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2004 MN4, Even Higher Probability
phreakuencies writes "Worried since the recent post about the MN4 2004 asteroid, I added a bookmark to its 'impact risk' section at NASA. The asteroid started as having a 1/233 probability of hitting earth. Later it raised to 1/63. Daily computations made on 25 Dec raised its chances up to 1/45. Optimists can now say it has a 97.8% probability of missing earth." And Veteran writes " NeoDys offers the 'Orbfit' software package (source code released under the GPL) which can be used to get a pre-release view of the situation with Asteroid 2004MN4."
You know in all those movies where some guy, sometimes just an amateur scientist, sees something in his telescope/seismograph/thermometer/disease-modeling -software that all the high-up professionals miss, and rushes in to warn the government?
That doesn't happen.
So kick back and relax in the knowledge that, even if a global catastrophe is imminent, there's fuck-all you can do about it, except make yourself a quick drink.
The coolest voice ever.
Am I just sick, or do other people find the possibility of this thing hitting to be pretty damn exciting? The chaos, the devestation, the panic, the collapse of all social systems... jeez, that would honestly be one of the coolest (And last) things to ever happen in most of our lives. The timeframe is nice too... many of us that are currently in our late 20's, early 30's will be wiped out before things start going really downhill for us (physically), but we'll have enough time to get a decent bit of fun stuff done too. Bring it on!
I don't respond to AC's.
It's important to note that if the chances of impact are 1 in 45, then the chances that future observations will exclude the possibility impact are 44 in 45.
The two events "asteroid hits us" and "we can never exclude the possibility of it hitting us" are equivalent: the first happens if and only if the second happens. Therefore the two events have the same probability.
So the "don't worry" part of the above sentence is pointless: the second half sentence is a mere reformulation of the first; there is no reassuring "extremely high" probability that future observations will correct the number downward.
From the last post about this, I went and read up on the whole thing. I went to the beautiful CGI script where you input asteroid size and velocity and all that, and assumed I was 100km from the impact.
I had to up the asteroid size to 1300 metres and a velocity of 14kps of dense rock colliding with porous rock before I could interpret the results as something that would suck for me (2nd degree burns on my body from the fireball).
There would be no major earth effects of such an asteroid hitting Earth, so it said.
Compare these stats against our current fearsome asteroid.
In one thread I saw someone refer to this as possibly a human-extinction event. I have a hard time believing that once I actually bother to go check this out. It'd sure suck for everyone within 100km of the impact site but for everyone else, I guess we'd have about the same effects as a major earthquake to deal with.
fifth sigma, inc.
this thing wouldn't take out the world, it's about a 1/4 mile across or so. But it will be bad. Big hole, and sever damage in the area. If we are lucky it will hit texas.
Or maybe the Yucatan Peninsula, then we can find if Asteroids ever strikes the same place twice.
Imagine how much technology boost all the related stuff will receive. If the Moon shot (the pure publicity stunt) generated so much progress, imagine this.
By the time we will know it is going to miss by 500km, we will already have cheap reliable interplanet travel and will be able to melt/mine/whatever the asteroids. Cool.
...we're looking at very little of the sky *at one time*. I don't think it takes much amateur equipment to spot something which would be missed by "normal" study, which usually involved spendning forever looking at one tiny fixed part of the sky to gather enough light/EM to make a clearer picture than the last one (i.e. mapping space).
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
You know what? I think we need sometime else besides the Torrino scale.
With all those asteroids, it's always the same game: high probability at the start, it goes up or down and after 2 weeks, we've got some numbers that really mean something, but the problem is that during this time, people start freaking out because they would like to hold to some true numbers, not just "probabilities that are bound to change".
So, what we need to communicate with even more weight than those torrino scale numbers is a "measurement progress percentage" and tell everybody "if it's not 100%, don't worry yet". That way, with the always updated percentage number, the masses can reliably hold to something, and know that "progress below 100% means that what we know is not reliable".
