Slashdot Mirror
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.
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!
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.
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!
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?
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
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
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! ~~
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
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.
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...
"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?
"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
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.
Chances are this is how we would first detect an asteroid withh our name on it.
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
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 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.
Yes, best hear it from you than those roaming bands of anti-stargate thugs. They're everywhere these days, seems like I can't even go to the store anymore without seeing a best sci-fi show turf war. Instead of throwing up signs, they got action figures and shit, quite a site.
Finally, math books without any of that base 6 crap in them.
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.
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.
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
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.
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
I don't think an asteroid the size of Bruce Willis would do much damage at all.
Commander Sheridan is a little biotch! All about the new school sci-fi! Smallville up in this piece in the deuce-0-0-deuce.
Finally, math books without any of that base 6 crap in them.
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?
I dont even belive it would be possible using current weapory it to hit an asteroid from far enough away to stand any chance of saving us. Plus they'd spend so long forming commities with sub commited with working groups to look at the problem we'd all be dead by the time they reported back with their suggestions and drafts anyway
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!
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.
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
"...a gentle sustained push is what's needed...."
that is the exact thing I told my girlfriend...
alas...she still says no.
nbfn
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?
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!
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...
Uhm, smaller debris that follows an asteroid? You must be thinking of the Bruce Willis movies. First of all the odds are highly in favor of asteroid being in the 1-2 mile diameter or less. Secondly, any debris following such an asteroid would be so small that it would be of no danger at all, and finally the acceleration of the asteroid from the nuclear rocket would be so gradual relatively speaking that any debris would pick up the ride from its meager gravitational force.
Planet P - Liberation Through Tehnology.
www.enthea.org
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.
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."
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.
... 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?'"---
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.
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.
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
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.
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
It's obvious you don't know the law of conservation of mass.
It's also obvious that you've never seen the video of the exploding whale.
Here's a hint... if you start off with an 8 ton whale, and you blow it up, you end up with 8 tons of whale parts! Asteroids also follow this simple rule.
- Preferences: Solaris 10 (servers), Ubuntu (desktops), Solaris 11 (personal servers) -
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
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
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...
...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)
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"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
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
'Nuff said...
For those that would die defending it, Freedom
has a sweet taste that the protected will never know.
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
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
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
While the probabilities may be small, this is the only event that could result in the extinction of our species. I disagree. There are a number of events that could eliminate the human race, along with pretty much all life on earth: Sun going Nova Supernova Black Hole passing close by The moon's orbit getting interrupted, and crashing into the earth. Virii Earth's core exploding, etc. This brings up another point, are we worried about a large asteroid hitting the moon and fragmenting it or changing it's orbit? How likely is it?
1f u c4n r34d th1s u r34lly n33d t0 g37 l41d Capitalization really works: i helped my uncle jack off a horse
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.
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.
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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!
...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
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).
"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 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.
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.
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.
...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
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.
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
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.
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
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.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
Actually most earth approaching asteroids are carboncious, rich with megatons of heavy metals. I doubt it will fly apart from a gradual push from a sustained nuclear rocket.
www.enthea.org
The point is that on hitting the atmosphere, the rate at which a meteor burns up is proportional to the surface area over the volume (for uniformly distributed frictional heating, constant density, etc. etc.). So if you split a 100 m radius asteroid into 1000 10 m radius asteroids, a much lower mass will hit the ground, assuming that the bits are seperated enough that they see "fresh" atmosphere. If they all still hit together, then slipstreaming etc. will occur and there won't be much difference.
SO a 1000 10 m radius asteroids cannot do _more_ damage than a 100 m radius asteroid, and might do much less.
Not really, most of them would just be happy if we left the cities and got back to our "natural" Agrarian ways.
Just like Pol Pot did with Cambodia.
I don't think you ought to feel as if you should cater to the lowest common denominator. Your ".sig" is your final words, a parting shot, and it is your space, not anyone else's. If I had a vote, I'd vote for the return of the nom de plume. Pen name may mean the same, but it just isn't as good.
Lack of eloquence does not denote lack of intelligence, though they often coincide.