Slashdot Mirror
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."
From the summary:
I hope this rock hits our planet. I really do.
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.
Then again, it could be a bad thing...instilling a sense of false security. (Hey...this asteroid hit us, and we're still here. Guess all those asteriod doomsday scenarios are bunk.)
I rather suspect the former will be the prevailing attitude...trouble is, mankind has a notoriously short attention span...would this command enough attention for us to start a space colony project...and actually finish it?
Will our eulogy be: "The humans became extinct because they couldn't concentrate hard enough on their space program."?
____
~ |rip/\/\aster /\/\onkey
My bet is it will hit Earth on April 13, 2029. After all, it's a Friday!
I wonder if Jason http://www.fridaythe13thfilms.com/ will show up.
If "disco" means "I learn" in Latin, does "discothèque" mean "I learn technology"?
in 2029, that is. By then it may be too late for effective counter-measures.
Bull. 2029 to 2035 gives us ~6 years to prepare. If the asteroid actually posed clear and present danger, then a crash program to build an interceptor could be accomplished. With apologies to Pournelle and Niven (warning, associates link), the catch-22 is that we would have to give up our fear of the Orion. Using standard building practices + what we know of advanced hydrogen bomb design, we could potentially launch an Orion within three years. The options would be to either send it on an unmanned kinetic-impact course with the asteroid, or to send a team ala "Armageddon" (or some other lame stop-the-asteroid movie) to manually plant and detonate the charges.
If I'm reading the info correctly, the asteroid is a mere 46 gigatonnes. So as long as we get to it fast enough, there shouldn't be any difficulty in nudging it into a higher orbit. Of course, we may only be able to buy some time in the short term. Orbital mechanics is tricky, and not as simple as just "pushing" the asteroid out of the way. We may actually have to push it toward earth to slingshot it into a more acceptable trajectory.
One way or another, we have the tech. It's just scary as all hell to behold, and in a crash program would almost certainly add a small amount to the nuclear pollution that already exists on our planet. But if it's a choice between three random deaths from cancer or millions dead from a massive impact, I think the choice is fairly clear. Especially when the former is theoretical and the later is firm.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
That's it. I'm moving. This neighborhood is really starting to suck.
So...let's party like it's 1999?
~~Don't wanna close my eyes. Don't wanna fall asleep. 'Cause I'd miss you, baby. And I don't wanna miss a thing. Cause even when I dream of you The sweetest dream would never do. I'd still miss you, baby. And I don't wanna miss a thing~~~
**puts on tin foil hat**
I'll be 59 in 2037 which is when I can start withdrawing from some of my retirement accounts.
I guess I should go ahead and blow my money on a car or something instead since how big my 401k is isn't gonna matter when the monkeys take over the Earth.
"People that quote themselves in their signatures bother me" - athakur999
I've got a list of politicians and patent lawyers all ready and waiting for it.
The only problem is, I'm not sure whether we should be on it or they.
I wonder how close it would have to come to have an effect like that, and what those probabilities would be like?
As it is, I'm not losing sleep over a %0.042 chance that this puppy will shorten my retirement.
John
I knew the Republicans were lying about there being a Social Security crisis in 75 years. Now I don't have to worry about it. Whew.
I reckon if we gather up as much lead and place it by the Oval Office, we might just be able to alter the asteroid's trajectory and save ourselves from self-anihilation.
So let's start collecting lead! Who's with me?
If you don't know what AltaVista is (was), get off my lawn.
I knew my Y2K shelter would come in handy. Who has all the Spam now!?
19th January 2038 half of us will be dead! Who needs to count the seconds after
that?
Comment removed based on user account deletion
We need to get a couple of spaceships ready for a rondevous. We'll also need a very high yield nuclear device, or a very powerful rocket to alter the orbit of the asteroid.
Also, we'd better put Bruce Willis in cryo-freeze for the next 24 years.
It's good to use your head, but not as a battering ram.
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.
Start stocking up... no tinfoil hat will save you from this one :)
The Asian earthquake was some magnitudes greater than that. Of course it's all in how the energy is dissipated.
Transcend Humanity. Please.
...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)
As if a million shareholders cried out in torment and were silenced at once.
So first it's gonna kill us, then it's not going to kill us, now it's going to kill us again? When will the /. gods make up their minds?
Hmmmm, just happens to be a "change of course" call around the same time NASA budgets are up for review... ;)
"Nature bats last..."
So be sure to purchase lots of stock in insurance companies today! Either way - you're a winner.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
I guess NASA's budget is more important after all. It would be nice to know this type of stuff before we have to que Bruce Willis. Does Hubble or Chandra provide some of this orbital data necessary to calculate the orbit of this rock. I would think so (someone correct me if I'm wrong), but it would be nice to send a probe with a nuke on it to blast it before it has a chance to hit us (or the pieces after the blast). It is much easier to deal with before it in headed straight for us.
"Those that start by burning books, will end by burning men."
(Hey, do you know if it's inhabited or not?)
.. paranoid crackpot leftover from the days of Amiga.
Lets have Microsoft patent asteriod collisons and then we'll send all the lawyers after the asteriod to deliver a cease and desist order. Worst case scenario is that we're out a few lawyers.
I traded all my mod points for these magic beans.