Actually, for the current incident, we don't have this number, so I really won't wonder if some people will be freaking out over the next few days.
Astronomers: full exposure it the name of the game! Tell us how long it will take to measure the path, and where you are currently standing!
Thank you.
Pushing it a fraction off course should make the difference depending on where.
The ISS is what it's name says, an international space station. Russia is doing the lifting now. US may be more sophisticated, but Russia seems more robust.
The most intelligent scientists in the world? Have you been quizzing them? I was not aware scientists had a ranking system. Thanks for making me smile!
Seriously, if it hits 5 or greater on the scale, then we'll have reason to really worry.
Even if it does hit 5, it's worth noting that the probability estimation has changed twice in the space of a day. That's no insult to the mathematicians - I can't begin to grasp the variables involved here, but if the numbers can change that fast I think it's safe to assume that there's going to be more fiddling of the statistics needed in the next 24 years before we get an acurate projection.
Most newspapers are closed today, which doesn't help. BBC is open, and Slashdot is open. All the others I read are closed.
"Me personally think that a hit that would posse good odds of destroying the world would be a great thing for world unity and get the whole planet to work as one to solve the problem, and maybe from that we can learn something."
Ronald Reagan had similar ideas, from what I recall, about the potential unifying power of an invasion of space aliens.
It might make a good script for a B-movie actor like Reagan, but in real life you'd just have destruction and chaos. And maybe not just from the asteroid - people who think they're doomed often behave in a nihilistic manner.
Don't worry, if Kerry had won, there would be tons of jokes about him never being able to decide whether or not to do anything about it.
Just like how everytime the internet is in the news, someone uses the Gore slam.
Just like how everytime Clinton does anything, people make jokes that it is not suitable for the eyes of children.
If you can't take it, don't dish it.
This has been covered before, but the problem with hitting an large object hurtling towards something with a nuke is that afterwards you have a lot of much smaller hurtling bodies which are now radioactive.
FreeBSD for the impatient.
[1]If it is solid iron it won't shatter, just get thrown off course. But then it won't hit us at all - problem solved there too.
Laws are horrible moral guides, moral guides make even worse laws.
Kerry got the second most, ever. More population means more of everything.
It's like when they trot out the old, "Home ownership is at the highest level..." when the economy is so weak they can't drum up any other stat.
They did that this time around.
You seem to have no clue of the kind of destruction that tidal waves are capable of. Maybe a quick glance at what is going on around Indian ocean right now would provide some frame of reference. Widespread destruction around a region spanning thousands of miles.
Today's quake right outside of sumatra essentially leveled all the coastal areas around the indian ocean with water causing massive destruction several miles inland. And the resulting tidal waves were "only" 5 meters high as they reached the shore. (there is a direct mathematical relation as a function of the depth of ocean outside the shore). Good luck living few minutes off the coast of the affected water body.
It is quite possible that an earthquake off the coast of Africa could cause huge tidal waves and massive destruction in south america. A direct hit in the middle of atlantic would devastate a lot of the coastal cities around eastern coast of u.s. and western europe. Of course the size of meteor would matter a lot but even something that is comparable to an earthquake around 9-10 on richter scale would change the world as you know it.
Yeh. The reports I heard from se-asia were that the quake there was around 8.9. Vertical movement in the bottom of the sea was on the order of 10-30 meters. Displacing such a huge mass of water has rather far reaching effects. The curious aspect of a tidal wave such as this is that it can be literally less than foot in amplitude while in deep sea (thus being virtually undetectable on its own) and only once it reaches more shallow waters it starts rising.
Another nasty side-effect of a meteor crashing on earth is that it might trigger earthquakes elsewhere around earth. Faultlines with tension already built up might just be triggered. Nevertheless, ocean is literally the worst place on earth for a meteor to hit. Somewhere in the middle of nowhere in siberia, sahara, gobi, australia or alaska would have the least effects.
several solutions were considered for dealing with threats from bolide collisions like this. One of them was a big bomb. The thing that most people remember is the line from Armageddon where the guy says something like "if you hold a firecracker in your open hand it doesn't hurt you." Well the guys who thought up the nuke solution weren't dumb: its just a matter of how you define "big" in big nuke. Apparently there is no theoretical limit on the yeild of a nuclear device (ie think giga or terra ton yeild instead of megaton.) This changes the analogy from holding a firecracker to holding a bunkerbuster!
