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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!
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/
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".
Well, at this point we're leaning too far to the right. Maybe if we all just straighten up?
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
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.
Am I seeing this right?
It looks like it's up to a 4, now.