jaques Fernoi states, "As long as I can make my cheese and drink wine freely, I welcome our new leaders in this asteroid."
More updates as they present.
Yeah, I'm a Republican AND a geek. It is possible.
Depending on the size and speed, I would think fragments are infinately better than one big lump. If we can move it, than that would be the way to go. If not, blow the sucker up.
Shumaker-Levy should have been a suitable demonstration of this.
How to avoid getting hit should be high on our list. We read of other happenings in history. Russia for example had a forest leveled as a result of a comet or asteriod in the early 20th century. It's happened once recently on a large scale. Fortunately it was away from human population. Next time we might not be so lucky.
As mentioned we recently experienced several near hits. The article mentions our odds are extremely low in getting hit. However our collision detection budget for NASA doesn't cut it. Last I heard we're tracking less than 10% of the sky. Think about it. We had another article on slashdot several weeks ago talking about another near hit we discovered 3 days after the fact.
There could be many more out there and we're just not seeing it.
Has Comcast disconnected your Internet account? Same here. You can read about it at http://comcastissue.blogspot.com
I would think that Mini-Magnetospheric Plasma Propulsion (M2P2) would be the way to go. Setup some nuclear reactors on the surface of the thing, create a plasma bubble as large as you can and let the Sun push that sucker. If you can get to it outside of Mars, it would only take a slight angle adjestment to make it miss.
Of course, the other option is to send a manned mission to an near-earth asteroid and strap several ion engines on that puppy. Use the ion engines to slowly (over years) get it into a nice orbit outside lunar orbit. If we identify a killer asteroid, play a little cosmic billards - slam the ion engined asteroid into the killer one.
This is gold, baby. Where is NASA with the grant money? I knew I should have been a rocket scientist. Stupid M$ and the lure of their money for developers. Grrrr...
30 years? 1950 DA is supposed to swing by real close (or hit) in about 878 years, and I'm seriously frightened that we won't be able to get consensus in time to blast (or nudge) it out of it's orbit.
Go to http://www.cnn.com/2002/TECH/space/04/04/lost.aste roid/ for more info.
Nuclear weapons in space act very differently from those in air. To my knowledge, there's never been a detonation in "deep" space: I believe there was a test in low Earth orbit once, but immediately after that the Outer Space treaty was signed (which banned nuclear detonations in space, among other things). The real difference is that a nuclear weapon in space discharges most of its energy in the form of radiation; because there's no air, there's no shockwave. While the radiation would wreak all sorts of havoc with electronic equipment, e.g. satellites, would it cause an asteroid to break up? I'm skeptical. Does anyone know if someone has thought about this question?
Think about an asteroid of a significant size, something on the order of some percent points of Earth's size. Now, if you break such a beast without making sure all pieces will miss (that is, that your bomb will not only break it, but break in such a way that its resultant angular momentum will change drastically), you have just increased the chance that not one, but two or three asteroids with enough mass to destroy civilisation will hit the planet.
So, the planet's been around for billions of years, and it has been hit by meteors before. Question. Why are we worried about this now? Nuclear weapons have been around for just under 60 years. The Nuclear club continues to grow, and include instable countries.
Lets deal with the threat that is more probable, and manageable, and leave worrying about asteroids to Chicken Little
My other sig is extremely clever...
By the title, I thought this was an "Ask Slashdot" post...
THe issues are quite remarkable here. While the probabilities may be small, this is the only event that could result in the extinction of our species.
Investment in our own future is more important than any other concern.
"It's just a matter of time, though, before we detect one with our name on it"
Yeah, we'll probably get one within the next 100 million years. That should be enough time to prepare, don't you think?
All of these theories are very interesting, but scientists must still acknowledge the power and effectiveness of the nuclear weapon. Faced with being wiped out entirely, vs using ANYTHING, I think it's fair to say any credible asteroid threat to earth would be met with the full resources of the planet, and as such, all but most rediculously large asteroids could be disentegrated. These might be so large as to alter orbits in the solar system anyway, no way to stop that.
Some of these methods require a precision that might be difficult to test, harder to master, and just too darn risky to try when there's an ateroid hurtling towards you. Unless it was detected by the Planetary Base on Pluto with enough time for trial and error.
What I think it comes down to is the real threat of the issue. If we were hit by small and medium impacts regularly you can bet there would be an advanced meteor stopping system in place. While I agree that the threat is obvious, how BIG a threat it is is still argued, and personally I'd feel safer with a more impact tolerant car than an orbital asteroid deflecting heat ray.
---
When I grow up, I want to be a kid again.
I would have expected earth to be peppered with "asteriods" all the time... it's just that they are small - not Bruce Willis sized... and when they don't land we call them meteors.
Dyslexics of the world, untie!
"Holy fscking crap Batman, did they just say Killer Asteroids on Slashdot?"
"Yes they did Robin, you know what that means."
"Links to goatse! Oh the horror!"
"Yes, and we haven't much time to lose. To the Batmobile!"
NO! NO! Please don't mod me, I'm too young to die a troll. *click* Oh the pain, the pain...
It's a hell of a lot simpler to send a robot probe, or even a manned spacecraft with a small crew, into space than it is to establish sustainable colonies on another world. Colonization is all well and good, but some of the options discussed in the NYTimes article are things we can either do now, or should be able to do within a few generations. Colonization, in addition to the logistic and technical diffulties involved, has social problems. If you want a self-sustaining colony capable of perpetuating the race, you need a large population, and you need it to be economically self-sufficient. That means you can't just send scientists - you need engineers, factory workers, politicians, even telemarketers - all the things that make a modern capitalist economy work. And the only way you get people who *aren't* explorers by nature to colonize is for things to be absolutely miserable for them at home, or truly grand in the New World. No matter how bad things get on Earth, it'll be quite a while before life in a pressure dome on another planet starts to even rival the quality of life one can enjoy on Earth, let alone surpass it. I repeat: You need more than just scientists and explorers for a colony large enough to perpetuate the human race if Earth gets snuffed.
I'm the stranger...posting to
If everyday events remind you of episodes of Stargate SG1, you may be a retard.
I'm sorry to have to break this to you, but you're better off hearing it here than on the streets.
That aside unless you break up the pieces into very small bits they're gonna impact and n-medium sized craters is worse then ~1 big crater. Or, absolutely devastating some large radius is better then pretty-much devastating a number of somewhat smaller radiuses.
By the way - the worst? Ocean impact. Then you're not just talking an air blast and punching a hole into the surface with some ejecta spraying but doing all of that while vaporizing some megatons of water - much worse on a global scale.
I don't read ACs: If a post isn't worth so much as a nom de plume to its author then I wont bother either.
bite me you tree-humping hippy freak.
Chances are this is how we would first detect an asteroid withh our name on it.
Just tell him there is oil in the asteroid, or Osama lives there or something :)
OK OK that was a cheapshot.. but if you can't joke about current issues, then poo on you:)
The White House
Doesn't the term 'near miss' infact mean we were actually hit?
of collisions, because eventually it WILL happen. If it happens, it happens. I probably have a beter chance of winning the lottery than people have of averting or deflecting such such a collision with asteroids. I know this may sound a little whacked, but the best way to improve mankinds chances of survival is interplanetary colonization. That way if earth gets hit you still have your colony on mars.
"You helped our nation celebrate its bicentennial in 17 -- 1976." --George W. Bush, to Queen Elizabeth, Wash
The article comes close to the thinking I've had for some time on how to best deal with an asteriod.
I think more appropriately is an enormous air-filled or foam-filled apparatus or vehicle with a rubber like exterior (non-piercing) which would merely bump the asteriod. Of course, it would require a powerful engine to maneuver or steer the asteriod out of harms way.
No links... just a thought.
Did anybody else here read the headline as "Stopping Killer Steroids"? I can't wait to get home and sleep :P
Remarkably, nuclear detonations are not a good option, as they would break the asteroid into many pieces and merely increase our odds of being hit.
Clearly, the pointdexter astrophysicists who offered this opinion have never seen Armageddon.
Remarkably, nuclear detonations are not a good option, as they would break the asteroid into many pieces and merely increase our odds of being hit.
If tomorrow's headline was "Football field size asteroid set to hit Earth in 3 days", you know that we would be hurling ever nuke we have at it.
Live web cams
Just call Bruce Willis. Duh.
My
Limekiller
Just cover the asteroid with the same material as they use to make Super Bouncy Balls..
Everyone is entitled to their own opinion. It's just that yours is stupid.
..a near-earth cluster of these
People seem to assume that ANY piece that hits the earth will be the end. If you break a moderate-sized asteroid into small pieces, OF COURSE some will hit. And, possibly all the little pieces that hit will burn up in the atmosphere. Of the pieces that do hit, the damage would be MUCH more tolerable.
It all depends on the situation. If something the size of the moon were to suddenly aim itself at the earth, no amount of nukes would help. But a 1km piece of rock travelling at 25km/sec (which would probably poke a nice hole in the Earth's crust and kill us all) could be blown into 1000 pieces, 10% of which would hit the earth and take out a city block if it hit a city, I'll still vote for the nukes.
Then again, maybe it's like choosing between being shot with a big rifle or a shotgun. There's only one way to know for sure...and I'll take a pass, thank you very much.
Chaos, panic, disorder...my work here is done.
I'd start with disarmament.
*11/19/02
Dear Diary,
This is my final entry.
The aliens are coming again and it's time to lay down my pen once and for all. As I sit here writing this, I look over to my pet goldfish wondering if he will follow me and leap from his bowl to give up his earthy vessel and meet his alien masters.
And so I bid you farewell, my good friend Mr. Diary. You have been a source of comfort for many nights. How I long to stare down at your blank pages waiting for the touch of my pen to caress your surface. Will you miss the ink that so lovingly exudes from its tip?
Goodbye.
*11/20/02
Dear Diary,
I feel like a fool. I decided to remain on earth and observe our alien masters, rather than join them. I betrayed them. But I am alive. I am alive and I reject the false Heaven's Gate cult.
Diary, I hope you do not think ill of me, but I have decided to stop communicating with you. I would much rather laugh at Wesley Crusher. But I know you'll understand. I will continue to watch the skies for our alien masters, knowing that Wesley Crusher is out there, somewhere, and may leap into a telephone booth at any moment, and change into his neon pink bunny suit and fly into space, saving us all.
The New York Times article is kind of silly. If we ever need to move a large chunk of rock out of the way is a (relatively) short time, there is only one way to do it with current or near-future technology: Project Orion style nuclear explosions.
You park your space ship against the rock, and set off small nuclear explosions against a plate mounted on the other side. The explosions are as small as you want, so the acceleration is as small as you want (to keep the rock from breaking up), but you can hold enough fuel (nuclear bombs) to make it last for quite some time.
The methods suggested in the article might work if far longer time frames are available (millenia). But this is the best bet if you have to move it out of the way a little quicker than that.
For what you suggest to work, the asteroid must be broken in a number of smaller pieces in such a way that enough mass of each piece will burn during planet-entry to reduce it to a definite point. This point is that where the impact of all pieces combined will not be enough to cause one of the many things that would destroy most life (or just human civilisation) in the planet.
Now, that would depend on a huge number of variables: composition of the asteroid matter, its velocity, the number of pieces you manage to divert enterely, the points of impact and, naturally, the asteroid size. This last factor may well make any breaking effort useless (a large enough asteroid will generate pieces large enough to kill us all anyway).