April 13, 2029 looks like it will be a Friday making it Friday the 13th. Guess it will be ok not to pay your taxes until Monday the 16th, if ever!
"Can there be a Klein bottle that is an efficient and effective beer pitcher?"
Perhaps it is just boredom and curiosity about how we would live in a post-apocalyptic world. You don't really want to see anyone hurt, but the uniqueness of it all, the change of pace.
I say: Bring It On 2004-MN4!
Letter To Iran
Wouldn't be a good idea to try adjusting the thing's orbit in advance of the 2029 encounter just to prove that we *can*? We've spent a lot of taxpayer dollars in the past just to prove a concept- why not do it again? There'll probably be plenty of applications for how-to-land-on/move-an-asteroid technoloogy in future decades...
I came, I saw, I left. It looked better in the brochure.
Lets put them on the same ship as the hairdressers and telephone sanitizers.
Fight Spammers!
I wonder if people will build more bunkers. I know a person who owns a house, and there is a bunker in the back yard, from the days of a USSR nuclear strike threat (Back in the 70's and early 80's the drill for a nuclear strike was to climb under the desk in the school). It looks kinda flimsy to me, I am guessing the salesperson was real good. It looks more like a shed that is half way in the ground.
But, if someone wanted to make a good bunker, not just to ease the mind, but something to survive in, how deep would it need to be? I live on flat land, so I can not tunnle into a mountain, which I would assume to be the best choice. What is needed for a good oxygen supply, can you generate your own, or do you need an exhaust? How long would you need to stay underground, and where would you store the water and food? And would you have more than one exit out of the bunker, in case one side suffers damage and is burried under?
I think it would be cool to have a series of bunkers, with some pre-picked neighbors, people you trust. Have 7 or 8 bunkers, maybe a mile apart, each one acting as a node. The chances for survival would increase, and the time would pass quicker.
Rosco: "If brains were gunpowder, Enos couldn't blow his nose."
...for super volcano to erupt! D'oh!
I drank what? -- Socrates
In 2029 we learn that the world will end 2038-01-19.
-- Imperial units must die --
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.
A snapshot always help me put these predictions into perspective...
The U.S. announces its "war on large rocks".
The following NASA page contains an impact risk summary of several near-earth object:
http://neo.jpl.nasa.gov/risk/
Note that this one is in the top three, but with due respect to Douglas Adams, "Don't Panic" appears to be in order.
That game was actually written by NASA, in order to train the nation's children for just such an eventuality.
____
~ |rip/\/\aster /\/\onkey
I am probably more apt to be hit by an African Swallow then be killed by this asteroid.
The very day I finish a project on time for the first time in my life, I find out that the world is probably ending soon.
Homer: It's times like this I wish I were a religious man.
Reverend Lovejoy: Run for your lives people We don't have a prayer!
What is with us humans? Always hanging about and waiting for the end of the world?
IGB: More fun than eating oatmeal!
For Christ's sake, scientists -- MAKE UP YOUR FRIGGIN' MIND ABOUT THESE GLOBAL KILLER ASTEROIDS!
I just went through paperwork HELL getting the "Asteroids, Meteorites, and Other Heaven-to-Earth Bodies" coverage removed from my AllState homeowners insurance. This after I put it on there when you FIRST told us it was going to hit us!
Then I had to call Jean, my agent, and f*cking tell her to shred that whole contract and contact my mortage lender when you f*cking scientists said, "Whoa -- wait -- it might NOT hit after all. Our bad." But, of course, the fax machine at my office was on the fritz that week (screw all-in-one concepts, HP!), so I had to take a 2 hour ride through traffic BACK to my house to get the paperwork and OVER TO Jean's office.
Now, after FINALLY getting the signature pages right, 'cause Jean's assistant can't friggin' spell "interplanetary" for sh*t, I gotta do the whole g'damn thing again.
Christ -- I'm going to just leave it on there this time and pay the extra 20% on my homeowners insurance premiums this year. It's not friggin' worth going through all that hassle, having to take time off, explaining to my boss what why I'm having to factor "global extinction" into my homeowner savings plan, etc. Dammit.
I guess, now, that those f*ckers from Homeland Security are going to change the f*cking color of the alert this week too. Then I'll have to go back and talk with Jean about that "Dirty Bombs, Biological/Chemical Agents, and Other WMDs" clause. Dammit.
IronChefMorimoto
As Homer Simpsons said, "What's everyone so worked up about? So there's a comet, big deal. It'll burn up in our atmosphere and what's ever left will be no bigger than a Chihuahua's head."
Oh wait, that's a comet he's talking about, not an asteroid. WE'RE DOOMED!!!
*hides in bomb shelter*
how the dinosaurs' felt when they became extinct.
This will be the greatest form of extinct species empathy ever!
Darn...can't it just wait until 2030? I think that Duke Nuke'em Forever is due out in 2029...
One man's Funny is another man's Offtopic.
Hawaii eats 75% of the all the Spam made by Hormel.
They even have gourmet cooking shows featuring Spam.
If you guys start buying and storing Spam in your Y2K shelters we are going to send some Moke's to have beef wid you...
--ken
Bitcoin pyramid: Join here: http://www.bitcoinpyramid.com/r/1427 it's FREE!
