Slashdot Mirror
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.
← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)
I don't need to worry about the unix 2038 time problem??
Near Earth Objects
A mugshot of Bruce Willis as icon will draw the right associations.
Windows 2000 - from the guys who brought us edlin
...Armourgeddon outta here quickly!!
Sorry, but my karma just ran over your dogma.
...then we won't have to fix the 32bit time stamp. Someone tell Linus and the rest of the 2.6 devs.
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Look at the bright side, Bruce Willis will drill it AND he won't be coming back.
Philip
Signatures are broken
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.
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.
Here at NASA JPL http://neo.jpl.nasa.gov/risk/2003qq47.html is the risk summary.
but the brits are playing it down here http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/3200019.stm
Hmmmmmm now where did I put that Anderson shelter?
"Common sense is nothing more than a deposit of prejudices laid down in the mind before you reach 18" Einstein
What should an enterprising geek stock an underground shelter with? What would /. users suggest?
So where is the story now about the cult following 2003 QQ47. I mean there has to be somebody who thinks its driven by aliens and will take them off the planet to nirvanna.. to leave the rest of us to hell or something equivalent.
God i wish the Scientologists swung that way.. I'd say let the rock take them.
Who makes you Sig?
Bruce Willis can stay put.
Lets send him anyway..37 - what does it stand for really...
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?
It's SCO's final solution.
According to my wife, Miramani, you take out a communicator, you say "Kirk to Enterprise", and the magic repulsive laser pushes the rock away.
Never pet a burning dog.
At 1 in 909,000, you're still much more likely to be hit by an asteroid than you are to win PowerBall.
It's good to use your head, but not as a battering ram.
I have to wonder how they (them, you-know-who ;) ;)
.....
came up with a name for this massive rock...given the chances that it will hit us, you'd have thought that they'd come up with something more imaginative...
(For good examples, please see relevant crap doomsday movies or scifi novels
In a situation like this, I'd recommend what any other geek would: We need a slashdot Poll!
"Most appropriate name for a massive rock that will most likely possibly maybe destroy all life on earth:
A) EarthCrusher
B) Foot of God
C) StarHammer
D) SCO's Laywers' Bill
E) DinosaurKiller
F)
G) CowboyNeal's Booger
They say that there is a one in 909,000 chance of asteroid 2003 QQ47 impacting our planet.
The chances of a catastrophe are likely to become even slimmer once more measurements of the asteroid's orbit have been made.
Yes, duh. With our current knowledge, there is a 1 in 909,000 chance of the chance going to 1, and a 908,999 in 909,000 chance of the chance going to 0.
Saying it is likely to become slimmer is a totally content-less comment.
I believe posters are recognized by their sig. So I made one.
For you Spetics out there, a tonne is a metric ton. It is equal to a mass of 1000kg. There are approximately 0.454kg in one of your pound thingies.
Stick Men
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.
General "Buck" Turgidson: Doctor, you mentioned the ratio of ten women to each man. Now, wouldn't that necessitate the abandonment of the so-called monogamous sexual relationship, I mean, as far as men were concerned?
Dr. Strangelove: Regrettably, yes. But it is, you know, a sacrifice required for the future of the human race. I hasten to add that since each man will be required to do prodigious... service along these lines, the women will have to be selected for their sexual characteristics which will have to be of a highly stimulating nature.
Ambassador de Sadesky: I must confess, you have an astonishingly good idea there, Doctor.
Well, looking at the NASA NEO page (http://neo.jpl.nasa.gov/risk/2003qq47.html) shows the actual probability of 2003 QQ47 impacting the Earth in 2014 is 1 in 1.754 million, the highest isolated probability. The BBC's figure of 1 in 909000 is the cumulative probability of the asteroid impacting the Earth in the next century.
2003 QQ47 only merits a 1 on the Torino scale. That's the same rating given to random events. For anyone to get upset, you'd be looking for at least a 3 (out of 10) which is a 1% chance of a collision and some regional destruction. Compare this to a 10, which is guaranteed collision and global climatic catastrophe. A 10 event on the Torino scale happens every thousand centuries or so.