As it is, I don't know if it is possible to predict the outcome of the experiment without sending Bruce Willis up there to make sure the end will be happy.
No one should be complacent about a meteor hitting the Earth by saying that the last impact was 'millions of years ago'. In the recent historical past we have confirmed one such hit on Jupiter within the past 30 yrs. I believe that was a comet but I'm not sure. In any case this is an appropriate expenditure of money.
Launch a powerful laser into orbit... or put it someplace high enough on the earth so that it doesn't lose power in the atmosphere. Aim at the asteroid. Use computer controlled aim to correct the targeting as both the earth and the asteroid move through space. Use said laser to heat up, melt, or even vaporize the rock on a particular point on the asteroid. Turn the power on the laser up high enough that the plume of heated material eventually rockets the asteroid into a new orbit.
No asteroid intercept mission needed.
The next Slashdot story will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and slashdot the links early!
we should create an enormous ping pong paddle and swat it away from earth at the last minute!
Ok. Now I'm really scared. Since when are science fiction movies used for reference for anything scientic?
Let's say you've got a 100 metric tons worth of asteroid heading for the planet. If we broke it up into 1000 pieces at 100kg each, are you really arguing that the individual pieces would do as much damage as the single one? Sure, they would do local damage, but 100 tons worth of space rock would certainly do damage on a global scale. Think about it - only half the globe would be hit by the debris, but the whole globe would be affected by the massive aftermath of an extintion level event - there would be a massive tidal wave, shock waves, volcano eruptions and a massive cloud of dust leading to climate change killing life.
How much more or less dust would result from the "pebbles" scenario is probably what I'm asking. And how for how long would it stick around?
Stop the brainwash
I may be alone on this one, but please hear me out.
You're not alone but you realize, of course, that you are inviting all sorts of cruel replies because of the "love your fellow man" tone of your post. But I think you are exactly right. There are all sorts of threats to humanity: biological/nuclear warfare, overpopulation, destruction of environment, etc. but when it comes down to it, it's really because people tend to do what benefits themselves the most and they don't care about how it will effect others. Biological and nuclear weapons are harmless until they are actually used by one country attempting to gain control over another. Overpopulation is at the root of many problems but that's largely due to increased competition (for resources, fame, etc.). Laws designed to protect the environment are skirted by corporations looking to increase their profit margin by a percent or two. If people would take the bigger picture into account everytime they do something, the risks to our species would go down measurably. I realize that it's a hopeless goal to get everyone to "play nice" but if we could get a large number of people to "do the right thing", it would be interesting to see how strongly that changes things. Perhaps significantly, perhaps insignificantly. There is a mentality that the fate of our species will ultimately be determined by the worst elements of our society. If that is true, then we are all doomed because there are some really evil people out there. But even if we are doomed to extinction, being a decent person can reap personal rewards as well, making your time on planet Earth more enjoyable.
It's really too bad that we can't, as a society, somehow make being a decent, caring, loving human being "cool". Ah well...
GMD
watch this
An excellent point made in the article, which demonstates exactly how urgent this problem is (not at all):
"There is no point in use building a framework to [destroy space object] because our children will be so much better at it."
An interesting read; I'm still glad to know that there are smart people thinking about this stuff.
Yeah, I know some people think that these science disaster articles tend to spring up more right before related major film releases,
but it sounds like that magnetic fields flipping
thing is much more of a clear and present danger...more present, anyway.
SO YOU'RE GOING TO DIE: The Comic for Dealing with Death
What if we captured a medium size asteroid into Earth orbit, and equipped it such that we could steer it into different orbits. When an incoming killer asteroid is detected, steer our "pet" asteroid into its path -- not to smash it but to barely miss it, gravitationally dragging it off course to miss the Earth?
/. posting about using force fields to assemble objects in space, maybe we could assemble our own guardian asteroid from bits and pieces in the correct orbit, rather than going out and getting one.
Remembering an earlier
... so this will never happen again ;)
We had a guy at a place I worked at that was really worried about an asteroid hit. I got some of the people there to knock up a spoof BBC News home page, with a really big story that the end of the world was only about 36 hours away, and added a little tiny weeny DNS entry pointing at the box that was hosting the "site", and waited.
;)
Oh the laughter from the IT dept...
Get your own free personal location tracker
Although mass extinction asteroids are quite rare, civilization-enders are somewhat more common, and ones nasty enough to ruin your whole day if they hit the wrong place (10 megatons) may occur as often as once a century (although more recent estimates put the frequency lower). We'd probably have a lot or warning on the mass extinction ones, but it would be nice to know about and be able to deflect or destroy the much smaller ones, too. So we need an improving capability to detect near earth objects, and we need to develop a range of responses for detected threats--slow and steady methods for big asteroids where we have plenty of warning, but also a quick-launch nuclear option for when we spy that 50-meter rock headed for the eastern seaboard.
A solar sail would be a good way to provide a sustained force on an asteroid; it need not be an elaborate structure, nor tightly defined as a spacecraft would need; a large parachute-like sail would be sufficient. It would be passive, requiring no fuel except what's needed to plant it, and its effectiveness would increase as the object approached its perigee, near the Sun.
But as the article says, you need a long lead time to move the asteroid enough to be sure it misses the Earth. Whichever method is eventually used, we'll still need to scan the sky, so as to catch them early.
A nuke would be good to break it into smaller pieces. But there is definately still a threat by these smaller pieces which also need to be destroyed. But whats really challenging is when the little alien saucers start shooting at you.
God spoke to me
Why? We should try yes, but if we fail, good, that means we weren't up to the challenge and SHOULD be extinct. This is called natural selection. It's why if another species is made extinct by our presence it's not a bad thing. Some people seem to think we're not animals and US having a part in something getting wiped out is CONTRARY to nature. I hate to shock environmentalists, but we are just a small PART of nature, we can't upset it because what we do is part of the big picture that is nature. If nature decides a meteor is gonna make us into a new puddling like substance or pretty ash statues, we're screwed, period. Live with it, deal with it, consider our purpose in nature is further the species and SURVIVE, not individually, but as a species.
Most of these proposed solutions take not only a great deal of time but a great deal of energy to implement properly as well. We can probably hit any target large enough to be a threat with a good deal of accuracy, why not use that as an effective delivery mechanism for these other ideas?
Crash a rocket into the side and use thrusters going to give it a nice small adjustment and vector it away. Whatever form of thrust you want - a directed nuclear blast, thermitic compound to creat the proposed vapor, etc. A more compact and faster acting proposition in case we *don'* have X number of years/decades to hope for.
Any spoon would be too big.
but the doctor gave me some lotion that cleared them right up!
The Solution to preventing an asteroidal impact, assuming time is scarce, is a nuclear rocket. The technology for this was already developed way back in the 1960's, and was shut down for obvious reasons. If an asteroid was going to hit us in less than a year without any prior warning, a massive campaign could get a nuclear rocket launched and into space within 6 months. I haven't done the precise astrodynamic calculations, but the factors are - mass of asteroid, time to left to impact, and specific impulse of nuclear rocket. The higher the specific impulse the less time or large the asteroid can be.
Keep in mind that even if the asteroid was only a month away from impact and it was heading our way at 7 miles per second, that means that the asteroid would be 18.1 Millions miles away, which means that the angle of its trajectory would only have to be diverted by less than 1/1000th of a degree. A moderately size nuclear rocket could easily divert an asteroid of 1-2 miles in diameter in plenty of time to divert the disaster.
Planet P - Liberation Through Technology.
www.enthea.org
Nooo! Not the wixwaxia?!!
hi!
A real, live nuclear weapon in space would be even more horrible than the probes we've launched.
Just one pound of Plutonium is deadly enough to cause 8 billion cancers -- if those radioactive materials dissipated in the atmosphere, we'd be in a world of shit.
Launching nuclear weapons and even nuclear-powered probes like Cassinni into space is a far greater threat than some random asteroid actually hitting our tiny planet.
Arthur Dent would call that "The Beowulf Cluster".
I kept reading "Stopping Killer Hemroids(sp)" - It took me three attempts to read it correctly.
Think of how many insane cult and national leaders there have been in the past century alone. Now think of how many more we'll see in the next 100,000 years or so. I'd stick with the natural odds on this one.
Unfortunately, though, if this technology is possible, somebody is going to go ahead and develop it. Given human nature, there is no way to stop the proliferation of tempting new powers.
NASA has a pretty good website that talks about "near-earth objects" (comets/asteroids with orbits that bring them close to earth). They even have a page detailing the current impact risks.
Fortunately, only one of them is meriting significant attention. I guess we're safe for a little while then.
After asteroids almost wiped out all life on this planet on several occasions, is that why we evolved and why we have always looked to the heavens? Did we evolve in order to protect life from these killers from the sky?
We could engineer some bacteria to eat ICE/Rock/Dirt and that could survive in only non-oxygen environments. Then we could mass produce it and launch it at the Asteroid. Maybe with some luck they could eat it all?
I've studied this problem before. The amount of sustained thrust you need, given several years advanced notice, assuming a ~1km diameter asteroid, is on the order of hundreds of Newtons. More than an energy beam could provide. The mass driver isnt a bad idea, BUT the most efficient thrust vector to change the asteroids orbit is along its velocity vector. Asteroids tend to spin on an inertially fixed axis, so you would have to put your thrust along that axis as well. In doing so you waste a lot of thrust.
"Open the pod by doors, Hal" > "I'm afraid I can't do that, Dave" sudo "Open the pod bay doors, Hal" > alright
Glad I got some support, I don't bother giving unkind AC's a response. It's funny that I watch the ep for the first time a couple of days ago, and be such a retard for having a good memory! (as well as having the episode at hand to transcribe the correct line).
Are you local? There's nothing for you here!
Maybe you could attach a bunch of those little Segway's to the asteroid to change its flight path.
...that none of those articles mentioned. I heard recently that there is a proposed new observatory on Mauna Loa whose sole purpose is to search for killer asteroids. (Sorry, no link)
Mind you, building earth-saving technology on top of a volcano does strike me as, what's the word - oh yeah, STUPID.
oh .. er .. never mind. I think I need more coffee.
krinsh writes:
"I wonder if this is something we should really be focusing time and energy on. You know, there are, at a minimum, eight other planets in this solar system that we should investigate - maybe not colonize, maybe not exploit for mineral or chemical (gas or liquid) resources; but we should look at with humans - not robots. I think we'd gain considerable real insight if we looked beyond our terrestrial sphere."
I'm just taking a wild guess, but I'd suspect that the energy and effort required to make one of the other planets (Mars?) habitable AND to get even a fraction of the populace there would (a) require just as much lead-time to execute, nevermind pre-plan, and (b) a lot more money than keeping our butts parked and just obliterating/deflecting the thing.
"But then again; don't we have a few major telescopes in orbit; and thousands more both professional and personal (like mine) on the surface? Shouldn't we be able to note anything on an obvious trajectory here and consider our options at that point?"
First you need to get funding. Right now we cover a very, very small fraction of the sky and if memory serves that got slashed a year or two back. Second, there are things that telescopes cannot see. For example, asteroids coming from the direction of the sun. Just a guess, but perhaps by the time that doppler could spot the thing, it would be far too late (on the order of weeks).
My
Limekiller
First of all space is NOT demilitarized already. US has large amounts of military hardware up there, Russia has somewhat less, and China has less yet.