Apparently they did not proceed with this idea for fear of some psycho/terrorist setting it off on earth.
"Wonder if it will ease the pain if I tell you that I think most of the citizens of USA is totally okay, perhaps a little too uneducated about the rest of the world, but nobody is perfect."
This is a myth that is caused by the fact that just about everyone knows who the leader of the US is or what the government of the US is doing but most citizens of the US do not know who the leader of there government is. Do you know the name of the president of Mexico, Peru, or the Prime Minister of Australia is? Most educated US citizens know that Tony Blair is the prime minister of the UK and a few other countries leaders. Your right that for the most part the people of the US really do not care who is running other countries. They feel that it is none of our business.
As far as the Nordic countries yea I know that Sweden is one of them as is Norway, and Finland. But to put it in perspective there are more people in several states than in the country of Sweden. Do you know the cultural difference between say Florida, Idaho, Texas, and Maine are? They are very different places and the people while all US citizens are also very different. Most people in the US do not even know how diverse the US is because they do not travel as much as I do. Of course even those differences are being crushed by the media. Yes the same Americanization that people around the world talk about is not really Americanization as much as Californiacation or New Yorkerizing.
I find it funny that people in Europe think the know and understand the US when they really have no clue. The US was isolationist for most of it's history. The problem with that is the people in Europe kept dragging the US into Wars. After WWII the US could not let it happen again so it ended it's isolation policy and pretty much funded the rebuilding of modern Europe and Japan. Then the US spent huge sums of money and time trying to protect Europe until it could stand on it's own again. I think most people in the US see many of the nations of Europe as whining, selfish, and petty. They care more for comfort than for other peoples lives.
This threat is a good example. Most US citizens on the board are thinking "How can Nasa deflect it". While most of the Europeans are thinking "Will America deflect it or let some other country get whacked?". I see no one talking about the ESA spending lots of money to launch a mission. Kind of like Yugoslavia. That blood bath was happening in the EU's back yard but they did nothing to stop it until the US came in and did the heavy lifting. Same thing in Africa. Yea the US foreign policy often causes the US problems. That is because at least we will try to help. And some of the policies that many people in Europe thought where bad plans worked out well. Like moving Persing and Tomahawk missiles into Europe to counter the USSR,s IRBMS. The USSR removed their missiles and their short rang missiles as well. Oh how the Europeans wailed when we did that yet it ended up removing a major threat to them. What gets me about Iraq is everyone seems to forge that Saddam DID HAVE weapons of mass destruction. He did have chemical weapons, he was trying to get Nukes, and he was developing Bio weapons. He did throw out the UN inspectors and that Russia told the US that he was back at it. Frankly I am not a great fan of GW but these are facts and with those I can not honestly say I blame him for going in after 9/11. What it looks like is even Saddam thought he was building WMDs but his own people where feeding false info to him to save their own skins.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
The other two Off the top of my head are Germany and holland. Based in the simularity of language.
Gee I guess you are so much more enlightend than americans since you classify Texas as a state of gun carrying red necks. Not superfical at all. And I am sure that summery of one state that just happens to have roughly 3 times the total number of people as the country of Sweden is complete accurate.
THe Marshall plan was very helpful to just about every country in Europe exprobably the Swiss and Sweden. They both where "neutral" during WWII.
No comment on the EU's failure to do anything in Yugoslavia? No comment on the INF treaty? No comment on the EU doing nothing in Africa. Frankly you are right that most of the population of the US could know more about the rest of the world but the rest of the world thinks they know and understand a lot more about the US than they really do. There knowlege is every bit as shallow and superfical as they think the average US citizen's is.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.