Journalists really ought to at least try and understand their subject matter before committing their thoughts to be distributed to the general public. They have a duty of responsibility to ensure that data of limited significance is not represented as some twisted interpretation of a coming apocalypse.
NetInfo connection failed for server 127.0.0.1/local
Sorry to take this seriously, but enough of the "And I for one welcome our new Asteroid Overlords" jokes. The idea of a scale that measures the likelyhood of impending destruction just seems too wonderful to leave unanalyzed.
The Torino scale seems a wonderful invention, since obviously the dinosaurs didn't have it, and see what happened to them! But it has an obvious bug, it works only with integer values. Zero means "all clear" and One means "enough danger to panic and start looting". What about "enough danger to reconsider whether life as a tea jockey is really worthwhile?" I mean, it would be really useful to know that the current Torino scale is 0.003 or whatever. People could change jobs and say "Torino went up, I'm reconsidering my life choices!" or whatever. A single decimal Torino jump could be enough to spark divorces, a full digit change enough to halt wars. But we need more accuracy.
I for one welcome our new Torino overlords!!
Ceci n'est pas une signature
Why isn't anyone doing anything!!
'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.
Personally, I'll start worrying when the propability is more than 1% (Torino Scale 3) and increasing with time.
Vimes: Does this mean I'm going to die?
Death: POSSIBLY.
Vimes: You turn up when people are possibly going to die?
Death: OH YES. IT'S QUITE THE NEW THING. IT'S BECAUSE OF THE UNCERTAINTY PRINCIPLE.
Vimes: What's that?
Death: I'M NOT SURE.
I hereby place the above post in the public domain.
The Mayans predicted the apocalypse would be year 2012 CE, for astronomical reasons. Coincidence? Probably.
--
(According to Terry Pratchett anyway, who also admits that there's a million to one chance of it being a million to one chance- ok here on in it gets complicated ;-) )
-WolfWithoutAClause
"Gravity is only a theory, not a fact!"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?see the close approach table here - note the the distances on this chart are typically in single digit earth radii.
See also this data on the NEODyS home page
It means that any space alien or mad scientist with a grudge could give it a nudge to do something nasty.
Note also that the orbit simulations link given above seems to be calculated with old data. showing no collision in 2014
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
"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.
Ah well - never mind, we can use them to propel the kitten-tipped missiles we'll be firing at the asteroid.
Actually you can just try to figure out what's going on with 2003 QQ47 using the ORSA software. It is not a simple computation, but you can try anyway. --Lino
Please read the news article "Asteroid Might Hit Earth in 2880, Unless it is Painted" about another asteroid that might hit earth. The article suggests that painting the asteroid would deflect it from its course.
Table 28.9 Global Catastrophies
"Learning is not compulsory... neither is survival."
--Dr.W.Edwards Deming
I agree it is interesting how much press this is getting for such a basically non-existant chance of a collision. However, I have to think anything that causes the public, especially the American public, to take any sort of intrest in space is a good thing. We've fallen a long way from our glorious Apollo and Gemini roots. I really hope China, the EU or anyone else just makes massive strides into space to force our government to seriously look up again to space. Or, alternatively, I'd be willing to risk a 1 in 10 colllision to make us at least get out there to crush asteroids. Though I have a strange feeling it would just result in most rich people/nations finding ways to survive an impact, instead of defending against it.
We seem to have lost touch with the stars and became much more focused on more trivial, Earth-centric problems recently. Hey, don't get me wrong. I'm all for saving the environment and national defense and all that, but all it would take is a good, massive impact to solve all of our problems here and leave our ruins for some alien civilization to possibly come across. Here's to the future...
Request: ECM unit, 1000 km fullerene cable, 1 tactical nuclear weapon. Reason: Birthday party for foreign dignitary.