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2004 MN4 Probably Won't Kill Us
Xshare writes "It's now official. NASA's Near Earth Objects page lists 2004 MN4, the asteroid that's been covered on slashdot recently, as having a 1 in 56,000 chance of hitting earth, and even then only in 2037. It seems that earth was near the edge of the cone of probability of when it could go. As the cone kept closing, the probability of hitting earth grew, but it kept getting closer to the edge. It's now outside the cone, and we can be safe."
I was looking more for life to go out with a bang. Maybe bush will still help with that...
Not true at all. If you even bothered to RTFA, you'd understand. Not to mention that the slashdot submitters actually used TFA from NASA. :-0
In three days this has gone from 1/233 chance, to 1/45, to 1/56,000. How can there be so wide of a spread over such a small time interval if the method being used to estimate this is at all reliable? I could see how small trajectory changes in the asteroid would vary the predictions a lot if it were closer, but this is still 30+ years away.
What's to say tomorrow won't be 1/1? How is this latest measurement the final word that there is no threat?
Chicken Little? Is that you?
That would have solved the Social Security solvency problem.
Human destiny lies with the stars, simply because eventually the Planet Earth will no longer be able to support human life, soon then later at our current population and resource expenditure.
While this may be true, you have to wonder if it's a good thing to venture into other worlds now, I mean, look at our world.
Our main fuel source is a non-renewable, polluting one that won't last us into the next century. We still have billions of people living in utter poverty, and children aspire to be rock stars, and the likes.
I don't think our (american/european) culture is ready to venture into space and colonize, we need to start putting value on the right ideals. To where children aspire to be scientists, to where the best idea wins out, not the shiniest one, to where corporations and people in general terms aren't "out to make a buck."
I'd hate to see these ideals brought into space. Militarization of space? No thanks.
We could support many more billions of people on the planet if the right alternatives were taken to sustain life, and not just make money
Error 407 - No creative sig found
Make sure you use a lamp for this experiment instead of sunlight. The shadow won't change size if sunlight is used.
Look at the web page, that's still REALLY friggin' close. I think that's well inside geosynchronous orbit.
Could it be that the mass media actually showed a reasonable amount of restraint on covering this story until more information was in hand? In the previous Slashdot stories posted on this subject, there was a lot of complaining about "What aren't the major media outlets covering this story?!?!?"
Well, this is why. The data is/was incomplete. The calculations are/were preliminary and ever-changing based on new observations. There was no point in starting a panic and sensationalizing the story at this point.
Sometimes we, the readers/contributors of Slashdot aren't as collectively bright as we think we are.
-S
--- What parts of "shall make no law", "shall not be infringed", and "shall not be violated" don't you understand?
You're essentially saying that we, as a people, shouldn't colonize space until our world culture matches your own ideals. Children wanting to be scientists instead of rock stars is not inherently better; it's just your opinion. There are plenty of people out there would would say we have to wait until children dream of becoming ministers/laborers/politicians when they grow up. What we have then are two problems with your argument: A) there is no perfect cultural state. Everything is subjective, and for your version of a perfect world to come true then someone else's view of a corrupted world has come to pass. B) even if there was some perfect state we could achieve, it would be utter insanity to wait until we acheived this until we colonize space. If we always waited for everything to be right before moving on then we would NEVER get anywhere. China didn't wait to invent paper; Guttenburg didn't wait to invent the printing press. We move on, and hopefully get better as we go.
"People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
Well there ain't any oil in outer space, so the colonization of other worlds REQUIRES the development of an alternative energy source.
And there have ALWAYS been lots of starving people in the world, and for one reason or another, there will most likely always be poverty in the future. However, a new frontier gives those in poverty a chance to take a risk and start a new life somewhere else. There's greater risk of death in whatever strange new lands they're venturing to than if they stayed at home, but also a great chance of having a much better life too for them and their descendents.
If Europeans had put off the colonization of the Americas until poverty was eliminated in their home country, it never would have happened... because there's STILL poor people in Europe. Obviously there'll be a significant difference of opinion about how much of a "good thing" the colonization of the Americas was from the Native American point of view, but for tens of millions of (almost entirely) poor people throughout the rest of the world, it was a chance to have a new, better life, exploiting new undeveloped resources.
The same could be true today with the colonization of other worlds. Sure it's more difficult and will cost more to accomplish, but on the other hand we have a lot more extra people sitting around on our planet, and there's no other indigenous people elsewhere in our solar system that need oppressing and killing off first...
Many people are against the "militarization of space" in theory, but in reality people will feel the need to arm/protect themselves no matter where they go. As soon as there's multiple competing groups of people scattering through-out the solar system capable of visiting each others' settlements, they will be carrying weapons of some kind with them. This is a simple fact, and you're never going to escape it. It's not an American/European issue either, there's no major society on this planet that has ever been able to adopt and maintain the ideals you want long term, at least not long enough to exist to this day or to be remembered by history.