I knew they would come in handy for something!!
The number of people trying to hitch a ride on a spaceship.
If we don't have time for effective preparations, where do I donate toward the ineffective preparations?
I, for one, want a massive Wile E. Coyote-style flag to pop out of the Earth immediately before the asteroid hits. Preferably reading "Yipe!"
No, because nuclear missles have engines that will only work in our atmosphere, and will only power the payload above the atmosphere.
I suppose we could launch it on a space-shuttle type device to get it into orbit and have it retrofitted with space-based engines (Think Saturn V-style).
ROMANES EUNT DOMUS
...the article itself says that the asteroid will most likely not be put on to a collision course.
All it's saying is that it is possible (I would say probable, I have some experience in similar research) that the model might not accurately account for the close approach with the Earth. The solar system is somewhat of a chaotic system when it comes to small bodies flying around through it. A very small change or error in calculation of the orbit of the asteroid can lead to wildly different orbits. One of them might be Earth smacking. Most of them won't.
As with all of these recently discovered "hazards," it's bloody unlikely to happen, but the media likes the headline. Don't panic anytime soon.
Probably the mass? I.e. different material => different density => different mass. We can pretty simply observe the size, but without seeing interactions with other objects figuring out the mass requires some guesswork.
Asteroid 2004 MN4 was introduced earlier on Slashdot..
Great. This is just what nerds need to boost their image in the world.
"Oh.. that giant killer asteroid? I heard it was introduced by a nerd-news site."
Starsucks
Anyone else ever type in /.'s URL instead of using it as home or a bookmark?
Ever type "slasdhdot.org"? Made me laugh.
Anyway...
I'm not too afraid of the asteroid, Bruce Willis and his raw-around-the-edges friends have handled much larger.
Way to make my 59th birthday seem grim!
rm -rf
Let Them Eat Quiche!
"Can there be a Klein bottle that is an efficient and effective beer pitcher?"
Yeah, there's no way it will hit Earth, otherwise John Titor would have mentioned it...
Mother, do you think they'll like this sig?
to finally hitch a ride on an astroid only to have crash right back on earth.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
0.865 gigaton for 2004 MN4 impact
vs
32 gigaton for Indian Ocean quake/tsunami, 2004
I recently had to write some date-validity checking code which brought to mind the fact that Unix dates will break in 2038. If this pans out, we won't have to worry about that, so that'll be nice.
(Also, my date-validity code, even if the 2038 issue weren't there, breaks in February of 2100. So that's two problems I won't have to worry about)
Listening to all that "End Times" bullshit again.
I had enough of it during Y2K. I getting too much of it now.. Imagine what it's going to be like in 2037?
Jesus, save me from your followers....
"I hope I die before I get old."
Yes, I am talking 'bout my generation...
--ken
Bitcoin pyramid: Join here: http://www.bitcoinpyramid.com/r/1427 it's FREE!
The asteroid is now expected to miss but come close enough to be below the altitude of TV satellites. It should be visible as a rapidly moving point of light.
Well, I know where I'll be come April 13th, 2029... whereever I need to be to see this rock hurtle past us. I wonder how likely it is that the effects of a collision with a satellite would be visible (with binoculars or a small telescope)?
If other reasons we do lack, we swear no one will die when we attack
But we'd better start worrying now.
Really, this is little more than sensationalized rank speculation. Volcanoes could destroy the environment before 2029, too.
Space is REALLY BIG, people. No matter how big the asteroid, the chances of hitting earth are VERY small.
We have lots of things to worry about that are more urgent, and more LIKELY than an asteroid impact 30 years from now.
Has slashdot turned into the Weekly World News of science reporting?
But Herr Heisenberg, how does the electron know when I'm looking?
but I upgraded to the '05 Maxima. The gas mileage on that thing sucked.
Six score characters.
Brevity being wit's soul
I have enough space.
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
And taken over key positions in government and industry, which would explain why we are being lead be dinosaurs!
"Can there be a Klein bottle that is an efficient and effective beer pitcher?"
Suppose it makes good business sense for them... whenever their sales drop they could repeat this story and throw in the name of any decent sized asteroid that gets within lunar orbit...
Why not try to make a space station out of it?
Push it to a lagrange point. Mine the sucker, pressurize the caves and viola!
You've got a space station with raw materials.
It would seem to be cheaper than trucking the stuff up from earth's gravity well....
Service guarantees Citizenship! Questions Guarantee GITMO.... Amerika Uber Alles!
Asteroid 2030
--
"I have also mastered pomposity, even if I do say so myself." -Kryten
I'd say we've got about five minutes left to live; the whole world's going to end. You said you'd fuck me.
BETHANY
Are you a complete lunatic?! Everyone's out there battling that thing and you want to cower back here and jump my bones?! We have to go down fighting!
JAY
No - no time for that foreplay stuff, just sex.
BETHANY
You pig...!
JAY
What?! It's all over; nobody's gonna beat that thing! Now we can either lay here all comatose like that John Doe Jersey bastard behind us, or we can make with the love.
Be sure to remember the Programmers Prayer
Mass. (I'm presuming one of those m's is mass.)
