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Asteroid 2004 MN4 May Hit Earth After All
ControlFreal writes "Asteroid 2004 MN4 was introduced earlier on Slashdot, and although scientists are now fairly certain that is will miss earth on April 13th, 2029, the modification to its orbit caused by Earth's gravity may still cause an impact one or a couple of orbits further down the road, the Times reports; the impact probabilities in 2035, 2036 of 2037 will not be known until the exact modification to its orbit is known; in 2029, that is. By then it may be too late for effective counter-measures.
An impact would cause an energy release equivalent to about 1 Gigaton of TNT (~4e+18 Joule), and while that won't cause a massive extinction event, it causes widespread devastation.
More info on 2004 MN4 can be found here and here."
I have no way of knowing, but at the rate technology is going right now, we'll probably have something capable of blowing the thing into gravel by 2035. Or at least something that we can knock it out of the way with.
I can't even imagine what things will be like in another 30 years...I mean, if in 1915 you told someone that in 30 years a bomb would be built powerful enough to flatten a small city, they'd laugh at you.
Don't take life so seriously. No one makes it out alive.
So this asteroid may not hit the Earth but one will probably slam into us eventually. So why not use this one as a practice run?
From TFA:
"This is most likely not the object with our number on it, but one day we will have to address this question and we'll need the technology."
So let's develop the technology now, when a screw up won't mean utter devastation of part of the planet.
...let's get one thing straight: an impact will not lead to a Cowboy BeBop future, I don't care how cute you think Ed and Ein are or how sexy Faye is. Wishful thinking.
With the fanboy wave-off out of the way, I would like to say that the mere threat of this should get our notice. We're not in danger right now of running out of oil but sooner or later we will be, and without energy on hand, getting access to nuclear fissile materials will be next to impossible never mind refining them and we still won't magically overnight be any closer to getting fusion or mass-energy conversion working.
Add to news of the Yellowstone mega-caldera and the possibility that we're headed towards a cooling phase planet wide, and this rock being in the neighborhood ready to drop in and we're looking at a pretty good picture of a species with less security than a corporation firewall administered by your neighbor's five year old and much more serious ramifications.
Of course we need to spread out and make sure the species can sustain itself past such an event. Problem is, will anyone really grasp it when so much more pressing stuff is on the plate, like who's still in the running on Amazing Race?
If my grammar and spelling are off, I am [distracted/tired/careless] (take your pick)
Establishing an off planet colony isn't exactly the same as getting up to turn the TV off, even if we started really focusing on this idea now, without some new propulsion technology i doubt even by 2029 we will have this option.
I'll be 59 in 2037 which is when I can start withdrawing from some of my retirement accounts.
You are forgetting that we should get cure for aging in 20 years. So you might be 59, but you could look and feel like 20-30-year old. Retirement accounts are propably cancelled and people have to work their whole lives, unless they collect enough money to be without work for few decates.
They know it will be close in the other years, so why not start planning NOW so that if we know it by 2029 for sure we can either use whatever we worked out or use it for something else.
The reason it will not happen is because it will still not be eminent and it will be something only those earth saving tree huggers could work with.
Others have more importand things to do, like making money and the plan of the company only looks ahead 5 years, not 50.
Well, it was nice knowing y'all.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
In general terms, having your collective dna stuck at the bottom of a gravity well relying on the "stability" of a single biosphere is not a a good long term policy.
Personally, I think we should focus our efforts on keeping the planet we live on viable. If some big rock later undoes the hard work, so be it.
Meanwhile we're hell-bent on destroying a perfectly viable planet with our own home-grown stupidity - at the rate we are going we'll eventually finish the job whether or not an asteroid beats us to the punch is just a matter of timing.
Bull. 2029 to 2035 gives us ~6 years to prepare.
You've never had any experience trying to get the government to actually do anything concrete, have you?
Moderator hint: a comment is neither "Flamebait" nor "Troll" if it is true.
I have no idea....I'm no physicist, but it seems that if they know the object's mass and the object's size, they can figure the object's density, and infer its composition from that. What more do they really have to know?
(Mabye he's afraid it's composed of antimatter or admantium or neutronium or naquada, or has a quantum black hole at its center, or some other bullshit concern...)
____
~ |rip/\/\aster /\/\onkey
You've never had any experience trying to get the government to actually do anything concrete, have you?
You want an example of the technological progress a government can make in 6 years? Compare a tank from 1939 with one from 1945 (or for a more extreme example, compare an atomic bomb from 1939 with one from 1945). The military technology used by the combatants in WW2 improved massivly over the 6 years of the war and this is while several of the countries were having the crap bombed out of them. When properly motivated by immediate national interest governments have an enormous capacity to get things going.
And don't give me any of this "Space travel is really hard and expensive" crap either. Most of the cost of the space shuttle is tied up in our desire to have the astronauts return alive to the ground with little risk of anybody on the ground getting killed. Once you throw those restrictions away (which I'm pretty sure you could count on with ~10^9 lives at stake) it gets a lot less impossible to put a lot of nukes on an intercept course with enough fuel to slow down near the offending rock..
I'm not saying it's a walk in the park but the major roadblocks will be technological not bureaucratic.