Life on our world has evolved thru billions of years of fierce competition with each other, and with our amazing cognitive and imaginative abilities, the tools we use for armed competition have become ruthlessly efficient. You're not going to change this aspect of human nature with a couple decades of happy thoughts, it's going to take a significant change in our environment (ie. maybe expanding into distant colonies that have little direct contact?), and at least hundreds of generations for our genes to adapt.
But if you start creating human societies on other worlds, being spaced out over tens of millions of miles away from each other, war becomes exponentially more costly to even attempt, much less succeed. I don't believe humans will ever be able to form a utopian society of completely peaceful people in any group larger than a couple dozen individuals. But if you wanted to attempt such a thing, I think you'd have a much better chance of success if you could isolate your colony on some moon of Saturn or something, where it really wouldn't be worth anyone's while to build a fleet of space ships just to come out and fuck with you...
Besides, struggling colonies of people on far away lands who depend on each other daily to survive automatically fosters a priority on knowing/learning useful skills, maintaining a sense of community, and constantly thinking about the needs of the group over one's own wants.
The misplaced values you seem to despise are the results of excess and luxury. The ideals you favor are not widespread because they are not currently necessary to survive. You'll have a much easier job of encouraging the ideals you mentioned in an environment of adventure on a new frontier, than you will in the mall-shopping, sports-watching, pop-culture-consuming environment that exists right now...
Sometimes the best solution to morale problems is just to fire all the unhappy people.
Except for the fact that this asteroid is viewable by many amateur astronomers around the world. It's a simple matter to independently gather trajectory information and verify the mathematics. It would be extremely difficult for a single entity such as NASA to cover this one up.
BroadbandPig
Because it's a total non story at this point and they are excersizing that rare trait called journalistic integrity. Obviously, with the almost daily changes in the probability as better calculations and measurements are done, there is no certianty at all. Since a story of an asteroid hitting the Earth will certianly get people worked up, and maybe even cause a panic, you'd better be on fairly solid ground.
Ok, well, given that the earliest possible impact is over two DECADES away, I'd say it would be proper to wait until NASA was to the point that there was likely to be little change in status with more calculations. Maybe that takes a month, that's fine, nothing changes, this is a WAY in teh future story.
Given that the chance changed from around 3% to 0.002% with just one day of measurements and calculations, you'd look like a moron if you trumpeted this as a big news story yesterday.
Now, supposing NASA does new calculations and says that it's about 50% likely to hit, and after a week they still can't be any more certian, then maybe you break the story.
Either way, it's not like we will be sitting around 2-5 decades from now going "Damn, if only that story had hit major news a month earlier, we'd all have been saved."
Yeah, but anyone with a decent telescope, a book on physics, and a slide rule can double-check the calculations of any officially published numbers, and call bullshit if the government appears to be spewing it.
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
2004 MN4 is not a civilisation destroyer (unless it hit Hollywood), so human life could continue around the world even if it did hit.
Something more substantial however, such as a 10km chunk of rock would spell the end for civilisation as we know it.
Either way, I would imagine the time until impact would be the key variable in anyones thinking, twenty plus years and I wouldn't be suprised if a suitably motivated, combined world effort couldn't come up with a method to deflect even a large object.
As an aside, judging by what I see in the world today, it looks like a lot of people have already given up on planning for the future anyway!
$2B OR NOT $2B = $FF
First of all, let me thank Xshare for the excellent one-sentence explanation of how the probabilities so quickly vanished after peaking at 1/37th.
Having said that, doesn't this suggest that their method for computing probabilities might need some examining? How is it that the probability can change by over 3 orders of magnitude within a week---a full 30 years or more before the event itself?
At the very least, I would assume that these folks have some sort of idea what the log-variance is of the probabilities they're computing. It might behoove them to hold off on reporting the numbers until that log-variance dips below a certain amount---at least when the event is so far out.
I don't know, I suppose it might behoove us to have, say, a decade of warning so we could figure out what to do if necessary. But 30 years? I'm not so sure the hype this week was necessary.
I welcome everyone else's thoughts on this...
Some scientists would surely double-check, even if it's just for practice. I'd think amateur astronomers would, as well. There's bound to be a lot of interest in this object.
Putting out a press release isn't all that hard. Gettting any attention from it is somewhat more hard. But it'd be by far more productive to get the findings published in a peer reviewed journal of science -- physics or astronomy.
And thankfully, there are still news agencies, space agencies, AND nuclear powers which all operate outside of US jurisdiction. So that should come as a comfort to any who worry that the government is handing us a snowjob.
If this sucker is really going to hit us, it won't be kept a secret forever, and there are others who have the power to do something about it if the US decides to sit on its hands. Whether they will or not is of course another matter.
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
So what?
What difference should it make to any of your plans? Seriously? If the rocks fall next week or eight years from now, you still have to focus on the problems facing you right now. -It IS very important to not pretend that everything is all okay and all normal, because that's just not how things are, not on any level; not politically, not environmentally, not even solar-systematically; choosing to believe in lies is right up there in the top three or four most self-destructive things a person can do. Life is about growing one's spirit, and that cannot be done by embracing falsehoods. When one is given to pretending that things are okay, that sets the rhythm for a life; if you view the external world through wishful thinking, then you will inevitably use the same tools on the internal, which means you will simply never fix the problems inside yourself because you will pretend that the problems are not even there. Truth hurts, which is what drives us to fix the ugly parts of ourselves. But that being said, at the same time it is also foolish to get needlessly upset by the various nerve-jangling truths when they become apparent. Like impending asteroid strikes.
Asteroid disasters, (among other things, including the most recent 9.0 earthquake in the East), are going to start pounding the crap out of us with increasing regularity until there's not much left but a lot of debris and the cold wind whistling. That's all part of the show. Everybody dies, so why stress over it? Recognize it, adjust course as necessary and move on.
You're here to work on the spirit, not the physical. The interesting part is that if you're ready to advance, you might actually avoid the big crunch. It'll all be clear soon enough.
-FL
And amateur astronomy is a much more popular hobby than amateur typewriter repair. Findings can be verified, correlated, and reproduced. It's the scientific method at work, and it seems to work damn well with the internet as the glue in all sorts of problem domains.
Put in terms you might understand better, would you take issue with the following?:
You have at best, a bunch of coding done with some pretty basic equipment compared to what Microsoft/AT&T/Novell/Sun/Apple has. It is far more likely that the media would shrug it off as an amateur project by some Finnish guy.
You mean besides an Earth-smashing asteroid, which was the topic of this article??
OK, how bout a viral or bacterial plague spreading rapidly across the planet? The possibility of such a plague infecting the entire planet is dramatically higher than any point previously in our history due to the abundance of high-speed transportation systems. Rural areas of Europe were sometimes spared from the Black Death in the 14th century because their distance from the cities and lack of visitors meant that infected people couldn't get there before they died from their infection. Today a similar plague being released in a major airport could spread across the globe in a matter of days...
It wouldn't even have to be a plague that killed humans directly, a plague that killed our major food crops would be just as devastating. Especially considering what a tiny percentage of today's population are farmers. In the 1300s pretty much everyone knew how to continue growing their own food, even as all their neighbors were dying. You wipe out the couple thousands of farmers that produce most of the world's food supplies today, and most of the population would be shit-outta-luck.
Or how about an act of terrorism (or actual aggression) designed to make it look like Russia or China had launched an all-out nuclear attack on the United States?? The 'appropriate military response' is Nukes flying everywhere annihilating everybody. A short flaring of tempers causes all life on Earth to end, and with it the whole human race... It's not really possible for that to happen if humans are living on a half-dozen or more different worlds. Even assuming an Earth nation had built (as yet non-existent) rockets capable of delivering nukes to another planet in sufficient quantity to destroy them as well, it'd take days of planning and then months to years of travel time before they actually reached their destination, giving plenty of time to devise some kind of counter-measure.
But most likely, it would be a combination of such events, none of which would totally destroy humanity in and of themselves, but when stacked together, finish us off. Say an asteroid hits the Earth, wiping out a large chunk of the population and causing serious environmental changes. Which causes most of the food crops to be lost as well as kicking up microbes and pollutants into the air and water, killing lots of people thru starvation or poor living conditions. The surviving peoples crowd together in the areas of Earth that are still habitable, which leads to constant fighting over scarce resources. With the old political structures clearly collapsed, you're left with hundreds of ex-army officers in possession of weapons of mass destruction, which inevitably start getting used in the gang warfare that arises out of the immediate ashes. The chaos of this situation and breakdown of existing public-health systems would allow other factors that are currently not much of a threat to be major sources of fatality again. (ie. death during childbirth, or from the flu, etc.) Slowly the environment becomes so inhospitable that people die off altogether.
Such a scenario could easily lead to the complete and utter end of tens of thousands of years of human civilization. (It wouldn't have to start with an asteroid impact either, there's plenty of other events that could start the wheels turning.) But if we have already expanded to other worlds, and even to the stars, such a series of a events would surely be considered a major tragedy, but hardly the end of our existence.
Sometimes the best solution to morale problems is just to fire all the unhappy people.
Post it to
It's not big, but it's clever!
This giant earthquake and subsequent tsunami that's been in the news, preliminary reports of the casualties are at least 30,000 people. Do you realize how huge a number that is? And it's probably drastically under-reported, the waters swept through poor coastal lands in many Asian countries and carried bodies out to sea. I bet (but hope to God not) that the death toll is twice that, on the order of 60,000. But I suspect the death toll will climb because it always does, especially when information collection is weak in the disaster areas.
There is a huge natural disaster here on earth, without stuff raining from the sky on us. I guess all I'm saying is, disasters will happen, and as non-religious as I am I can only say that we should all pray that large disasters will not happen, and in bad times help out others who need help, because there's really nothing else you can do.
The process of colonizing "the New World" certainly didn't turn us into that kind of a people -- pretty much the opposite, in fact.
History does tend to repeat itself, and there is no particular reason to believe that a whole lot has changed in respect of people's belief system and basic motivations since the 1600's.
If you're a zombie and you know it, bite your friend!