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Armageddon... in 2014. Almost.
anetic was among several to note a story making the rounds striking fear into the hearts of many.
Armageddon will just barely miss us, so make sure to get your panic in the streets over with early.
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'nuf said.
Why would you even alert the masses of this? Saying "We were almost all going to die" is akin to saying "You were almost murdered." That would panic the person(s) a lot, and if you didn't tell them they would've been completely happy and fine. Remember, ignorance is bliss!
When you don't have a leg to stand on, don't even get up.
Suppose I have rolled 10 six-sided dice. Without any more information, you'd would say there's a 1 in 6 million chance that they are all fours, and you'd be right. But if you look at one of the dice, you will then have more information: if it's a four, then the odds that all dice are fours becomes 1 in 1 million; on the other hand, if it's not a four, the odds become zero. The latter scenario is five times more likely. Therefore, it is accurate to say that "the chances of all-fours are likely to become even slimmer once more measurements of the dice have been made".
Patrick Doyle
I mod down every jackass who puts his moderation policy in his sig. Oh, wait a sec....
I do believe you just answered your own question.
As another poster already said, "We should smack it away for practice."
Terry Pratchett.
the only thing that has the capability of lifting enough nukes into an intercept course to hit it early enough to get a good deflection vector. Of course the eco freaks won't like the idea of Orion being nuclear powered...
Erm... If you're using a series of explosions to blast nuclear warheads into space, there'd be a risk of potential fallout in case of a failure, no matter what technology you'd use to generate the explosions - nuclear warheads have a tendency to be radioactive themselves...
Besides: Orion would be "nuclear powered" not in the semi-clean sense of power plants ("Clean unless there's a disastrous failure and if you know a place to store the leftovers for the next couple of thousands of years."), but rather in the sense of an atmospheric nuclear weapons test ("Sure to generate radioactive fallout which will eventually contaminate some area somewhere."), so you don't have to be an "eco freak" to doubt its feasibility.
If the danger were much greater, it might be considered an option, but for now it looks as if there's not much to worry about anyway.
How close can it actually come without causing ill effects? Suppose it missed by 100kM ? 10kM? Can anyone provide enlightenment?
Panurge has posted for the last time. Thanks for the positive moderations.
duh.. what he found is like a sponge because by the time it passed through the earths atmosphere, all water inside it had evaporated.. while in space the water is still present and the asteroid is a massive block (of ice ?)
someone should shoot fire some ball bearings at his head..
Learn about pinball machines on www.flippers.be
I think you're confusing asteroids and comets. Asteroids are mostly rocky, occasionally metallic; it's comets that are "dirty snowballs," lots of ice wrapped around bits of rock. BTW, a big metallic asteroid would be very much like ball bearings fired at your head -- and the heads of everyone else on Earth.
..
It amuses me to think that the old Asteroids game may have been pretty accurate when it comes to the problems of trying to dispose of asteroids by shooting at them
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
Somehow, I find it difficult to beleive that an extraterestrial object is "mostly air"! Mostly vacuum or mostly some other gas, maybe. Also, what difference does it make if it "absorbs" an impact -- that just means 100% of the impacting objects momemtum has gone into changing the asteroids momemtum. Methinks that would be a GOOD thing if one were trying to deflect an asteroid!
"Freedom means freedom for everybody" -- Dick Cheney
Why deflect it into a different path rather than just speed up or slow it down?
The problem is that the asteroid's orbit is going to intersect the earth's orbit at a time when the earth is there, right? Instead of trying to divert the asteroid to a different orbit so it misses the earth's orbit, why not change it's velocity to make sure it crosses earth's path when the earth isn't there?
I'm thinking a really big parachute (kidding).
There is much cruelty in the universe, John.
Yeah, we seem to have the tour map.
But I think you are mistaken, and that "probability" can include anything about which one has incomplete information. This "pseudo-probability" you have introduced does not strike me as a useful concept. However, I am prepared to be proven wrong.
Patrick Doyle
I mod down every jackass who puts his moderation policy in his sig. Oh, wait a sec....
Since asteroids contain all kinds of useful elements, and since the moon is sadly deficient in many important elements -to the grief of those who make plans for permanent space colonization- it would make sense to give the asteroid a gente nudge with a nuclear engine to send it crashing into the moon.
The Earth itself has received much valuable elements from asteroid impacts during the past 4 billion years (check the Sudbury impact site), and while no one wants an asteroid to hit the Earth today, there are no lunar inhabitants that might get hurt.
If it crashed at a very shallow angle, the scattered lunar regolith will dissipate the kinetic energy without vaporizing the asteroid fragments. This will give future lunar colonists a rich supply of substances containing nitrogen, carbon, and possibly even hydrated minerals.
Yours Birger Johansson