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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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There should be a new scale: The probability that a particular NEO will cause an article to be written up in main stream newspapers.
Seems like every year or less another "near miss" gets some play in the papers.
Who knows, maybe it's the same 3 or 4 objects that keep getting reporting on all the time...
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
Time to dust off those schematics for the Orion lifter... 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...
Donald 'Duck' Dunn: We had a band powerful enough to turn goat piss into gasoline.
What should an enterprising geek stock an underground shelter with? What would /. users suggest?
Note how the story doesn't mention the asteroid actually missing us. It notes that the probability of it hitting us is a little under 1:900000, based on current data.
Now, that doesn't mean the asteroid will hit us, and it doesn't mean it won't. It means that we don't know yet.
Still, the chances of this wiping out most of a continent are better than the chances of you winning the lottery. There, feel better yet?
Because anyone ignorant enough to do anything irrational upon hearing the news probably didn't hear it. They were too busy watching Frasier, Temptation Island, 700 Club, etc.
Most people don't watch the news unless it has something to do with Iraq, somebody getting shot or murdered, or one of their favourite TV shows.
Of course, a skilled preacher may be able to whip up a nice mob this Sunday. "THE END IS UPON US!"
The US Army: promoting democracy through unquestioned obedience
I'd be more worried about this one which is also rated 1 on the torino scale but has a 1 in 10,000 chance of hitting the earth.
Oh by the way, it's not due 'til 2101..
$ strings FTP.EXE | grep Copyright
@(#) Copyright (c) 1983 The Regents of the University of California.
'Horizon' on the BBC covered this issue a while back - see http://www.bbc.co.uk/science/horizon/2003/armagedd on.shtml
A quote from the link above:
Asteroids like sponges
Three years ago, the residents of Tagish Lake in northern Canada witnessed a bright explosion in the sky, as an asteroid burned up in the atmosphere above them. Jim Brook was lucky enough to find debris from the impact. The first thing he noticed was that it was far lighter than he expected it would be. Like a sponge, the chunks of debris were mostly air.
Dan Durdan makes his living by firing ball bearings at asteroid samples - meteorites - to study what happens when they are hit. When he tested samples similar to the Tagish Lake meteorite, he was surprised to see that, rather than shattering or being deflected, these less dense asteroids simply absorbed the impact of the blast.
These results were worrying. This could mean that many asteroids would not be deflected by a nuclear blast. Trying to deflect an asteroid with a blast might have no effect, and would keep it coming on its deadly trajectory.
The programme also covered an alternative solution (another quote..)
The power of the Sun
Jay Meloch has suggested a radical new way of dealing with a dangerous asteroid. He wanted a surer, more controlled way of diverting a large body - with a gentle push instead of a blast. His idea was to find a way of harnessing the biggest power source in the Solar System - the Sun.
In the same way as you can use a magnifying glass to set fire to a sheet of paper, you could focus the Sun's rays onto a point on the surface on an asteroid. The spot where the Sun's rays met would heat up, blasting particles of the asteroid into space. This would act like a rocket engine, and might be enough nudge the asteroid out of harm's way.
The scientific community ridiculed his suggestion - until Meloch received a phone call from someone who took his idea very seriously. The US military already uses collectors like Meloch's to gather radio waves. Meloch may well have come up with a suggestion that will one day save the Earth.
$ strings FTP.EXE | grep Copyright
@(#) Copyright (c) 1983 The Regents of the University of California.
The Mayans predicted the apocalypse would be year 2012 CE, for astronomical reasons. Coincidence? Probably.
--
15 March 2005: The object will be .082 AU from earth.
24 September 2012: The object will pass within 0.098 AU of earth.
I also noticed (if I am reading the orbital diagrams correctly) that the points where the object is closest to the earth coincide with the points where the object passes through the plane of the ecliptic. Since these are the Acending / Decending nodes of a solar orbit, wouldn't this point be ideal for a change of orbital plane? I'm thinking these near-Earth encounters may change the object's orbit somewhat, since surely the earth encounters will impart some delta-v on the object.
Anyone else up on orbital mechanics care to take a better look at the ephermis?"Only for a uselessly narrow definition of "probability"."
Nope. With a fair coin it is proper to talk of the probability being 50:50. The difference between a fair coin and celestial mechanics is that with a fair coin it is not possible to define an experiment which will determine the result in advance. In celestial mechanics it is not only possible, but very straight forward. The experiments will in fact be done, and that is the reason the "probability" will change over time before the date of potential collision.
The thing is that real probabilistic analysis is used in computing the pseudo-probability which is the odds 909,000:1. Taking the information at hand, they compute a volume of space through which both the rock and the Earth might pass through during the given time and then compute the probability of them both being at the same place at the same time within that volume. As the quality of the information improves the volume decreases and the pseudo-probability more accurately approximates the actual probability. The odds either get extremely large or closer and closer to 1:1. (I'm being sloppy here, and not talking about gradients. A real analysis would have different probabilities of being within different parts of an infinite volume.)
On the other hand, this is in fact boringly technical. Pseudo-probabilities are very useful, and it is only natural to call them probabilities in normal conversation. You only have to worry about the difference when actually computing the pseudo-probabilities.
Big Brother Bush is doubleplus ungood.