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.

Comments

Why Panic the Masses?

[aeinome]

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!

Re:Chances likely to change?

[p3d0]

No, probabilities are all about uncertainty. After further measurements, there will be less uncertainty, and that affects the probabilities.

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".

Re:Project Orion anyone???

[Baumi]

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.

Re:Nukes will not work for sponge-like asteriods

[Daniel Dvorkin]

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 ..

Re:Nukes will not work for sponge-like asteriods

[El]

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!