Everything is made of of elements, elements have different atomic masses. With out being able to determine the composition of the asteriod, and thus its mass, we can't figure out how much force is going to be generated by the earth's gravitation on the asteroid, and thus its eventual trajectory. That is of course even assumes the formula you have provided is correct, and applicable to a correct answer.
There is no America. There is no democracy. There is only IBM and AT&T and DuPont, Dow, General Electric, and Exxon
So we're living in a variation of the Ender's Game universe? Or the Last Starfighter?
rm -rf
1. This would certainly lessen the workload of converting all of those Unix boxes to handle their end of time problem.
2. The U.S. gov't won't believe this until a movie comes out about it... oh... wait a minute!
Wouldn't it be ironic if we had the technology to blast this sucker away from our orbit, but lacked the quantity of fossil fuels necessary to accomplish the task with present technology?
Aren't we supposed to be out of oil by then?
Better start working on nuclear propulsion with leaving the earth's orbit.
Or we'll be trying to shoot it down with compressed-air rockets like these.
If you're half as beautiful naked, you'd be 4 times as beautiful with twice as many clothes on.
Hmm, lets take that one step further.. Lets capture it in a very high orbit and use it as the counterweight for our Space Elevator. We should just be getting out technology down pat by that time and, hell, this thing is big enough we could actually use it as a base for all sorts of stuff.. kinda a mini-moon.. with elevator access. heh, it'd even make the ISS obsolete. You could use it to capture/send spaceships from/to other sites (Mars...)
Guess I won't be needing that social security afterall! Can I stop paying into it then?
Sounds like a solution to our police-state woes.
Who wants to buy front-row seats? Front-row seats here!
Zhrodague.net - I do projects and stuff too.
Even if we had an off-planet colony, how would we populate it? We can't even get a hundred people into space let alone a thousand, let alone a million, let alone a billion.
The half of us who are still living would. Sheesh, for some people, it is all about me, me, me.
... wake me up if/when it enters the atmosphere.
I'm thinking that It might be a good idea to tag it with a high end warhead after it passes us on a tangent - dispersing it away from us.
INsightfull?
sheesh, it's funny people, Funny!
"Get your stinking paws off me, you damn dirty apes!"
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Did anybody else notice that April 13th, 2029 falls on a Friday... Friday the 13th. Be afraid... be very afraid.
I think "Toys" is most accurate for today's times.
I am becoming gerund, destroyer of verbs.
Why not just use a variation of the Shuttle system? Use ET with a cluster of RS-68s to boost a Delta 4 common core based second stage.
Put a big honking nuke on it and try to nudge it into a safer orbit. Yes it may take a lot more than one shot to do it but if we could get a launch rate of one shot every month we could loft several hundred big honking nukes between now and then. You do not have to provide a big enough hit to stop 46 gigatonnes but just enough to move it.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
What great luck! Any idea of its composition? Because by then we'll be running low on quite a few of our essential minerals. Shouldn't be impossible to nudge it into orbit and mine it. This might be just what we need to bootstrap ourselves into space.
They have the data on the object's orbit around the Sun...with this information, it's high school physics to calculate the mass of the object.
____
~ |rip/\/\aster /\/\onkey
Would be a good chance to put a digger on an asteroid, maybe even park a HST-like observatory on it...
...almost as good as a lunar base...
A big one, and a small one.
Gotta procreate after the impact.
Never confuse volume with power.
"Greetings, people of earth. We are.....
Hold on...
Where the fuck did that asteroid come from it wasn't on any of our....&^%&^%(...no carrier"
I can't remember who the artist was. Sad.
if it hits earth it wont have to kill us all on impact, it just has to throw enough crap in to the atmosphere to cause a nuclear winter scenero which will finish civilisation off for good...
RE: [An impact would cause an energy release equivalent to about 1 Gigaton of TNT]
thats pretty big
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
I'd like to go with Ender's Game....I'm still trying to repress The Last Starfighter.
____
~ |rip/\/\aster /\/\onkey
The problem is population distribution. Some areas are empty, and others are 300x average. But even these are peaky. I don't even think a central hit on Tokyo would kill more than 40M.
So, what you're saying is that the asteriod will hit just about at the same time that 32-bit UNIX machines reach the end of time?
I look at this and know that, like many people, this is a cash vehicle and a licence for the US government to do what always wanted to do. With a big scare like this, the US government can get all the funding it wants to put a nuclear spacecraft into orbit. This will allow them to pour trillions of dollars into the "greater good". While they are at it, they will have a nuclear missile platform in space to control any government it so chooses.... with the "permission" of any partnered countries! "Either you with us, or your terrorists".
.. It will be convenient for the US government to use this new "planet saver" platform for other "very important" military moves against "terrorist" organizations.
Now NASA gets a blank check to research and develop anything it wants.
Kinda like someone fending off "killer minnows" in a bucket of water using a shotgun and a paint mixer.
I bet a case of Beer that the US government will make an announcement to develop a space vehicle that has the ability to blast something. Not really thinking that all you need to do is give the big rock a shove, so that it never comes near the earth.
...What would Bruce Willis do?
Bush is planning cuts in astronomy budgets.
Zhrodague.net - I do projects and stuff too.
AC comments get piped to
Nope, not even really applicable as a formula. Sure you'll find out what the force is, but you'll have to apply calculus in order to figure out what the trajectories will be, and then a slightly different formula (or computer simulation) to figure out if both bodies will intersect at a point and time.
Thank goodness I don't have to be a physicist to make a living. Its really bugging me that you knew a formula, and yet couldn't realize the problem with not knowing the asteriod's composition.
There is no America. There is no democracy. There is only IBM and AT&T and DuPont, Dow, General Electric, and Exxon
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"
Taco Bell has just announced that they will be placing a large bulls-eye target in the pacific ocean. If the asteroid hits the target, free tacos for the whole world that day!
...an asteroid has increased since we started looking for potential collisions. I suggest we stop looking. That strategy seems to have worked well for the human race for the last few tens of thousands of years.
Doesn't it make you feel good to know that our freedoms are protected by politicans, lawyers and journalists.
for the love, quit jabbering about asteroids that may hit us. What the hell is the space program for if they can't figure out how to blow up a threatening space rock. My god, we can send probes to Mars and dig up dirt, we can fly into a tail of comet, we can submerge a probe on Jovian moon, among other useless shit but blowing up piece of space rock is mystery. I guess it just to practical for them.
You don't have to be smart to use a Mac, you just have to be smart enough to buy one
Which was mentioned the other day, would be an advantage. We could look out the windows and watch the rest of the world get hit... Or, as I said before, NASA could screw up their calculations and put us directly in the path of the stoopid thing....
Why would we spend trillions of dollars combating a threat that seems to be important mainly to obscure scientists looking for a name, and 15 year old /. space fanbois?
Seriously, if we had a trillion dollars to spend, fight hunger or AIDS or *actual proven problems*, not some theoretical "an asteroid could hit earth".
You do understand that those movies were, er, fiction, right?
4x more likely to hit then in 2035. Impact risk
How about two? :)
Bow wow... chikka chikka bow wow...
How long did it take Homo Sapiens to evolve from its earliest ancestors -- like 1.5 million years.
Dinosaurs were around for a much longer period of time... Plenty of time to evolve, develop civilization and technology.
But maybe I just read too much Harry Harrison...
Wouldn't it be funny if they [dinosaurs] did have a space program and just haven't bothered coming back?
They did have a space program. They even CAME BACK.
Here's the proof!
2029 was pushing it, 2037 just not realistic for me. You the young ones can handle that. ANd do NOT raise my taxes mind you.
Excellent! Now I won't have to fix all those Y2038 bugs in my UNIX code! Go asteroid!!!
"Titor claimed to be a serving soldier who was recruited to a governmental time travel project. He was supposedly sent from 2036 back to 1975 to retrieve an IBM 5100 computer which he claimed was needed to overcome a Unix bug--Unix-based machines would no longer function after 2038, a known bug related to the 32-bit nature of the Unix clock."
for reference: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Titor/
I think I lost an hour or 2 of my life reading up on the archives of his posts.
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
/)
Watch what you say, or you'll end up in Gitmo for threating the president with all the other freedom haters, you freedom hating hater of freedom.
The days of the digital watch are numbered.
We don't need hundreds or thousands of people... just a racially diverse mix of a couple dozen or so fairly young women, and a wide variety of frozen semen. You let the colony grow from there. After all, if all we're interested in is ensuring the survival of humanity, then we don't need to move our current population off planet, we just need a small "seed" population somewhere else.
psmylie's dictionary: Godzillion (noun) Any number large enough to destroy Tokyo
Don't monkeys already rule the earth?
--LWM
Are you advocating murdering the president by
(a) attempting to direct an asteroid into his house
(b) shooting at the president's house with tons and tons of rounds
(c) lead poisoning, resulting in a new president who will.. also get lead poisoning...
or indicating somehow that the president is related to the asteroid?
Mr. hun, you have issues.
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
for my birthday... Either I'll be dead, or I'll have to deal with the fact the following year I'll be 50 :)
DNA samples stored as a backup plan. Stem cell research and cloning wouldn't sound so atrocious to many if they were awaiting an ELE.
...because Plutonians are teh suck
It's the correct formula, but the mass of the asteroid is completely negligible compared to the mass of the Earth. Also, since F = ma, you should be able to divide both sides by the mass of the asteroid and end up with a = G * Me / r^2. r isn't well known either though... However, I agree with the GP poster, I don't see what difference the composition makes unless it's passes within the Roche limit for its makeup and gets broken into smaller rocks.
That would be convenient. ;-)
Galileo: "The Earth revolves around the Sun!"
Score: -1 100% Flamebait
..hmmm...what year was that Unix bug thing suppose to hit?
Coder's Stone: The programming language quick ref for iPad
So if this thing happens to bump a small rock, say 1000Kg, over the next couple of years that collosion could be sufficient to put this thing in my back yard. I think we should use the Iraq oil for food program to send Ben Afleck to take care of this. I saw him do it in some movie and since he is an actor, he is qualified by definition.
Probability is that they will be Windows Users. So assume 90% users and 9 % Unix/Unix Like and 1/2 of them get whiped out so we will end up 100% windows users or 18% Unix other and 80% Windows.
</Tongue in Cheek>
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
I'm not much of a paraskavedekatriaphobe, but if the probability of it missing doesn't improve, I'm becoming superstitious.