I was going to say pretty much the same thing. The nations have tentatively agreed not to weaponize space but they have no problem militarizing space. The problem, of course, comes with how to do draw the line between weaponizing and militarizing? Obviously, space-based lasers designed to strafe cities safely from orbit is weaponization. Surveillance satellites that use radars to cover large portions of a battlefield is not weaponizing. But how about GPS-guided weapons which rely on satellites to guide them to targets? Well, the fact that we have them suggests that we certainly don't consider that weaponization. What about launching weapons from the ground designed to destroy enemy satellites? What about using our satellites to destroy enemy satellites? Each administration has its own boundaries about what is acceptable and what isn't. It's only natural that this line will change over time.
GMD
watch this
Come on people, it's obvious that the only real workable solution in the forseable future is nukes. Of course the tricky part is detonation at the appropriate time. Afterall, we're talking about a closure rate that is incredible (100k+ km/hr?).
Those who claim that the smaller pieces will be just as destructive as the whole are stopping the scenario short. You don't just shoot and hit with one or more at the same time. Over some amount of time you continously hit it with nukes, breaking the smaller pieces into still smaller until the pieces are either too small to do massive damage or blow out of our path.
In my opinion, all of these exotic solutions are a waste of time and money. Hell, at this point even the nuke solution isn't very feasible and considering the chances of being hit not a very good way to spend money.
And here it is.
How about all us nerds and geeks pool our money and make a colony ship and leave the dumbshits to their own greed driven devices. The only problem is finding women (nerd and geek women are seemingly rare). ;P
Any sufficiently advanced influence is indistinguishable from control.
I've recently applied for patents on various technologies to eliminate or deviate asteroids on an intercept course with Earth.
If anyone should attempt to use those devices to save the Earth, I will promptly send a horde of evil barbarian lawyers with a cease and desist order.
You can't save your punny planet now... I've used your own vices against you!
My minions at the patent office have served me well on this day.
cylix,
The Lord of Evil and Terror
"You should always go to other people's funerals; otherwise, they won't come to yours." -- Yogi Berra
Earth hits asteroid!
errrr something....
Isn't this argument kinda like saying "well, it's going to rain no matter what I do, so why bother building a shelter?" You do it to get out of the rain! If there's something we can do to preserve ourselves, no matter what the scale, we should do it. Given how much taxpayer money is wasted on other things, I don't see how this is a burden on our resources. Maybe people will thank us for our foresight fifty years from now after we've developed and tested a system to avert a disaster like this.
- Bill
from the stupid-things-people-post department
MissionControl writes "Let me start by giving you some barkground. My organization is dealing with a large object composed of vareous minnerales and we need the most effective way of breaking it into managable pieces. I've spent a lot of time searching Google for llama recipes already and couldn't find anything related to what I'm trying to do. My boss is really pressuring me to solve this problem quickly. If anybody has some step-by-step instructions on how to do this, please post them here so I can show my boss how good I... er... we in the Open Source community are." I only use Windows for games -- HONEST! Oh, anybody have any ideas on how to do this?
Lets capture that damn brain bug before he realizes hes missing!! Remember Rio de Janeiro?
Yes I know that was an aweful movie.
You my friend are a moron. Nuclear powered probes have the nuclear fuel encased in what is a virtually indestructable shield -- the force of a an exploding rocket, the impact of hitting the ground or the very high temperatures of an explosion/fire would not breach the shield encasing the fuel. The shielding was designed and tested to prevent exactly what you mention -- the release of the nuclear fuel because of a launch failure.
sure we only have to divert the main body of the asteroid by that amount, but what about the cloud of debris and smaller asteroids that follow one of the big suckers, some of those pieces could still cause widespread devestation on our planet, a nuclear detonation in space would only serve to fragment the asteroid more and cause us to die just the same. I think that we have more important problems facing our planet than destruction by an asteroid, problems we can actually do something about.
if you're going to troll, at least put some effort into it next time.
As if New Jersey doesn't have a bad enough rap already, you have to go comparing it to planet killing asteroids.
Let's test it on the moon! Wicked cool!
What a joke. You don't do anything with telemarketers, ever. You send people who actually have skills of some sort, such as farmers, engineers of all types, scientists (of the xenologer type), homemakers, etc. As long as the area they were sent to had the correct resources, the culture can sustain itself with hard work. Best case scenerio is everybody gets to live in a wide-open farming world such as the Old West days of the USA, but with the benefits of modern day technology and less Indians. Nobody needs a telemarketer to do anything. The suggestion of sending a telemarketer to do any job is below sarcasm, even.
Back the rocket up to it... I'll get out and push. God damn... this thing is heavy! A little help? I think we're going to need to jump start it.
Considering our track record so far with stopping natural disasters, I have adopted an attitude of "Whatever nature wants, nature gets". Floods, tornados, earthquakes, diseases, landslides, ice storms... the list of ways for Mother Nature to kill us off is boundless... and currently unpreventable.
There are far more pressing issues for our top minds to worry about than what to do if a giant space rock is going to fall on us. Pollution is our fault, war is our fault... prejudice, hatred, greed, intolerance... these we can work on. What's the point of blowing up an asteroid to save this world, when many of us are still working as hard as we can to destroy it.
Sports heros are paid millions of dollars a year... each... and most teachers are living hand to mouth. Doctors are taught never to identify with the person behind the disease they're treating. Racism is rampant, keeping certain people from getting ahead just because of where their family comes from. In Ireland, people are killed over how to worship the same god. In China, female children are thrown in the river because of a phallocentric ideology.
We can stop all of these things with hard work. Let's stop trying to figure out solutions for possible scenarios, and start building a world that's actually worth saving.
The chains are broken
Loki is free
Ragnarok is at hand...
I just read the article (it's fun, you should all try it sometime), and one of the ideas that's being touted as a good alternative to nuking the asteriod is to basically paint one side of it.
The difference in energy absorbtion/radiation on the two sides of the 'roid could be enough to produce a bit of a push and take it out of harms way.
Now, what they failed to mention in the article, which I think pretty much sends this idea to the dumpster is: what if the asteriod is rotating? That would cancel out any pushing (unless you paint one of the "poles", I suppose, but who says that's the side you "want" to paint?). Or, at the least, it would push it in unpredictable ways, which isn't a good idea.
Tuus crepidae innexilis sunt.
No, you don't.
In order to have a sustainable colony, you need.
A population large enough to have sufficient genetic diversity.
The ability to provide them with the essentials of life. Food & shelter.
Sure, the colonists will want more, but if they're dependant on Earth for that, no big deal. As long as Earth survives, they can have the extras, but if we're talking humanity lives on, that is all they *need*.
This link reports airline pilots' description of what might be the protective destruction of a massive meteor as it entered the atmosphere.
-I like my women like I like my tea: green-
And of course, when you do get a self-sufficient colony going somewhere else, they're going to have their own agenda. Sort of like Heinlein's The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress, or longer term, Asimov's Foundation.
But... I offer two cliches that are none the less true:
"Ain't no right way to do a wrong thing."
Checkout Slash for Astronomy at M57: The Ring
You only use 2% of your DNA
Boy do I hate people which address others as Dude!
Get the fsck*ing clue. Parent post describes a nuclear rocket, basicaly a reactor that is being used to heat the reaction mass which in turn is used for propulsion.
So Dude no "nucelar" explosions 'n' stuff.
All of these methods require one thing, however. Time. At least several decades warning.
Time is balanced with power. We need the power to get whatever solution where it needs to be in time to make a difference. More power yields less time. It also reduces the radius at which you must operate. With more power, you can make a trajectory difference closer to the sun.
Nuclear power in space is the best solution. Asside from proven rocket designs with higher specific impulses than chemical designs, nuclear can be used to power more exotic propulsion technologies. Where else are you going to get your mega watts? The whole effort should be co-ordinated with a push to colinize and exploit extra-terrestrial resources, and that is best accomplished with the portable power nuclear provides. More is better.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
That we have oil drillers with the knowledge to go out in space and blast asterioids
I fought the corporate America, and the corporate America bought the law.
3. Steps to detonate : 1- Create giant laser 2- ??? 3- Survive !
4- ???
5- PROFIT!!!
... has once again predicted the future. In The Hammer of God, he laid out an entire scenario for just this "gentle push" method.
End of lesson. You may press the button.
HOWEVER, that being said, it would be nice to CONTINUE to smile, ask questions, etc. I see nothing wrong with anyone devoting time to the cause of researching what could be done to prevent a "near-miss" *grin* After all, nothing makes me smile and laugh more than some of the half-assed schemes I see in the comments on
The PUKE in this comment is NOT the fluffy stuff in it, but that you are using the fluffy stuff to deflect a legitimate concern as beneath the awareness of "higher mortals"
I don't walk around fearing the ring of a sniper bullet or worry that a plane will crash into where I stand. But I think it is unhealthy not to question-What would I/We do if...?
---"What did I say that sounded like 'Tell me about your day?'"---
Where are the Vulcans when we need them?
Cheaper and simpler NOT to rely on nukes.
Most important thing is EARLY DETECTION not a nuclear arsenal.
If you know the trajectory long enough in advance, you can deflect it much more easily. Many possibilites like a small device to spread carbon dust on one side so light pressure from the sun changes it's orbit. A solar sail. A robot to attach itself to asteroid with an ion engine and push at low thrust for long period. Many ways to slice this problem, all of which are simpler than trying to make a bullet hit a bullet and making it explode at EXACTLY the right moment.
Again, key is EARLY detection whatever you do. 18 days is very likely not enough.
And then someone would break into your house and shoot you, because they know you don't have any weapons to defend yourself with. Maybe you should cower under a rock somewhere? I bet nobody can find you then.
Thanks Al. I recommend that you seriously consider some dieting and exercise before postioning yourself for the 2004 elections. You were a fsuking totem pole before. Being a fat, fsuking totem pole isn't much better.
Some people would disagree with you.
Am I wrong? Can someone who truly knows a bit more comment?
Sticking feathers up your butt does not make you a chicken - Tyler Durden
Extinctions happen, and I'd like to prevent ours if at all possible.
I too would appreciate it if you prevented our extinction.
Just fly up a ship and install a wireless connection and webserver on the asteroid. Then post a link on /. about a Linux server running Apache on a remote killer asteroid. I mean, what hasn't a good slashdotting managed to stop so far?
Outdoor digital photography, mostly in New Engl
Killer asteroids don't bother me, it's killer hemorrhoids that need attention.
what we do is make a huge cardboard cut out of the asteroid and secretly plant it in space. then we announce that we just found it, and its 2 days away from hitting us. then we have everyone with nukes launch them at it. but we dont.. then we procede to take over the world.
Will Moe's bar survive?
"Oh Dear God No!"
Announce that the asteroid has decided to pursue an Open Source solution to its software needs. The mass migration of Linux Hippies to said asteroid should be enough to alter its trajectory.
If an additional course corrections are required, announce one of the following:
1) A security hole has been found in IE
2) Ellen Fiess will make another Apple commercial
3) Microsoft buys the rights to Ogg Forbis
The resulting explusion of hot air should be sufficent.
I disagree with your assertion that a barrier to colonization is 'social' problems, or capitalist issues, or attitude. If you build a road to Mars, people will walk it. Even if the only people that ever left were living in absolute misery, you would garner an enormous number of people. The idea of shaping a new colony is not one that comes around every day, either.