-Pinkoir
You've never had any experience trying to get the government to actually do anything concrete, have you?
The US did Mercury and Appollo in timeframes that short. And global catastrophe wasn't a motivator then.
This may be the spur humanity needs to get us up off our collective keisters and establish a viable off-planet colony before it's too late. It would be an unprecedented catastrophe, but still survivable, and it seems like this is the only way we're going to learn.
If the sole reason you want a space program is paranoid fear that we might be hit by a rock, that's a pretty sad reason.
I'd like to visit the moons of Jupiter and Saturn. I'd like to see other star systems. I'd like to advance our knowledge of the galaxy and universe and try to find other life forms.
I mean, if people were dying left and right by micrometeorites hitting the earth and blowing out people's skulls but no one in power cared, I'd be concerned. That's not the case here.
Let's keep the fearmongering to a dull roar here. How sick does our society have to be when someone start's talking like a bad sci-fi thriller about the end of the world?
The sole purpose of any space program should be like any other science program, to make the unknown known and to expand the horizons of human understanding.
Frankly, if the meteor is coming in 2035, my opinion is that it's pretty much too late now. Get out your sandbags and automatic rifles and prepare for the armageddon (not the movie!).
"All great wisdom is contained in .signature files"
When humanity is staring down the barrel of an asteroid strike, then these treaties will probably not be such a big deal...
Besides, whenever has our beloved President ever let a treaty stand in his way?
____
~ |rip/\/\aster /\/\onkey
Why Orion? it's all new, untested technology. We're all engineers here - we know nothing works right the first time, especially not rocket science.
:)
Because most of the groundwork has been done to death. There are engineers out there who could build an Orion in their sleep, partly because it's so damn simple.
The other issue is that there simply isn't enough time to build some other super-booster. Both the Saturn V and the Energia are out of commission due to a lack of production facilities. In the case of the Orion, you'd be building something far simpler and more along the lines of a traditional building or ship hull.
But you have 20 years
You'd have 6 years, because scientists will be uncertain until 2029.
kinetic kill weapons are not that a good idea, little thing called the "law of conservation of momentum" you're not going to move a 64 gigatonne something much by hitting it with the sort of mass you can afford to lift off of earth
Well, on the small side we could build an Orion of about 3000 metric tonnes. On the large side, we could build one of about 8,000,000 metric tonnes. Maybe it's just me, but I think 8 million tons + a significant amount of relative velocity could make a difference.
I agree with you though, it's something of wishful thinking to hit it with a kinetic kill. The most likely scenario would be to take up station near the asteroid and go through several iterations of planting and detonating hydrogen bombs. The idea won't be to break it up, but rather to provide propulsion. As such, the bombs would be detonated on or near the surface of the asteroid.
What you do need to do is shift it's orbit, you don't need a lot of mass or a big motor, just time - get started now, drop and iron drive and solar cells on the thing now and fire it up, maybe deliver some more mass in 5 years, carefully watch where it's going and eventually drop it into the sun or Jupiter
The only problem is that we don't have engines that can make a dent in 46 gigatons of mass. As you pointed out yourself, the law of conservation of momentum is going to have a lot to say about a constant 1/1000 lb of thrust against that much mass.
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WWII was fought over a 6 year timespan. That's with technology that consisted of vacuum tube electronics. And it was in a destructive manner...trying to destroy your opponent's means of production. Plastic, RADAR, laser, jet technology, atomic weapons... all developed in 6 years.
Motivate the human race enough and its ridiculous what we can accomplish. We're 3 generations removed from 'total war' economy. An extinction level event would be sufficient motivation for us to see such economic focus once again.
John Maynard Keynes: "When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do?"
sheesh, it's funny people, Funny!
/. stories are most of the reason I read comments. A real knee-slapper deservers a bit of karma methinks :)
I think the reason some Funny posts get modded Insightful, Informative, Whatever is because starting sometime ago Funny mods no longer improve your karma. Thus to counteract, if a post already has a few Funny mods, a moderator might mod it Informative to boost the poster's karma a bit.
Makes some sense to me. After all, Funny comments in
"What do you despise? By this are you truly known." --Princess Irulan, Manual of Muad'Dib
/)
Hey, fuck you. I live here too you know. If it does hit us I hope it drops right on top of your fucking head you idiot.
A billion or so people dying so we can be "taught a lesson"?!?
Maybe if we are all lucky - someone will come along and teach you a lesson about always wearing body armor. Because you never know.
Humor from a Genetically Molested Mind
How do we know that? Who says they didn't? [who says the dino's didn't have a space program.]
:-), in the best tradition of sco.
In all the fossil record, we never find one screw nor washer, no bolts, not a single microchip, no industrial manufacturing complexes, etc. There you have it. Proof in the form of lack of evidence
I'll see your senator, and I'll raise you two judges.
Um except that all the links you provided talked about how DANGEROUS those methods are
No, they talk about the difficulties inherent in how dangerous they are. I don't know if you've checked up on the shuttle boosters any time recently, but they are EXTREMELY dangerous. The key is mitigate the danger in as many ways as possible.