Signature.
this asteroid could be a good thing as it may unite the world in a common cause against a danger that can wipe all of us out indiscriminately. yey for world peace.
--
http://unk1911.blogspot.com
Yeah, like me and Jessica Alba. We'll have the human race up in running in no time.
...will Bruce Willis still be alive then?
Coder's Stone: The programming language quick ref for iPad
Massive inbreeding.
this will save us.
I prayed about it, and God said, "Don't do it!" But I thought, "I know better."
Any follower of the Perry Bible Fellowship would know that the dinosaurs chose to go extinct!
h tm l
http://cheston.com/pbf/PBF025BCDinosaurMeteors.
Does it make you happy you're so strange?
How about the amount of debris that it could leave in the upper atmosphere as a result of collisions with small orbital junk?
Aside from taking out satellites, its trajectory would most likely be affected by small impacts of earth-bound debris. The solar wind would most likely be disrupted around this massive object. Piles of dust would probably be ejected into a variety of orbits around earth.
Certainly not doomsday material, but probably a serious hindrance to spaceflight and other orbital technologies. Just the possible debris could pose significant risk to a space elevator, assuming we will have built one.
Forget where I first heard this, but ceramic toilets are both ubiquitous (thus the probability of at least one being found is quite high) and long-lived in the extreme. Even millions of years down the road, they'll be able to find our toilets. Won't they be impressed?
Actually, you should mod them Underrated.. that is what I do for posts I find funny.
Proceed with Format (Y/N)? Y
I like how now, on the order of 100,000 years after human-like things started wandering the earth, we suddenly have the technology needed to track chunks of rock out in space. And now, with our several 100,000+ year track record, we suddenly say "Look out! Something's gonna hit us! Oh no, here comes another! Oh, the humanity!"
We didn't worry about it before we knew about it, and thus I don't feel the need to get all worked up about things now.
Posted from the wireless couch.
This stuff is way over hyped. All you need to know to deal with such an event I learned in elementry school.
Just watch the vid.
Duck and Cover
Congress will just dissolve NASA and pretend that they've solved the problem.
Then, after the asteroid hits, any surviving Republicans will blame the Democrats and any surviving Democrats will blame the Republicans and surviving followers of both parties will eat it up.
STOP MISUSING APOSTROPHES, YOU MORONS!!!
That would get the world on their feet, and focused on the asteroid than the wars and political squabbling. The Human race will finally have a purpose... to save Earth.... unless its aimed at Africa in which case the powers to be will make a point of ignoring it.
But even a near miss will almost certainly alter the Earth's orbit, possibly fixing global warming.
Heck we could use nukes to make sure it readjusts global warming, maybe CAUSE the impending ice age and end of the neocene.
"Give orange me give eat orange me eat orange give me eat orange give me you." -Nim Chimpsky
Hit it, oh hit it baby. Life forms suck.
You can't handle the truth.
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?
> or neutronium or naquada, or has a quantum black hole
Dude, I must tell you that this is Real Life (TM) and not Stargate. I know, I have trouble too.
=)
But what the U.S. government is already doing may be the very same safety measure that is needed: The renewed interest in a moon base, missions to Mars, etc. This exact same space program, I believe, is being put into effect to install a gigantic weapons system in orbit, very similar to the Death Star in Star Wars. This type of weapons system will be sufficient to blow up this silly little asteroid.
There are about twenty years left to prepare. NASA, you can rest assured, will come up with all kinds of devices to blow this thing out of the sky. And I'd bet you that the government, with all its supercomputers and whatnot, knows exactly when and where this thing is going to strike, and they're not just sitting around waiting for it to happen.
In the meantime, I know I'll be stocking up on canned foods and bottled water, and I need to buy more ammo for my handguns. If this thing starts coming down in my back yard, I'll shoot at it myself. Or I'll shoot at any looters that come around looking for trouble.
* I spelled "nucular" correctly. It's spelled according to the pronunciation of the guy I elected.
Professor Farnsworth: Well...that's bound to be a suicide mission. Fry, Bender, Leela...
Bender: DAMN YOU OLD MAN!
____
~ |rip/\/\aster /\/\onkey
Also, tidal forces could cause it to rotate, also affecting its orbit as orbital angular momentum is transferred into rotational angular momentum (or vice versa).
If I mod something funny as Insightful or Informative, it is because I love irony. I couldn't give a rat's ass about karma. I will post this with the karma bonus for no reason whatsoever.
There is plenty of time now. NASA has all the time in the world now to develop a new super secret shuttle, and train a small flight crew. Then they will have plenty of time to hire a rag tag bunch of wise cracking oil drillers to send on said super secret shuttle, while first stopping off on Mir to visit with a crazy cosmonaut and refuel. Once they approach the asteroid, despite all their natural personality classes, they will come together and drill the required distance to the center of the asteroid, deposit a nuke or two, detonate said nukes, thus splitting the asteroid in half and getting each half to go its own seperate ways... and then Morgan Freeman will make a public speech glorifying the heroics of this intrepid band, and we will get to see hollywood make movies about their journy and adventure... oh wait... that already happened. Damn... guess we are fucked then.
"Our funds have never taken part in toxic or death spiral convertible financings of any sort" -BayStar's managing partne
So we could avoid nearly all deaths by evacuating a 100 mile region around the impact site. Odds are, the impact site will be either water (any tsunami will be smaller than the one last December) or a rural area and the damage will not be huge. Furthermore, even in the worst case, we will be able to determine the rough impact area weeks ahead of time and can reasonably evacuate the area.
A billion people are not going to die. The impact on the Earth might be equivalent to a large volcano and it might depress the temperature by a couple degrees for a few years (we survived Pinatubo); certainly not much larger than recent disasters. And spending 100's of billions of dollars on trying to deflect this right now is certainly a waste of money, given that it is exceedingly unlikely this asteroid will cause that amount of damage even if it hits Earth.
It would have little to no measurable effect on the moon. It is literally about 1/100000 the mass of the moon. It would make for an EXCELLENT fireworks show.
"Curiosity killed the cat, but for a while I was a suspect."- Steven Wright
Parent post is currently at +5, Funny.
Where's the "Ironic" meta-moderation option?
How's my typing? Call 1-800-eta-shut
Anyone know what's the method used in order to identify asteroids and track their positions. What I mean is - how sure are we that we're tracking every potential threat?
The AACS key is NOT 0xF606EEFD628B1CA427BEA93A9CA9773F
Komodo Dragon vs. Sewer Rat.
Round 1. Fight!
Crunch
Komodo Dragon wins.
Fatality
____
~ |rip/\/\aster /\/\onkey
Assume the rock has 2E24 Joules of kinetic energy. You shoot it with your astro-blaster pistol, breaking it up into a billion pieces. The pieces still have 2E24 Joules of kinetic energy. What happens when they hit the Earth's atmosphere? Almost all of that kinetic energy is converted to heat. That's about 2 billion megatons of thermal energy in a big pulse.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
Ha! Ha ha!
:)
After my little spiel about how Funny mods don't help karma, blah blah, my previously "Informative" post gets modded Funny.
That is the Funniest thing I've seen on Slashdot today
"What do you despise? By this are you truly known." --Princess Irulan, Manual of Muad'Dib
/)
The density provides a good guess to the *average* composition, but not the heterogeneity of the projectile. This determines whether the particle is likely to burn up in the air (good) or melt and tumble (unpredictable trajectory - a simple orbital mechanics problem just became a hairy fluid mechanics problem) or hit the surface and if so, whether as one piece or a few large pieces or lots of small pieces.
Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana.
April 13, 2029 is on a Friday.
That would be the penultimate Friday the 13th. I wonder if that was a cultural premonition.
NOT EARTH, that's where I keep all my stuff!!!
Because that is when the Unix time value rolls over. Were Thompson and Ritchie psychic or what?
I believe I read a few articles detailing the development of a 747 based green laser that could be used to knock out missiles and asteroids
Abandon all hope ye who enter here...
Y2K was correct, but from the wrong end of Christ's life. Perhaps April 13th is the 2000th anniversary of Christ's death.
(Actually astronmers calulated Passover occurred on a Thursday in A.D. 26, 30, 33, and 36. April 6, 30 A.D. matches best with other Bible chronology.)
If you're going to invest the huge amount of time & money to nudge the thing off into space, why not instead nudge it into a stable earth orbit so we can study/mine it? Of course, don't fubar up some metric conversion or some such in your guidance software along the way...doh!
Well, it could hit the moon and then cause moon to hit the earth in a galactic game of billiards. Anyway, all we need to do is turn the earth so that the asteroid falls into the pacific ocean...
Oh well, what the hell...
Nice catch on the reduction.
As I pointed out afterwards its not the formula that's going to tell you if it will collide with the Earth. But it occurred to me that there still is no need to determine composition. It should be possible to plot the course of the asteroid using another planet to triagulate the vector, and then derive its velocity. As long as it doesn't come within gravitational influence of another heavenly body in the next 30 years, it just may be able to figure out its likely course. Wonder why the astronomer didn't catch that? :/ (Perhaps the asteroid won't be visible long enough to compare its trajectory with another celestial body.)
There is no America. There is no democracy. There is only IBM and AT&T and DuPont, Dow, General Electric, and Exxon
What's the reason for posting without the karma bonus ?
I guess it's in case you care about your karma and know you don't have anything interesting to say ? Or you know you'll be modded down? That's what I gather from reading the FAQ... which makes your claim to not giving a rat's ass about karma suspect, since I had to go look up what it means to check the "No Karma Bonus" box. I'm implying you care enough about karma to know details about how it's accumulated and 'spent'.
I don't think I've ever used that "No Karma Bonus" checkbox. I didn't even realize I could "filter down" my own posts that way. Maybe this post will be modded down and I'll see how it works. Now that I mention it, this is one of those posts I've read where it doesn't really say anything interesting and isn't on-topic. I'll probably be modded down. Uh-oh. Maybe I'll see how this works after all.
we can just sent a couple construction workers
They were texas oilmen, dammit! Just think, Halliburton, by way of Kellogg Brown and Root, might actually be responsible for saving the earth in 30 years. And if that happens, I'm officially joining the Republican party.