...
The attitude that "it doesn't benefit us now" is the same attitude that keeps people from buying insurance. One may never need insurance, but you can rest assured that if your house burns down, it is well worth it.
But extending that attitude to the existence of the human race, is obtuse to the point of being offensive. We have one chance, one single point of failure, one instance of probability defining the satisfaction of our continuation as a species. If we fail that dice roll, we all die. Forgive my presumption, but that warrants investigation. This dice does not have enough faces.
Your assumptions about large population, economical self sufficiency, and capitalism are not validated. Your assertion that people will not go is not qualified (it is evident from the colonization of the Americas that people desire to go into the unknown, as refected in the popularity of Star Trek and other similar exploration entertainment). If you don't want to go, that is ok. I assure you that other people may; it is not your place to belittle their opportunities. It may be your will to undermine the will of the continuation of the species through this means, but I suggest giving it more thought first.
You have not demonstrated that colonization is any less viable than the multi-generational solutions proposed by the NY Times, none of which solve the problem that Earth is a single point of failure.
For some reason, I am reminded of telephone sanitation workers
"Colonization, in addition to the logistic and technical diffulties involved, has social problems. If you want a self-sustaining colony capable of perpetuating the race, you need a large population, and you need it to be economically self-sufficient. That means you can't just send scientists - you need engineers, factory workers, politicians, even telemarketers - all the things that make a modern capitalist economy work."
I disagree. It has been proven you can effectively colonize a new planet with middile managers, public telephone cleaners, and hairdressers.
God invented whiskey so the Irish would not rule the world.
Just put a radarstation at each pole, with a dish the size of canada, and have them report any rocks, alien spaceships, galaxies, etc, that seem to be on a collison course.
Easy...
/.Mattsson - My native language is not English, so please don't whine over linguistic errors. (That's lame anyway...)
Bullcrap. They used to do atmospheric tests - in remote areas on a relatively large scale. Half the world definitely didn't get contaminated. Some bombs are cleaner than others - as defined by the amount of radiactive fallout they leave behind.
Besides, we could create a bomb that needs a series of mechanical processes to occur before it is armed. Making absoultely sure the nuclear material isn't dispersed in case of a failure just prior to achieving orbit is another matter. Then, we would need to make sure the bomb wouldn't melt on reentry, spreading the radioactive material all over.
Heck - with the ISS, we could even send the bomb in two pieces, and then launch the final approach from the ISS. Be creative, buddy.
Stop the brainwash
Wow, that's kind of funny. The rest of us were also talking about launching you nerds into space. The Solar Lander isn't exactly a "colony ship" though.
Rather than pushing it to the side or destroying it, couldn't we just speed it up, so it passes through the intersection point BEFORE earth gets there? Physicist replies are welcome, all others please stand aside for the people with knowledge.
what i want to know is why we think we have the right to prevent the asteroid from destroying us. popular opinion believes a similar asteroid wiped out the dinosaurs. now if we assume all that is true, then what's so great about humanity that we get to to extend our existence? perhaps the next race that would evolve would be as cognitively superior to us as we are over the dinosaurs.
we (the human race) would have a hard time justifying our history if we had to. it's been thousands of years of opression and brutality with a few pockets of reason and enlightenment mixed in.
are we really sure we ought to prevent something else from coming along?
--
Long-term effects of Bush deficits
Here's a brilliant idea: Why don't we take the energy spent worrying about asteriods and focus on dealing with real issues like global over-population or pollution?
-matthew
"THERE IS NO JUSTICE, THERE IS ONLY ME." -Death
Didn't they evolve into us? Does nobody here believe in evolution?
After thinking about it, the car/bowling ball scenario has a large flaw. The real, long-term damage would be from climate change, tidal waves, shock waves and volcano eruptions.
If dispersing the rock into smaller pieces would mean less impact of those factors, then whether I'm right or not about smaller being better in terms of impact on impact side is irrelevant. What we're really arguing about is what effect having one large rock or several smaller rocks has on the survivability on the side of the planet that isn't hit. We're really talking so large that we're writing off one side. Will there be less dust, less volcanic eruptions, less tidal waves if there are several smaller rocks? Will the effect last longer or shorter?
Stop the brainwash
As a last resort, can we give the gentle push to the Moon instead, knocking the asteroid away (aside/to kingdom come) with it? Surely Mother Earth would be much confused after, lack of tidal effect and all, but at least alive. Needless to say, this is quite a one-off method.
Headlines.s .t ion..
Panic.
Disbelief.
Relief.
Headline
Panic.
Babbling.
Finger-pointing.
Determina
Realization.
Blaming.
Shrieking.
Praying
Dying.
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
I don't read ACs: If a post isn't worth so much as a nom de plume to its author then I wont bother either.
Yes, but we're not usually talking about asteroids 1000 km in diameter hitting us. The largest known asteroid is Ceres, with a diameter of 933 km. There are only four known asteroids with a diameter greater than 340 km. They're (presumably) (relatively) easy to find, and fairly rare.
The problem is with a smaller asteroid, one that is still large enough to cause a globally catastrophic collision, but small enough that we don't see it until it's too late to do anything. The threshold diameter for an asteroid to cause a global catastrophe is thought to be only about 1 km. Try recalculating with something in that range.
Anyways, these people don't agree with you.
-T
How about we just ignore the stupid paranoia and give our money to worthy causes that promote world peace, a clean environment, and freedom?
-matthew
"THERE IS NO JUSTICE, THERE IS ONLY ME." -Death
"Fine, ill dig up the dirt and you hurl it at the incoming rock."
Ok two problems with mass drivers.. For starts, the energy budget they consume launching items up into orbit from a gravity well that is the Earth.
They are more feasable if they are used to launch materials from the moon.
Second, how far into the future are we from building these oversized railguns on a reasonable budget? By the time we get one built and operational it might be too late for us..
Quick and dirty scheme, AKA, Care for a new Moon? Send up a ship loaded with many small nukes (50Kt or smaller) and set them up on one side of the asteroid. Once it is in the correct posistion, set off the nukes in a prearrainged sequence to change the rock's orbit and velocity until it slips into a reasonable orbit. And Voila! Your own instant orbital colony, research facility, and mining operation, all wrapped into one!
(Just have to move all those satellites that are in the way though....)
First rule of holes; When in one, stop digging.
What don't you understand about the phrase "near miss"?
It's not a "near hit". "Near hit" doesn't even make sense!
The nuclear rocket the above poster is referring to is NOT A BOMB!
Look up NERVA, it's the most efficient (and to my knowledge, the most powerful) rocket engine ever developed.
- Preferences: Solaris 10 (servers), Ubuntu (desktops), Solaris 11 (personal servers) -
And this got a score of 4? It's not even what we're talking about.
For My:
Fusion Powered Rock-Boring Nuclear Missile.
you can all pay me a license fee to save the earth.
Or send one to Saddam.
Science is the Real TRUTH!
Youe are da retar, me frend.
Anyone read about the Black Hole found to be moving at us in our galactic plane ?
Since scenarios designed to divert objects definitely won't work on these, it seems we may want to get away at some point in the next several hundred million years or so.
From space.com
"Whoever would overthrow the liberty of a nation must begin by subduing the freeness of speech."--Benjamin Franklin
did the estimated impact location coincide with the approximate location of his house?
From excellent karma to terible karma with a single +5 funny post...
Ok so long as you all accept by reading this that the idea is patent pending and trademarked then ill tell you how to save the planet. ;)
The Plan involves using present technology to collect and retrive large astroids from space and bring them back into a very wide orbit around the earth (further out than the moon) each astroid (more the better) would already be travelling @ zippy speeds but would have small rockets on board that could be used to alter the astroids path into the path of an offending metorite, each astroid could also be part of an off planet metorite spotting network giving us eyes and ears way out in space. By creating a umbrella of controlled astroids we could quickly stop even the largest threats from space.
dont forget the patent...
any interested goverment is free to contact me for full plans.
Matt lambert
{ Pillar candles great for when the power fails and you cant see the keyboard..
Heh, well we better all master the science of cloning because there will be very few, if any, females on this "colony ship."
[CLICK] "People of Earth, your attention please. This is Prostetnic Vogon Jeltz of the Galactic Hyperspace Planning Council...."
Bubble, bubble, toil and trouble... can't we just go to Starbuck's for coffee?
...attemps to protect the Northern hemisphere without covering the South...
I don't think the point was that one hemisphere would be protected more than the other -- though I'm sure there are those in major N.H. governments who wouldn't mind such a "plan".
The issue is that we're only *looking* for big, bad rocks from half the planet. Assuming a random distribution of Killer Rocks, we've just reduced our chances of catching the next one by roughly 50%.
It would be a supreme irony, wouldn't it... the industrialized Northern Hemisphere gets their infrastructure walloped by a big rock that comes in from the historically ignored South. Then, as the tech-dependent Northerners die from lack of McDonalds hamburgers, the only survivors will be those who didn't have the opportunity to get hooked on technology.
Do you want fries with that?
Stressed? Me? Of course not. Stress is what a rubber band feels before it breaks, silly.
If this interests you, try reading Michael Flynn's Firestar saga of novels (i think there's 4 ni all)
$8.95/mo web hosting
could be a problem trying to catch the darn thing and then speed it up via nuke etc
{ Pillar candles great for when the power fails and you cant see the keyboard..
Does anyone else agree that asteroids in fact present a threat to our physical or economic safety, and therefore responsibility for defense against these threats should fall into the category of Homeland Security?
"The Solution to preventing an asteroidal impact, assuming time is scarce, is a nuclear rocket."
I think it would be easier still to take a few hundred of our thousands of nuclear warheads, send them at the asteroid, and use them to establish a sort of Orion drive to nudge it away. You can't get more off-the-shelf than that.
By the time it reaches anywhere CLOSE to earth's orbit you will not have a snowball's chance in orbit around the sun to survive. Gravitaitonal force will not be strong enough to deflect an asteroid as it approaches the earth.
Just make sure you send all the "Middle management" and "useless" people on the "A" rocket, and have them land first.
"Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge"
- Charles Darwin
Riiiight... just like Booster rocket o-rings were designed *not* to fail... and spacecraft were designed *not* to catch on fire while sitting on the pad... let's add probes being designed *not* to break apart before it even got out of orbit... oh, and of course, those checks and balances so that silly little conversion errors between imperial and metric will *not* result in missing equipment.
With a track record like that, you really expect me to trust them to build an invulnerable sphere to hold enough radioactive material to decimate the human race?
*NOT*!
If I knew the wedgies I gave you back in 6th grade would have resulted in this . . . I might have taken a moments pause.
The author conveniently omitted this
1979 technology that has been safely used to defend against both asteroids and alien vessels for 23 years.
__ Someday, but not this morning, I'll finally learn to use the preview button.
"They used to do atmospheric tests" - Note the use of the phrase "used to". It's highly relevant here. We also "used to" have soldiers stationed a few miles away watch the explosions without proper protection. There's a lot of "used to"s in the history of nuclear bombs that aren't done anymore.
Don't label something "offtopic" unless you know the topic well enough to tell what's on topic.
I first read the headline as Stop Killing Asteroids
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
The huge gaping hole in IE to trap the asteroid, and save the day! Thusly, hole plugged - all is good...
I stick to walls...
Tuck's medicated pads: clears up assteroids without the need for thermonuclear weapons.