BTW, most of what you're reading is the 1960's technology. The TRITON Trimodal link is an example of a "safe" engine built in modern times. Besides that, most of these engines are designed to be deployed in space where the extra radioactive pollution doesn't matter.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
If every human on the planet disappeared tomorrow, our foot-print would be visible in the fossil record for megayears to come. Even if every screw and bolt, nut and washer were crushed beyond recognition by geological processes, they'd still leave behind very distinctive mineral deposits.
Les Miserables Volume 1 now up with my reading of
Most likely the strength of the material. This determines how much energy is dissipated by tidal forces during the close Earth flyby of 2029. That in turn affects the orbital parameters and hence the possibility of a later impact. The strength of the material (is it solid rock, or a big gravel pile) is very hard to determine remotely.
Human genome = 3 billion base pairs = 6 GBit. Windows + Office = 20 Gbit. Which is more impressive?
60.000 years ago something like this hits somewhere on the American continent, killing lots of people. Humanity wouldn't be wiped out. The people living far away from the impact wouldn't even know.
This thing hits New York or Tokyo today, you think you wouldn't care ? Even if you aren't directly affected or anyone you care about is, think about the economy. We aren't self sustained hunters living far away in small groups anymore. Sure, humanity would survive, but would suck loosing your job because the economy took a hit now wouldn't it ?
Personally, I think we should focus our efforts on keeping the planet we live on viable. If some big rock later undoes the hard work, so be it.
Couldn't agree more.
How much would it cost to create a colony on Mars? What would we be able to do on own planet for the same amount of money? It seems to me that for the same amount of money we could develop a way to protect all of humanity from an asteroid strike, rather than send off a select few to the new home of humanity in the stars.
Besides, is colonizing Mars really any easier or better than colonizing a post-apocalyptic Earth? I would think a self contained biosphere built on Earth would be hella cheaper than one built on Mars. I would guess that Earth after a worst case asteroid scenario would still be more habitable than Mars. If nothing else, the "colonists" will sure have a ton of biomater to subsist on for awhile.
Personally, these arguements that we need to colonize space because we're trashing Earth sound a bit to me like someone who wants to buy a new house because they don't feel like cleaning their perfectly good existing house. Yeah, the new house may be more fun and exciting, but any way you rationalize it, you're still just rationalizing it.
There is no need for humanity to have Mars colonies, or an extensive off planet presence for civilization to survive even a dinosaur killing scale impact. Think Cold War era undeground shelters, long term survival planning for large numbers of people, caches of tools, technological implements etc, could be stored away in dispersed caches. Carefully storing up large quantities of survival foods, seeds etc could assure that civilization survives. I'm a big booster for space exploration and colonization, but I've always thought this to be a bit of a BS. train of reasoning. Now using this space program to divert an asteroid is clearly better than hunkering down and digging in. However I really think we could dig in and survive even a big one with 1950 technology.
And what if it hits in the ocean?
Lot more water out their covering much more of the earth than land.
Two thirds of the earth is water so a water impact is more likely than a land impact. In such a case it would suck to be living on an island or any of the coasts in the body of water it hits in because of the resultant Tsunami.
Just a thought.
Coward? Coward! Thems fighten words!!
Only the first nuke poses any meaningful fallout danger, and it's easy to design a bomb to minimize that (especially if there's not much metal at the lunch site). Plus, if we're launching a rocket using 2000 multi-megaton nukes, we can launch it from any place in the world that doesn't have 2000 multi-megaton nukes. ;)
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
You failed to see the rest of his point, or at least you failed to acknowledge it:
Meanwhile we're hell-bent on destroying a perfectly viable planet with our own home-grown stupidity - at the rate we are going we'll eventually finish the job whether or not an asteroid beats us to the punch is just a matter of timing.
We can fix this place up, but what's gonna happen when the one comes that we divert?
What happens with global warming is killing us?
What happens when we get into a nuclear war?
What happens when earth starts naturally changing it's weather pattern to something that threatens or survival?
So what if we can protect ourselves from one thing? FFS man, can't you see we *NEED* to invest time into getting out of here so our species can survive. So what if we fail 10,000 times, at least we're trying!
Not that I disagree, but damn...
Perhaps someone should read a little less Nietzsche.
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Here's a debunking of the 100 million year old hammer and ancient spark plug. Sheesh :)
I think OP meant a propulsion system we could actually BUILD Einstein, that means we'll have to be able to afford it too.
You sir, are obviously an idiot who either can't read or can't be bothered to read. We DID build nuclear thermal engines. They were done. Ready to fly on the Saturn V. They simply weren't needed as the time, because the LHOx engines matured faster. Nearly ALL Mars missions call for NTR engines, which is why the TRITON got built.
As for nuclear pulse propulsion, most of the work has actually been done, including tests to verify the basic concept. (Test Video) Von Braun himself was a big proponent of launching a mini-Orion on the Saturn V. His idea was that the V would get things to orbit, and the Orions would take them to the solar system. Too bad our government stabbed him in the back by dismantling the Saturn V program...
It always amazes me how people will happily chime in with criticizim even in the face of overwhelming evidence. No wonder you posted as AC.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade