Slashdot Mirror
Introducing Asteroid 2004 MN4
Numerous readers wrote in with bits about a potential asteroid collision: "The recently discovered asteroid 2004 MN4 is currently listed as having a 1/233 chance of hitting the Earth. It is 420 m across and if it strikes the Earth it will release an energy of 1,900 Megatons of TNT (the largest nuclear weapon ever detonated, Tsar Bomba had a yield of only 50 Megatons). It is also the only asteroid that currently has a Torino scale value of 2." So, in summary, there's a 1-in-233 chance of the worst disaster in recorded history happening on April 13, 2029, and a 232-in-233 chance of nothing happening. Have a nice day! Update: 12/24 22:14 GMT by M : The rock is now rated a 4 on the Torino scale, or a 1-in-62 chance of impact.
Not to alarm people further, but April 13, 2029 is also a Friday the 13th!
Chew: You Nexus, huh? I design your eyes.
Roy: Chew, if only you could see what I've seen with your eyes.
The Machines will have to worry about it.
Well its close enough time to start looting!
I don't really think there's too much point in getting concerned just yet. There are many asteroids that we can't track until they've already passed us, so worrying about a 1 in roughly 300 chance of an asteroid hitting us in 30 years time isn't really a major problem yet. Personally, I'd like to see some sort of government funding for machinery to detect a greater number of asteroids which are potentially on a course for us. Otherwise, our fate is just in the hands of luck.
I'm not stressed. I'm just terribly, terribly alert.
...maybe if we all lean to the left...
FLR
Thanks for all the numbers, but using this page is more fun ... (no HTML, it's short enough to cut and paste)
http://www.lpl.arizona.edu/impacteffects/
To put these odds in terms us slashdotters will understand, the odds that this asteroid will hit earth are better than the odds of rolling a '20' with a twenty-sided die 2 times in a row.
Chew: You Nexus, huh? I design your eyes.
Roy: Chew, if only you could see what I've seen with your eyes.
Clearly we need to start now to develop deep habitable mines to ensure the survival of our way of life. We must carefully select a few hundred thousand of those who should be protected at all costs.
A special committee would have to be appointed to study and recommend the criteria to be employed, but off-hand, I should say that in addition to the factors of youth, health, sexual fertility, intelligence, and a cross-section of necessary skills, it would be absolutely vital that our top government and military men be included, to impart the required principles of leadership and tradition.
Naturally, they would breed prodigiously. There would be much time and little to do. With the proper breeding techniques, and starting with a ratio of, say, ten women to each man, I should estimate the progeny of the original group of 200,000 would emerge a hundred years later as well over a hundred million. Naturally the group would have to continually engage in enlarging the original living space.
what a relief at least we wont have to go thru the year of "the end of unix time".
We'd have better luck either moving the astroid or abandoning Earth.
If we route emergency power through the deflector dish, we should be able to create a warp bubble that would temporaril lower the gravitaional constant around the asteroid. That way we could use the ships tractor beam to slightly alter the asteroids trajectory. It won't be much, but I think it will be enough.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
"This is not a problem for anyone and it shouldn't be a concern to anyone, but whenever we post one of these things and ... somebody gets ahold of it, it just gets crazy" ...From the CNN version
Along with the obligatory Simpsons quote..
Kent Brockman: Professor, without knowing precisely what the danger is, would you say it's time for our viewers to crack each other's heads open and feast on the goo inside?
Professor: Yes I would, Kent.
Online Starcraft RPG? At
Dietary fiber is like asynchronous IO-- Non-blocking!
Just think of how many times slashdot can repeat this story in the next two decades!
This
It's a problem of motivating people to non-immediate problems. Like environmental issues, these are not things that engage us now. OTOH terrorism and SARS puts people in an acute panic. With something like asteroids, environmental damage people have to start working on problems now even though there appears to be no good reason to do so.
So getting back to your question, why post about this and why make people aware of a looming future threat? Because hopefully, physicists, mathematicians, and engineers out there realize that this is quite important and might take part in coming up with solutions that could (yes) save earth. And maybe people will make the connection that humans striving for space travel, exploration, and colonization of space is also an activity that can save our ass -- rather than waste precious precious money.
And everyone else can realize, damn, life may well be shorter than we all expect, and be grateful that they and everyone else they know is still alive.
Gigli was almost enough to destroy the U.S. by itself. An asteroid should be no problem.
"No, no, no. Don't tug on that. You never know what it might be attached to."
Am I seeing this right?
It looks like it's up to a 4, now.
I guess I'd just like to see the math on how they come up with these numbers.
Nobody's stopping you; it's not a secret. Go get it.
But get ready for some heavy lifting; as you dig into it you'll very quickly realize why they didn't try to put any in a popular news article.
I'm not too up on it myself but you can start with phase spaces, I think, though that hardly touches the real fun, which is the probabilistic aspect of determining the path of an object through all of the influences of the solar system... while I'm not up on the details I do know they don't use naive formulations of that problem, they've got some powerful and brain-bending tricks to prevent the estimate from diffusing too quickly.
You need to take one more step.
2 + 0 + 2 + 9 = 13
1 + 3 = 4
See? No big deal.:)
Laws are for people with no friends.
So what's the bottleneck here? Poor imaging?
Yes. The image on the telescope is not a theoretical point, but has a certain diameter depending on the telescope diameter, atmospheric distortion, ccd resolution, etc. So you cannot pinpoint the asteroid position precisely, but only give a bounding box.
Combining multiple observations will give you more data, and you can start narrowing down the estimate. Right now the error on the position, projected to year 2029, is about 200 times bigger than the diameter of Earth, so we say that there's a 1/200 probability of impact. A planet is a very tiny target.
When the precision is sufficient to say that, for example, the asteroid will pass by the left side, it will suddenly drop to zero. If it is actually going to impact the Earth, the probability will slowly going up until it will reach 1.
Now, there would be some problems. First, as you change the orbit, there's the chance that you'll chage the target country from Outer Bleen to Inner Bleen, upsetting the inhabitants. Then, as you manuver the rock, you're going to probably annoy someone else. The ability to direct such a rock would constitute a "weapon of mass destruction."
I'm guessing positioning the thing for "aerobraking" in the Earth's atmosphere would make some folks nervous, too.
Ok, so this wouldn't be a project where you'd want to mix up your feet and meters or have someone say "oopsie!"
The shame is, humans don't have the brains or organization to take advantage of this opportunity. If this hunk of space junk is going to hit the Earth, I'm not sure we will move it in time. We certainly can move it. I just don't think we'll get our act together.
I wonder who'll be the first to suggest that an impact will be a good thing since the dust may greatly reduce global warming?
This sig seemed like a good idea at the time....