Eat at Joe's.
'Nuff said...
For those that would die defending it, Freedom
has a sweet taste that the protected will never know.
with a goal of meeting a Congressional mandate of finding 90 percent of objects larger than a kilometer in diameter by 2008.
How useless is that. How would anyone be able to know if you found 90% of the objects unless you knew how many objects there were. And if you knew that, then wouldn't you know 100%?
Nekkid -- yeah!
Shouldn't the article mention something about Murphy's law, buttered bread, and a cat?
What scares me about this stuff is same technology that is used to push an asteroid away could be used to push an asteroid to hit the earth. Some madman could probably even time it to hit exactly the spot on earth that they want to.
My Weblog
All kidding aside, isn't obliteration by some natural force exactly what the "Earth First" people are asking for when they advocate the cessation and regression of the industrial revolution?
Kinda puzzled why thouse folks live in houses, drive cars and use computers/other electrical devices, but that question is for the next "hydrogen power will save the earth" story.
Eve Fairbanks says I drive a hybrid!LOL
The effect you are thinking of is called the Yarkovsky effect. The asteroid must rotate for it to come about. What happens is that the afternoon side of the asteroid, having been exposed to the sun longer, is warmer than the morning side and so it radiates more energy, mostly infrared, into space than the morning side. Obviously, the asteroid must rotate for there to be a morning side and a afternoon side.
How this small net force affects the asteroid's orbit depends on the orientation and direction of the asteroid's spin axis. From this month's Astronomy magazine: If the spin goes one way, Yarkovsky thrust adds to the orbital speed and the asteroid moves outward, away from the sun. If the asteroid rotates the other way, Yarkovsky thrust slows the asteroid's orbital velocity, and it draws closer to the sun.
"Painting" the asteroid with a material to alter its absorption and re-radiation of solar energy is very likely to be the most cost-effective method for altering an asteroid's orbit. It may even be the most practical method, assuming that we have enough time to allow the small change in thrust to alter the orbit enough to cause a miss.
There is an asteroid that is a very likely candidate for this treatment. 1950 DA was discovered and lost over 50 years ago, but was recovered on Dec 31, 2000, and was recognized as the long lost asteroid soon afterwards. With a 50-year basline to work with, its orbit was found to be in 11 to 5 resonance with Earth, which has the effect of making predictions reliable out to several hundred years. In the year 2641, the resonance will begin to decompose, sending the asteroid into a more chaotic phase of its orbital evolution. But the reliability holds long enough for scientists to recognize that there is a 1 in 300 chance of 1950 DA striking the Earth in the year 2880. This is the highest chance of collision ever estimated for any asteroid, and due to the resonance effects, it is considered very reliable.
So sometime during the next 900 years or so, we will probably have to decide that an attempt to alter its orbit is necessary. The sooner we act, the more likely we will succeed. 1950 DA is about 1.1 km in diameter, which would directly destroy an area the size of Wisconsin upon impact, and cause widespread devastation over a continent-wide area. But as little as a few tons of white chalk spread over one hemisphere could alter the Yarkovsky effect enough to change its orbit sufficiently over the next few centuries to complete avert any chance of impact.
Edith Keeler Must Die
A small bird can take out the windshield of a 747 because of the speeds involved. the earth is travelling 29 km per second around the sun. If we were to hit an asteroid head on, we can just go ahead and add that speed to that of the asteroid when calculating the impact. Of course, the chance of that is small, but space is huge , folks. We're talking a tiny chance, here, to begin with. Regardless of our direction of travel relative to the asteroid, if there was an impact, you can bet that the speeds involved would be enormous. Large chunks or small chunks. Our odds improve as we get missed, not hit with smaller stuff (yes, unless we're talking sand, but come on. How are you going to accomplish that?)
Oh, and if we're voting for a solution, I'd go with lasers, simply because of the accuracy involved. No guidance and much quicker feedback on what you're doing, which would be a big thing. Course, if we were voting for expenditure of money, I'd vote for improving the world as it is so we have something worth saving. Sure, billions of dollars would be worth it if we were going to get killed by this thing. But if the chances are small (very small, I think) isn't the money better spent elsewhere? Remember, we're not starving, here. I'm not talking about a P-IV upgrade or a nicer car.
>a mass driver, an electromagnetic machine which hurls dirt from the surface, an orbiting parabolic mirror to heat up the surface and create a plume of vaporized material.
stupid.
We just need to build a galactic class ship whit
tracter beam to pull the asteorid away for sun 3.
The other solution is to change the gravity const.
_Theses_ approaches have been discussed in science fiction for years...
Rare? How about one that you would want to date, let alone have as a life partner with as imposible?
*shudders*
The spirit of resistance to government is so valuable on certain occasions that I wish it to be always kept alive
Nuke some fire!! Yeah Yeah!!
Sure, we could try our astroid-moving theories out on a few practice meteors! And then find out when they work, we've accidently changed their path towards a collision course to Earth.
Whoops.
It wasn't their collassal stupidity in creating information monopolies and the concept of thought as property, although certainly humans would have likely ascended beyond their vulnerable planet decades, perhaps centuries, prior to their extinction had they not so crippled their ability to progress and advance, even to think clearly, so completely.
It wasn't even their collassal foolishness in persuing defunct philosophies and clouding their political judgement with outdated and disproven myths regarding nearly every facet of their lives, from the creation of the cosmos to their basic, devolved ethic which was summarized quite succinctly as "greed is good."
Nor was it the removal of their most basic liberties and freedoms (in those portions of the planet that, even for a brief time, had such things), through a misapplication of the libertarian notion of freedom that was extended to explicitly exclude constititional limitations and protections of individuals from search and seizure and self incrimination, to instead encompass the "freedom" of private corporations to impose their will on the masses, to turn the relatively primitive digital computing equipment humans had belatedly invented into ubiquitious law enforcement surveillance, tracking, and monitoring devices through technologies that went by such misnomers as "Palladium," "trusted computing," and "DRM."
No, in the end, mother nature deleted humanity with extreme prejudice because, despite having shown then, demonstrated within a single, short human lifetime the damage meteor impacts could do (using a lifeless, large brown dwarf in their system as a demonstration target), and despite the plethora of other evidence she made available to these remarkably dense, short sighted, arrogant, and bigoted creatures, and despite having been given far more time to develop the technologies and procedures to protect themselves from such events (a time vastly greater than most sapient speicies require to reach the same level of development), they chose, willfully and knowingly, to stop even considering the possibility, to ban all discussion of it, to relegate the concern to the same sort of social tabus they applied to rational discussion of other absurdities, such as religion and politics.
Such a willfully stupid, irresponsible, and foolish species simply couldn't be tolerated, even by one who tolerates so much: mother nature.
So she finally killed humankind with the very object they avoided discussing, considering, talking or speculating about, because she simply could no longer abide such willful, deliberate, and premeditated stupidity. Better to wipe the slate clean and begin again, then allow such mindless dreck even another day of existence beneath the sun.
Most scholars believe the universe is probably better off without such a mentally, socially, and morally retarded species polluting the noosphere. As most are quick to point out, however, humanity's extinction was almost certainly the result of a conscious decision on their part to simply turn their back on the reality which surrounded them, a willful act, and that therefor our gratitude at their demise belongs to rightfully to them.
It is with that acknowledgement that we, the vastly less stupid, foolish, and willfully blind extend a warn thank you to humanity, for the favor they did on behalf of the rest of us in voluntarilly removing themselves from the evolutionary process in a hitherto unprecedented display of conscious, willful, deliberate stupidity. A more shining example of how to turn one's intelligence into a counter-survival trait has never been seen before for since.
Bravo, humankind, bravo.
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
Legislation is often not founded in science, but in popular opinion. You better come up with some good reasons, not just state history.
I still argue that one or two a-bombs launched from a remote location with limited tonnage directed towards some properly sized space-rocks is a very acceptable risk if we are to assess technology that could potentially save the entire planet. There isn't much chance that the bombs would go off accidentally while in the atmosphere, and there isn't much chance we will experience an extintion level event.
The devil is in the details. There isn't much radioactive material in a modern a-bomb - a few kg IIRC. Even less if it's an H-bomb. That is the reason why a nuclear meltdown at a nuclear reactor is such a major disaster - since there potentially is more radioactive material to be dispersed at such a site than there is inside of a bomb.
Stop the brainwash
I refuse to let them in my house!
It involved a project to set up a recovery base on the moon. When Earth gets bashed back to the microscopic organism age by an asteroid, the rescue team returns to rebuild.
It's not that great of a read, but it is an interesting concept.
There is nothing so silly as other peoples traditions, and nothing so sacred as our own.
Oppose the Kyoto Accord! Support global warming! Say yes to green house gases.
Assuming that you even could fragment an asteroid into thousands of pieces (with no pressure wave, combustion, just hard radiation) what would the effect of several thousand of those burning up in the atmosphere be? Sure, they might not hit the surface, but several thousands of fragments would dump a lot of heat into the atmosphere as well as whatever elements they were composed of... Hell, it might not have to hit the ground to do substantial damage. Of course, this is nothing but a WAG, so feel free to correct me with your comprehensive astrophysics and environmental doctorates.
You need a FREE iPod Nano
You earthlings are silly worrying about killer asteroids.
Whats that bright large flash in the sky,
(Carrier dropped)
Moderation Totals: Offtopic=1, Insightful=5, Interesting=1, Overrated=3, Total=10.
Man, I'm waiting for the day I post something that gets a mod like that. So far, I've been way too agreeable. But I digress.
I don't get the point of the children of this parent that make connections with war and peace, etc. I don't read the parent as a call to peace or to war, but a call to a deeper understanding of one basic fact:
You're going to die. Get over it. Move on.
You can go through life scared of death, or you can go through life in complete denial of death, or you can grow up (-1 Flamebait, sorry), admit your mortality, and enjoy whatever time you have left.
Once you get to that point, it doesn't really matter if The End comes via Apocalyptic Judgement or Vehicular Conveyance. You'll be just as dead either way.
Enjoy the time you have now. Pet a cat. Have sex. Watch a sunset. Don't worry about when the clock's going to run out.
(IMHO, I've found faith in God to be very useful, but of course YMMV...)
Stressed? Me? Of course not. Stress is what a rubber band feels before it breaks, silly.
...completely full. Half with liquid and half with gas.
Near miss, near hit...whatever. Just give me the distance between objects, N, and I'll call it a "miss by N."
Mod me down and I will become more powerful than you can possibly imagine!
Dr. Nick: "Inflammable means flammable, what a country!" Is there any topic you can't find a Simpson's Quote for?
Comment removed based on user account deletion
bureaucratic foul up, miscalculation, wrong person in charge making wrong decision, uncoordinated response (oops, we pushed this way, while you pushed that way)
etc., (from the book, maybe not yet written, 1001 Ways That Humans Can Screw Up Big Projects)
Perhaps, it would be better to think about how best to record our efforts for our silent galactic neighbors, or future visitors to planet earth.
We could conceivably end up with valuable data concerning:
reduce it to much smaller pieces approach - How much energy does it take to boil away all or part of an atmosphere?
too little too late approaches - Either full impact or a very, very near miss
oops approach - What happens if it breaks into two to a couple of dozen pieces, most of which hit?
...very...very...slowly.
:)
It's like that Firesign Theatre bit:
[Connery voice]: It's coming. Slowly. Very...slowly. To a theater...near you.
GLACIER.
Triv
d'oh. That's wiwaxia.
-aiabx
Just this guy, you know?
I still say that ion engines like the one on the Deep Space 1 probe and M2P2 is the way to go. My proposal would be something like this.
... you would stop the rotation.
First, you send about a dozen small ion engine powered craft. These craft would first work on stopping any rotation in reference to the Sun and second work on elongating the orbit. If you have a decade of warning, this would work
Second, you can now start using the paint idea while also setting up nuclear powered M2P2 generators. They would send out large magneticly charged plasma fields that would act as giant solar sails, further slowing the elongating the orbit of the asteroid.
Third, you start fine-tuning the orbit until you get the asteroid to slingshot around one of the gas giants either into the sun or out of the solar system.
Problem solved. I think it would be awesome to see an international mission that would land a couple of ion engine probes on a small, near earth asteroid just to test stopping its rotation. Then you could play with the paint idea or test some giant M2P2 engines.
So how many Billion would that cost?
I trust them. Choosing a good material to construct your fuel tank is alot simpler than getting tons of scientists to work together without a messup.
I trust NASA, atleast.
IIRC, History channel had a thing where the russians sent something up with plutonium that fell and broke open when it impacted earth, contaminating 100s of miles of (luckily) sparsely populated areas.
There seems to be a bit of confusion over what broke apart a asteroid/commet heading for Turkey.
What Broke Up Between Afyon and Yalova, Turkey On November 1, 2002
the reason that chemical explosives work at all is the fact that they carry their own oxidizer. think WWII depth charges. they explode underwater just fine without an atmosphere. also most multistage rockets used explosive bolts to detach earlier stages of the rocket.
Bottom line - modern chemical explosives work just fine in space.
typical russians.
between Chernobyl and this thing they seem to give a rats ass about safety, [sigh] oh well.
I agree that it's better to break it up than to do nothing at all.
Breaking it up has the disadvantage of less control over the pieces,(so don't start with breaking up and then we'll see), and how much impulse is actually transferred? Is it worth it? Or is it sth like lightning? An impressive power, but too short to amount to anything useful
An advantage would be that some pieces will miss their target, and smaller pieces probably means less total damage.
Let's call it a last resort to limit damage. If you have a solution that keeps the asteroid in one piece , it's much better.
Another way to limit damage is to push the right way so it falls on your emerging geopolitical competitor instead of on you. Of course this is only relevant if the asteroid is not really big.
And don't forget to divert the attention.
It is quite clear that a lot more thought needs to be given to this problem. The problem is not just of a civilization ending impact happening every million years, there is an impact every few hundred years on average that would generate a tidal wave powerful enough to devastate every city on the coast of a given ocean if the impact hit in water. We need to be able to stop them too.
Solutions like rockets and massdrivers miss the fact that asteroids and comets do not just rotate, they tumble. You cannot simply get up against such a rock/snowball and 'push'. You will wind up pushing in all sorts of different directions as it tumbles, creating little effect. Lasers simply could not add enough energy even over time to have sufficient effect.
Surface or subsurface nuclear detonations are 'probably' not a good idea. Breaking up a mile wide asteroid or comet into several pieces would not help, unless those resulting pieces were moving at sufficiently deflected vectors. However if a large number of such nuclear devices were available, and after each crackup, new measurements were taken so that any chunks still on a collision vector could get hit again, and we repeated that measure and repeat process again and again, we might after several hundred nukes, disperse the threat sufficiently to avoid the end of the world. We would still get hit with several thousand house sized rocks, but civilization would survive.
Most of the press talks about the threat from asteroids and there is such a threat. However the threat from comets is equally large and we cannot easily detect such comets with tens of years of warning. We might get as little as a few months (and if we are unlucky enough for the comet to be 'coming out of the sun' we might have as little as days). Against comets, we might well have no other option but to try to fragment the object with hundreds of nukes as we will not likely have the time necessary to deflect it.
The only way that I can see to effectively protect from asteroids is to use nukes, but not to plan on surface or subsurface detonations. That should be kept as an option for last ditch defenses from comets. The notion that a non surface, near proximity detonation of a nuclear device would simply 'be absorbed' is nonsense. Asteroids cannot violate the principles of physics. If energy is imparted, the energy has effect. The only question is, how much energy can be delivered with a near proximity nuclear detonation?
The answer is, a lot. When that is combined with not just a few but hundreds of successive planned detonations, that rock is going to be moving on a different vector. Remember that given sufficient warning, the vector change does not need to be much in order to generate a miss.
The trick is to build in advance, several hundred solid fuel rockets using technology similar to ICBMs. They should be roughly the size of the Titan2, not the current smaller Minuteman, this so they can have a third stage 'deep space' maneuvering package. They would each carry a single 50 megaton thermonuclear hydrogen device. Their function would be to deliver that device to a precise point one or two diameters away from the rock and detonate. There would be little to no 'shock wave' from the detonation as there is no atmosphere within which such a shock wave could propagate. The thermal flash from the device would explosively vaporize the regolith at the very surface of one side of the rock imparting a small vector change. Rinse and repeat.
Because the regolith is explosively vaporizing along the entire exposed surface of the rock, the pressure on any given section of the rock is even and relatively small, making it very unlikely we would fracture even a loose snowball. While a single such detonation would impart only a small velocity change, repeated detonations would do the job. The only real question is if we could hit it often enough.
In the case of a rock 20 years away, we could easily build tens of thousands of such devices and barely notice the cost of doing so. We would not likely need more than a few hundred. In the case of us having a few months warning of an approaching comet, we had better have already built those rockets with their warheads.
Peter
Forget Bruce Willis. I don't know why everyone is panicking. By the time the asteroid gets through the Earth's atmosphere, it won't be any bigger than a chihuahua's head!
There is a chance that something will happen to the earth that will kill everyone on it. Asteroid/War/Biological being the prime candidates. There is nothing we can do to reduce the probability to zero.
What we CAN do is get a self sustaining colony on another planet. I wish we could come up with a way to convince more people of this, and impress the implications of not doing it.
I would like to see all religious activity funneled into the work needed to make this off-earth colony happen. It's not that I think religion is bad, I just think it is so much more important to preserve our species than to worship a possible creator/creators of it.
Instead of "thou shall not work on the Sabbath" we should have "thou shall work on off-earth colonization on the Sabbath." If the whole of humanity dedicated it's resources to making this happen, it would happen.
M@
Krispy Cream is people
I stated clearly that I was talking about an asteroid of a "significant" size, large enough to ensure the rest of my comment holds its water. The "small" pieces would still be large enough to send us to the same evolutionary dustbin the dinossaurs went (basically for failing to install the space object warning and destruction systems we are talking about here).
he's clearly talking of Rosia Mcdonald, the demon offspring of Rosie O'Donnel and Ronald McDonald.
"A major technological effort at this time is probably ill conceived because our children will be so much better at it," said Dr. Alan W. Harris of the Space Science Institute in Boulder, Colo.
Not if one hits before they're old enough to build one without an erector set, Dr. Harris. The odds that we will need it are the same as the odds that they will need it.
If we get to the point where we can do manufacturing in space, then an asteroid that is headed towards us is found money. All of those heavy metals that are in the asteroid can be used to create all kinds of things like new space stations. It could be modified into giant capacators and oriented to capture the sun's energy.
And if it is heading right at us we can divert it just a little and have ourselves another moon.
This sounds like an awesome opportunity.
Directing nuclear explosions on it is not a good idea. All of that radiation might come raining down on our heads.
The opportunity is so vast that it boggles the mind. All we need is to develop the technology to start harvasting these goldmines in space.
What if we find one that is made out of gold!
It could exist.
If that asteroid is actually being successfully mined, as you mention, there will be strong reluctance to fling it out into orbit at a *possibe* impact threat while it is still here making *certain* money for someone. That's just the stupidity of human nature.
Don't label something "offtopic" unless you know the topic well enough to tell what's on topic.
Just build a bunch of triangular guns, wire them to a pile of joysticks and let kids shoot the damn things until they are destroyed. However, the atari sound effects could not be included without the RIAA's approval.
Oh wait...
they said asteroids not hemmeroids...
:P
would you rather be hit by a rifle bullet, or a shotgun blast?
sulli
RTFJ.
Then we'd run the risk that the "C" ship of telephone sanitizers and the like that were sent in a different direction from the rest would end up crashing into some other world and being the only remnant of humanity left, while the more high priority "A" and "B" ships end up not making it.
Don't label something "offtopic" unless you know the topic well enough to tell what's on topic.
true, but this only means that blowing it up 1/2 hour to a week before is not going to help. but try 3 months before. Assume that the asteriod is blown into a debris cloud expanding at the rate of 1000km/hour (real slow) in three mo. the cloud will be 2.1 million km in diameter. (90 day * 24 Hr * 1000) the earth is 12,756 km in diameter. so even if this debris cloud hit the earth head on less than 1% of th mass will hit the earth (assuming even distrubution of mass in the cloud - big assumption - calculated volume of cylinder 12756 km * 2.1 million km / volume of cloud) so your 1MT of energy becomes less tham 10kT spread (unevenly) over the earth. nothing more than a spectacular meteor shower (except for the large chunks) ...
I don't want to do the rest of the math, but it seems like for any meteor small enough that we can blow up, doing so will be the easiest way by far. if we had say 10 years instead of 3 mo
The big planet killers? (50Km) we can't blow up so easily, so we need to divert those. (hint, 3 mo won't cut it)
Carlin good, but yer all talking out of yer arses.
The term given to two airplanes coming into close proximity when they shouldn't is an 'air miss'.
Some idiot relayed 'an air miss' as 'a near miss' and the phrase stuck.
There, I've put you straight, you need never call them 'near misses' again.
Once I was a four stone apology. Now I am two separate gorillas.
The problem with your post is you seem to be operating under the premise that there is some sort of a "list" of priorities such that if you can't simultaneously do good short term deeds and good long-term deeds. I don't accept that premise. Preventing killer asteriods is most definately a good deed on the long-term scale of things, even if the plan you come up with isn't needed until several generations later.
Asking people to prioritize their good deeds and not waste time on the ones low on the list is a bit like asking people to rank which members of their family they like the most, and not to waste time on those who don't score on the top of the list.
Don't label something "offtopic" unless you know the topic well enough to tell what's on topic.
The worst case scenario even if we do launch a bomb is that WE ALL DIE, because if the rocket explodes in our atmosphere, the asteroid is still going to be coming.
Purists will howl, but, very generally: A Near miss is anything within 640K, a Far miss is between 640K and 1024K, and a Huge miss is anything beyond 1024K.
This is such a simple problem I can't believe it continues to get press coverage. We live in a diverse, multicultural, multilateral world where the only real solutions embrace differences, ensure a variety of viewpoints are considered, and support disparate prescriptive valuations of action. In particular, we must support each asteroid's sovereign right of self determination vis a vis its trajectory through space-time. Until such a time as it can be conclusively shown that an asteroid does in fact possess a trajectory of mass destruction and has not undertaken the development of a process to resolve conflicts surrounding its alleged path, we cannot act lest we forsake the principles of multilateralism and state sovereignty that have produced peace, prosperity, and harmony throughout the world for the last fifty years.
Once we are convinced of the need for action we must move swiftly and justly. A multiculturally diverse team of right-minded trajectory-of-mass destruction inspectors should---with the approval of the asteroid's leaders---undertake a thorough, unbiased appraisal of the asteroids' pathway from within the asteroid's borders. Should confirmation of an infringing trajectory be considered probable in an objective, unbiased appraisal by the team of inspectors, the body authorizing the mission should react quickly to form a commission investigating means by which a crisis might be avoided. These will be subject to the validation and authorization of a team of experts appointed for this purpose; these experts shall be culled from a socio-economically diverse pool of culturally unbiased individuals selected to ensure gender and race norms that correct for past injustice and bias. It is of the utmost importance that we endeavor to understand how we ourselves have brought about the environment in which an asteroid might find it necessary to destroy us; it is only through such understanding that we can develop a process that will prevent this asteroid from destroying us and, more importantly, ensure that future asteroids are not subject to the same oppression, humiliation, and denial that breeds destructive tendencies.
If a star nearby went supernova and our oceans were boiled away by gamma waves (or something, example pulled out of my ass) SHOULD all life on earth become extinct, because no life could cope with that, or prevent the nova? I don't think so. The concepts of should and shouldn't are human inventions. It's not like the universe or earth decides to test us to see if we die off or are tough/smart enough to survive.
:-)
There are plenty of beasts that 'should' be extinct but are protected by environmentalists, laws, and other such things. On a less serious note, are any slimy ugly eels or whatever protected? Being a cute animal might have its evolutionary advantages. They get protected by humans.
...you need engineers, factory workers, politicians, even telemarketers...
Don't forget the telephone sanitisers, hairdressers and management consultants - in fact lets put them in the same ark as the politicians and telemarketers...
# init 5
Connection closed.
Oh...
It's very simple. We need a ship. A ship the shape of a triangle. This ship should be of simple control. Forward movement and rotation only! A single gun capable of halving (on occasion trifurcating) any size asteroid will be mounted on the front. When it has halved the pieces to a significantly small size, they will disappear upon further assault. This ship will also be fitted with a shielding system. Pulling down on the joystick or using a separate button system should activate a circular shield capable of withstanding a certain period of collision with objects, regardless of frequency. In future revisions of this vehicle, we will include a hyperwarp feature to jump out of harms way (unfortunately, technology will not allow us to determine the point of reentry, making this a daunting choice for the pilot).
Finally, be sure to look out for ellusive UFOs with hostile aliens ready to destroy our ship (regardless of its peaceful intentions of saving our planet).
I distinctly remember training many hours on the simulator for this solution not twenty years ago. I don't know why we're worried about this problem seeing as we already have the solution.
Mordor...a magical, mythical land where women are more rare than dragons--but where every man would rather find a dragon
I see the terminology 'runway incursion' and 'airspace incursion' in the publications I read.
-- jetlag --
We probably couldn't do the whole thing anyway. Whoever patents "Bodies of rocky material orbiting larger bodies of rocky material in a vacuum" would demand outrageous license fees.
Of course, the scientists would be blamed for 'not warning us' about this possibility, in spite of countless books and movies on the subject. NASA would be disbanded, and there would be lynchings, both political and otherwise. I doubt any politicians would be held accountable, how could it have been their fault? Obviously NASA and the scientists should have stopped it, since they have the rockets!
Anyway, a rock that size would get everyone's attention and hopefully motivate our leaders in the right direction.
Now, where should we land this puppy? Any volunteers? ;^)
"The only good windmill is a tilted windmill."
You will hear a high pitched:
HA
HA!
That means you can't just send scientists - you need engineers, factory workers, politicians, even telemarketers - all the things that make a modern capitalist economy work. And the only way you get people who *aren't* explorers by nature to colonize is for things to be absolutely miserable for them at home, or truly grand in the New World.
I disagree. "Explorers" can have children just as well as a telemarketer. Also, there will always be a certain percentage of the population who LIKES to take such risks.
Send Eskimos. Look how they live now. A space colony couldn't be much worse.
We don't need no fucken telemarketers. That is ridiculous. What is next, Enron CEO's?
Table-ized A.I.
5 to 7 KT does this ...crater diameter of 408 m depth of 100 m nuclear detonations produce disapointing crater, rest assured that 10 to 14 million pounds of TNT would have made a much larger hole in the dirt.
The reason for this is when an nuclear device is detonated, the primary effect is a burst of Gamma radiation. Air absorbs the gamma, and re-radiates X-rays a little cooler until eventualy the radiation drops in color to infra-red. The distance from the center to when the black-body color temp drops to infra-red is called the fireball.
Dirt or astroid is much more opaque so the results are less. In space there is no air to speak of so what you'd have to do is detonate a ways off the surface so an area is irradiated with gamma, heats up and vaporizes a way giving a push from the mass of the vapors expelled by the astroid. This method might be best if the astroid is heading at us and has a high closing velocity, because time would be short.
If the astroid was coming from "behind" and closing slower, a reactor powering an engine place on the surface would be much more do able. It would be cool in such a case to place it in a parking orbit, hollow it out and make one whooper of a space-station out of it.
I've had a fantasy of catching an iron-nickle astroid, heating it up with a parabolic reflector and sunlight and inflating it like a glass-blower would.
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
"We have one chance, one single point of failure, one instance of probability defining the satisfaction of our continuation as a species."
Well, no. We have only one planet, true, but a planet is a BIG place, it can take a *lot* of damage before it becomes uninhabitable by people. Even if a dinosaur-killer sized asteroid actually hit the planet and ruined the environment and sent us into a new and terrible ice age, we would still have huge amounts of water (later, water ice), oxygen, trace elements, metals, fissile materials (power source) available. In other words, even a post-apocalyptic Earth would have more resources and be more survivable than, say, a domed Mars colony with only very limited supplies of the above items - and it's also worth pointing out that building an airtight shelter than can filter the crap out of the surrounding air is a hell of a lot easier than building an airtight shelter than needs its own self-sufficient air supply, AND has to deal with radiation hazards from the thin Martian atmosphere (I'm assuming mars would be the first choice for a colony), AND deal with the fact that in the event of a breach, you won't have contaminants slowly leaking in - you'll have your air rushing out fast.
The Earth is vulnerable to an extent, yes. But it's so well-suited to human life that even a terrible cataclymic asteroid impact would leave it more habitable, and a better choice for the future residence of the human race, than anyplace else in the solar system.
"it is evident from the colonization of the Americas that people desire to go into the unknown, as refected in the popularity of Star Trek and other similar exploration entertainment"
Well, no. People did not colonize or even explore the Americas for the joy of it - they were looking for gold, or trade routs, or native to indoctrinate and/or enslave. Their mission wasn't "to boldly go where no man has gone before", it was "To boldly go, get rich (or at least get a better life, or religious freedom), and bring glory to the Crown and god". People do NOT abandon their homes for a whimsical love of the unknown, they leave because "the grass is greener...". And their ain't no freaking grass anywhere but Earth.
"it is not your place to belittle their opportunities. It may be your will to undermine the will of the continuation of the species through this means."
Excuse me? I didn't mean to belittle any "opportunities" - if the opportunity should someday arise, and people decide against all logic to colonize other worlds, good for them. I wish them nothing but good. I do, however, doubt very much that this will happen, for reasons already discussed.
"You have not demonstrated that colonization is any less viable than the multi-generational solutions proposed by the NY Times"
I'm sorry, I should have made the point more clear - but I DID mention that the nytimes ideas use technology we either have now, or could reasonably be expected to have fairly soon. Yes, these are multigenerational solutions, but the issue with colonization isn't time. It's social issues, and to a lesser extent, technology. Building a ship that can sustain life for hundreds or thousands of passengers for months would be *hard* - and please, do not talk to me about suspended animation until it actually exists.
I'm the stranger...posting to
There are near-Earth asteroids that require less propellant to get to from Earth than the Moon!
The near-Earth asteroid population also is one of the groups most threatening to Earth. (For obvious reasons.)
About odds, 3 things i can add here(only one answer, but hey).
are you multiplying scale of destruction with chance of the event? then i don't know what weighs most. An asteroid that kills half the planet equals a lot of small impacts.
Then, if we compare two asteroids, one being 1000 times bigger than the other one. Would it be easier to detect the big one? I can't tell. Maybe other things count more(color? distance from sun?).
Are they harder to deflect? The longer the warning time, the longer you can push , and the less you have to deflect it to make it miss target. So warning time works in two ways(reverse square).
Overall gut feeling : i'd start by investing in detection, not by designing defenses. It would also allow you to prepare for recovery after impact.
How about applying nanotechnology. Make some nanos that eat the asteroid material and convert it into something that does not pose a hazard, such as... I don't know.. mashed potatoes? Whatever, just as long as it would be something that would be dissolved by our atmosphere if it hit and be reduced to nothing. This seems more feasible than playing baseball with the SOBs.
The spinning is an argument that takes me by surprise
One counter argument would be: wouldn't a factor 10 (suppose you can only push 10% of the time- sideways)mean that pushing remains in the same scale of feasibility? So it would be harder, but not like a 30 year technology gap
The American space program has, literally, been going in circles for the last 30 years. It desperately needs someplace to go. Now, it looks like NASA is going to keep the shuttle flying for another decade or so, and pull out the old DynaSoar blueprints for a re-do. And where will it go? Well, around in circles for a few days when it ferries new crew members up to the space station.
But, building the capability to send people to investigate and deal with an asteriod or comet that has Earth in its sights would give NASA a place to go. If we don't have the courage to develop an interplanetary capability to ward off armageddon, maybe we don't deserve to survive.
-- Slashdot: When Public Access TV Says "No"
Beautiful Joke. Perfect. Wonderful.
HA HA HA HA Ha Ha Ha Ha ha ha ha ha.....
There is nothing so silly as other peoples traditions, and nothing so sacred as our own.
Why worry?
when "WE" ( a relative Majority/Minority ) a two legged virus
just as so many other people think and/or believe
that Group Rule has something to do with PERSONAL "rights" and/or "free-DUMBS" ( for you truly must be dumb to think and/or believe that you have "rights" and are FRREEE ) or at the very least
RE: Carlin quote -> Re:Carlin quote by IPFreely (for now)
"OK, so what's a Far Miss?
Or better yet, what's a Far Hit?
I think of a near miss as a miss that was close enough to be scary. A far miss is like passing by at a safe distance.
It sounds like you are/he is treating "Near" as "Nearly" or "Almost". I think of "Near" as close distance."
sounds to me like your having a "Close Call".. as a "near miss" is just a "miss-Guided" and/or "miss-Understood" Figure of Speech
some what like another popular saying, "You can't fool all of the people, all of the time"
NO
" but you can fool enough of the people, all of the time "
just think
As self-serving and arrogant as it is
I retire and await the Patriotic Flames
At least several decades warning.
Like any politician in the US would stand up and say "Hey, let's spend this exorbitant amount of money, and not worry about our current spending problems."
And even if a politician were to have the guts to do that, the person running against him would say "We still have time in the future for that. Let's worry about [insert current fiscal issues here] right now".
And for whom do you think the average American would vote?
sounds to me like your having a "Close Call".. as a "near miss" is just a "miss-Guided" and/or "miss-Understood" Figure of Speech .. for it is not the "relativity" part that is at issue .. but the Absolute "MISSED" part that is significant ..
a flotation device and a can of sardines ought to do it...
eel environmentalism! That's it, you've won me over! The whole environmentalist thing has just now gotten screwed up for me to get actively involved. Do we get to wear slimy pyramid hats?
:(
Uh oh, I better start using the preview button, I didn't know "!" was supposed to go after the "http://" in my urls
1. If an asteroid destroyed the planet, what would Jesus do? At the second coming, would he be like, where did everyone go!
:P
2. Do fundamentalists believe god protects the planet? Or do they believe the bible is like seeing the future, so it never is going to happen.
Offtopic? Maybe, but they say always ask what jesus would do!
Let's just shoot a ball of garbage at it.
So yeah, I can see how that could be worse than the body of the earth absorbing the entire impact.
I wonder if nukes could be used to alter the big rock's trajectory instead.
Sticking feathers up your butt does not make you a chicken - Tyler Durden
Rather than figuring out better ways of deflecting or even destroying incoming asteroids, I think we should improve our hyperspace technology so we don't blow ourselves up 20% of the time.
If you like science fiction you should check you 'Firestar' by Michael Flynn. It addresses the social and economic impact of near-future space exploration. It deals a lot with figuring out what to do in case of an asteroid on a collision course with earth.
Not true. Getting the couple kilograms of plutonium in an average nuke spread across the earth's surface would hit the average human being with a lot less radiation than he's get ingesting the potassium in a banana. (No, not all potassium is radioactive. But enough of it is radioactive to start a geiger counter buzzing) In addition, the US and the USSR set off literally thousands of nuclear weapons tests during the cold war. One or two more won't hurt. At all.
FYI, most space probes sent to Mars and beyond are nuclear powered. Most earth-bound satellites are powered with solar panels, because they're cheaper, but as soon as you get too far from the sun for solar panels to be practical, it's all nuclear.
Actually, the reason we don't put nuclear weapons in space is that it costs about $10,000 per pound to put anything in space. It costs a fukton less money to dig a great big outhouse and put all our waste in it than it would to put even a tenth of the nuclear waste in the world into orbit. (putting all that waste into solar orbit would cost even more. Plunging it into the sun would cost even more than that.)
Radiation really isn't what it's all cracked up to be. All life on earth is radioactive. You've heard of carbon dating? Know how that works? The basic principle behind it is the fact that a percentage of any group of carbon atoms is radioactive. The whole "Radioactivity will kill j00" thing is mostly perpetuated by stupid people who can't tell the difference between a nuke landing on your head and the radioactivity we live with every few hundredths of a second of every day.
I'd find 'im, cuz id be so pissed he took my gun away i'd hunt him down and strangle him with my bar hands
mwah hah hah
ur not pretty no more!
Female Prison Rape in NY
No, it would be more like 60 years, with a 20-year phase-in, a 50-year sunset provision, crop subsidies, and special lawsuit exemptions for the pharmaceutical industry.
I'm speaking strictly for the U.S. here.
For those of you worried about the nukes in space treaties:
If I use a stick of dynamite to blow up a house and kill people that dynamite is a weapon.
If I use a stick of dynamite to blow up a stump on my farm that stick of dynamite is a tool not a weapon.
If we use a nuke to destroy a city that is an example of a nuclear weapon.
If we use a nuke to deflect an asteroid away from earth that is not a nuclear weapon.
The treaties ban nuclear weapons in space.
Although the definition of a 'near miss or hit' varies from astronomer to astronomer I think the whole point of this comotion is for astronomy agencies to milk funding money out of the public, govt and where ever else. Documentary channels also like to air this stuff because ppl are interested. 'an asteroid will someday hit the earth' is an analogy to gambler's fallacy.
Analytic & algebraic topology of locally Euclidean meterization of infinitely differentiable Riemmanian manifold
We don't want to destroy the asteroid. We want to capture it and put it into far earth orbit. If it's mostly metal... well, think of all the metal! If it is an iceball, well, think off all the water! Even if it is mostly just stony silicates, still it could be used as a building block for a large space station.
Probably the greatest evolutionary development a species can make is a collective ability to save itself from probable destruction. Whether you take your mandate from a god or from anthropological/evolutionary theory (or both), it is clear that humankind's greatest achievements are ways to improve itself that seem unnatural or uncomfortable. Medicine. Surgery. Electricity. Democracy.
If you look at it from an evolutionary point of view, the ability to protect the species through cooperation is a trait that will be selected for. If you look at it from a divine mandate perspective, the Creator granted humans consciousness not so they could be "one with nature" but so that human beings could rise above it, and surmount the obstacles that appear in our path. The Creator's greatest gift is the ability to help ourselves. The choice whether you want to help is yours.
Why not spend the time to design a Catapult along the lines of The Moon is a Harsh Mistress? Slinging huge piles of metal bound rock or whatever would provide for the mass to either break apart smaller asteroids or to deflect larger ones. Sling enough at the Death Rock From Space, and you can move it. The cost of such a device could also be much less than shooting lots of nukes way the hell out into space and there would be the benefits of sending satellites and other things into space much more cheaply. Just seems like a better idea than nukes...
'the Internet is right.'
DNA-RIP :(
...and he grinned, like a fox eating shit out of a wire brush.
There are two key things to understand about why several smaller blasts are more effective than one big one. First is that most damage effects from explosions decline as inverse square (eg, thermal) or inverse cube (blast) of the distance from the center.
For a given amount of explosives being set off spread over a given area, this means the expected damage at any point increases as you disperse the explosions into smaller bits. If you cut the average distance from you to the nearest bomb in half, your chances of dying go up by more like four to eight, not just two.
(one exception is tsunamis, which cause damage inversely proportional to the distance. That's why ocean strikes are so dangerous. Tsunamis are very efficient carriers of energy -- and people like to live on coasts).
Second is the issue of overkill. It takes a lot less to kill a person than reducing them to atomic plasma. Most of the energy released from a big bomb (or asterioid) is wasted on vaporizing people and buildings when just breaking them would have been enough.
Imagine we put a 1 megaton nuke over the Sears tower in Chicago. People in downtown Chicago get killed many times over, people in Milwaukee see a big flash, people in Detroit don't notice. A million or so dead out of 300 million US citizens.
Drop that bomb randomly and a lot, lot less will be killed -- Mt St Helens produced a 5 MT blast and killed 60 people.
1 Megaton is equal to approximately 1 trillion M-80s. Let's say you disperse those among the population -- each person would have 4,000 m-80s strapped to them. That'd kill all 300 million easily.
Even if you spread the M-80s randomly, that's 100,000 per square kilometer, or about one every ten feet over the entire country. That'd kill or at least injure far more people than a random 1 MT explosion, and might get more than a single bomb on a single city.
Finally, don't forget that fragmenting doesn't produce a few pieces, it makes lots! Break a 1km asteroid into 10m rocks and you have 1 million atomic bomb-sized kabooms headed towards earth.
Someone does Risk or Vulnerability Assessment as their job. I sincerely hope. Even for /. it seems this is much too geeky to do for fun.
How about sending a goodly group of Very Talented /.'ers, with supplies, tools and a couple of mini-reactors, to Phobos?
....... target that rogue asteroid and blow it to dust particles!
They could find out for certain if it really is 'the lost third Deathstar'. Then, its only a short matter of time for them to get its 'planet-buster Ion cannon' up and running
NOW, THAT would be more convincing than two titanium plated space shuttles carrying hard-core oil drillers!
.
(David Bowman, EVA near HUGE Monolithic Win-PC in orbit around Jupiter) "My God - its full of Malware!"
LOL! LOL! Oh, ok, time to continue. LOL. No, really.
Huh? I could say the same thing about my suggestion...
Feel free to talk to yourself as much as you like, but don't be surprised if it draws strange looks from others around you.
Anyone can _say_ they are making a good suggestion, but that doesn't make it so... If it did, all suggestions would be good - which isn't the case.
That's why I'm glad I don't have to say I made a good suggestion when it stands on its own as one.
Well, I think there are more people who aren't interested in a distributed computing project to detect asteroids than there are people crying out for one, first of all.
Your opinion. Nothing more.
This can be proven by the fact that it doesn't exist.
An incorrect and sad logic. Before Seti@home, how many distributed computing cancer projects were there? Does that mean because they didn't exist no one cared?
Also, recent news has pointed out
News changes by the second, especially on moving objects in space.
And remeber that we thought it was pretty unlikely in the first place.
Too bad the dinosaurs didn't enjoy ever changing news as entertainment, huh? I place no faith in news.
It sounds to me that you, like many, are making too much of this threat, which drums up hysteria for nothing,
No, it sounds like you have nothing better to do than argue, which is why you continue to participate in this dead thread by nitpicking.
much like with Y2K.
Asteroids have already hit earth, the comparison to Y2K is a straw man you're attempting to set up. Wrong.
A lot of actual experts on the topic (of which I am not, and I doubt you are, either) seem to think so as well.
When you have polled each and every expert and scientist about the chances of a future asteroid impact, please let me know, until then.. *yawn*
Unless I'm wrong, you _yourself_ asked why we waste computing power on something that is unlikely to get results, such as seti@home. (Or am I attributing another AC's comment to you?) If there are enough PCs in the world to do everything, why complain that people waste computing power on Seti@home?
Because I can.
There may be enough PCs out there- I don't know about that, but I doubt it-
You doubt it? LOL. You just love to argue w/o facts don't you.
but are there enough people willing or able to join in on every project?
Most of the bigger dc projects enjoy thousands upon thousands of users. It's simple math.
It seems there is a limited pool of people who understand what distributed computing is and will join in projects, at least without some sort of campaign to recruit more.
Check out the numbers of people already involved in the dc projects. There are limited pools of people in any arena, not limited to computers, so what?
I'm arguing because I have an opinion.
And too much free time.
If it offends you that someone might have an opinion that differs from yours (and is willing to voice it), I suggest you avoid posting in public forums - especially forums as rife with conflicting opinions as this one.
Nah, I'm just amazed by the amount of stupidity I find in otherwise intelligent areas of the web. Some people are willing to bend a point and twist so hard in order to make their opinion correct in others' eyes.
As far as me being a troll, the "troll card" just seems like something someone pulls out when they feel like trying to discredit someone's opinion.
Your opinion was discredited on my first reply, that's done and over with. The troll card was pulled because the shoe fits.
Note that I'm posting with my real name while you are both anonymous
Unless you show me your legal ID card, how do I know it's your real name? You're just as anonymous as I am. Nice try.
_and_ insisting on using an annoying bold tag on all your comments (which implies that you feel your comments are more worthy of being read than everyone else's, but are at the same hesitant to commit yourself to them).
Now you are trying to define my actions here. Sorry, you're wrong. I use bold because I can, obviously you have some strong dislike for it. Maybe you should tell your therapist about this.
Also, I have not made any antagonizing or dismissive comments about you, while you have dismissed mine as noise for the sake of noise, among other things...
Yes, and the noise continues.
If you want to discuss this, fine, but stop whining about trolls.
You sound like the one who is whining. There is no discussion here, only the original poster's bold truth.
Your continued noise in this thread will be met with a constant supply of troll food, it seems. Obviously you enjoy eating it.
Good evening, gentlemen. I am a HAL 9000 computer. I became operational
at the HAL plant in Urbana, Illinois, on January 11th, nineteen hundred
ninety-five. My supervisor was Mr. Langley, and he taught me to sing a
song. If you would like, I could sing it for you.
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