"No beer until you finish your tequila!" -Leela's Dad
...* ...as if to say that a ball of rock running in to another is going to teach us something about gravitational mechanics. I think these lottery disasters are so well covered and revisited simply because there's a small part of everyone that wants to see Earth get shaken up. This is likely a symptom of sheer boredom rather than pure scientific curiosity.
A hungry man will tell you anything if you give him a cookie.
According to
http://www.lpl.arizona.edu/impacteffects/
(The impact effect calculator). It wouldn't cause widespread devastation, at least not on a global scale. There would be a lot of damage within 100 km of the impact, but not much vapourised rock or ejecta, so there would not be much effect beyond that. Very bad for those close to the impact, but no significant effect globally.
Y'know, my initial reaction, on reading the summary, was --- "Oh, it'll hit America, so I don't have to worry too much."
Hooray for Holywood...
Repton.
They say that only an experienced wizard can do the tengu shuffle.
While you're right that Hubble wouldn't be too useful for tracking this asteroid, Hubble is perfectly good for looking at things in our solar system.
If that thing hits anytime before 2038 we don't have to worry about upgrading any of those 32 bit Unix systems right?
Why link to the article copy-with-ads at answers.com instead of the original at wikipedia.org?
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.
-truth
I had a steady B+ in my AI class until I failed the Turing test...
Wait, I'll tell you the rest when you're older.
I already know how it ends, they get married, live together for 20 years, then they get divorced and she gets everything.
Me, bitter? No way.
For a frame of reference, I Gigaton of TNT explosive yield is about the size of 20 Tsar Bomba class nuclear explosions . If the asteroid was kind enough to hit us somewhere on land and thinly populated, such as the Sahara Desert or Siberia, the main effect would be a volcanic winter, such as what happened after the explosion of Santorini, in about 1650 BC or Mount Tambora in 1815 . Not a lot of fun, but civilization would probably go on as usual for most places.
If it hit in the middle of the ocean, a Tsunami could conceivably wipe out many of the major cities on the Pacific Rim or Atlantic and European seacoasts. Tens of millions could die, and many of the developed world's major cities would be laid waste. Whole countries would be crippled, and the ensuing chaos would disrupt world trade, and potentially destabilize entire regions.
A direct hit on a major population center, such as Southern California, the area around Bejing, China, or Bombay, India would cause millions of casualties and huge suffering, but the effects would be local enough that the rest of civilization would find a way to get by, even if important industries were wiped out. Such a hit would be a relative longshot, but could happen.
I sure hope so! That's what I use on good posts that are already classified (imho) properly. Likewise, the trolls/flamebait get overrated from me.
Back to the asteroid topic (oh. Yeah, that thing), is there any indication that the various space programs are looking at deterrant options? Something along the lines of blowing it up, or bonking it towards old Sol?
::jafomatic
The Earth Impact Effects Calculator lets you calculate the destructive effect of various asteroid impacts.
Seastead this.
If I'm posting something very specific in response to a single poster, that adds absolutely nothing to the overall discussion, I might post without the bonus. Or if I knowingly write something that is, as you said, uninteresting and off topic (or trolling- because sometimes it has to be done), I'll uncheck the box.
I guess I figure it's less likely to be seen by mods, and I'll lose less Karma when they invariably mod it down.
Give a man fire, and you warm him for the night. Set a man on fire, and you warm him for the rest of his life.
It looks like we won't have to put in overtime on that 2038 Bug w00t!
90% of everything is crap. Also, crap is relative.
From the article: As a safety precaution, some experts are calling for 2004 MN4 to be "tagged" with a transponder that would constantly radio its position.
:-)
------------------
OK, but please proceed carefully. We wouldn't want to accidentally crash the transponder mission on the rock and effect the trajectory in an unpleasant way.
Of course, if you can pull off a transponder rendevous, why not send a rocket motor instead and solve the problem? How much delta vee do you need to nudge a 1000ft rock into a safe trajectory?
Whenever dangerous asteroids come up, I make the same statement, and I still stand by it. Quoth my journal: Cost-cutting idiots will kill us all
Music speeds up when you yawn, but does not change pitch.
I cant recollect where in the bible it says the Christ is coming back in 2000 years.
I dont think it says that, the only thing I can bring to mind is the scripture that says that "only the father knows" the times and days of the end times.
Perhaps you could reread, and point out the section where it says that for me?
emt 377 emt 4
Eight ball into L-5 Orbit. Level of difficulty: .75 degree of arc in 27.322 days. Miss, and scratch one Earth.
Kinda puts Global Warming into perspective, huh?
And those of us who survive will reset the Epoch to midnight the day after the asteroid hits. :-)
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
[Strangelove's plan for post-nuclear war survival involves living underground with a 10:1 female-to-male ratio]
General "Buck" Turgidson: Doctor, you mentioned the ratio of ten women to each man. Now, wouldn't that necessitate the abandonment of the so-called monogamous sexual relationship, I mean, as far as men were concerned?
Dr. Strangelove: Regrettably, yes. But it is, you know, a sacrifice required for the future of the human race. I hasten to add that since each man will be required to do prodigious... service along these lines, the women will have to be selected for their sexual characteristics which will have to be of a highly stimulating nature.
Ambassador de Sadesky: I must confess, you have an astonishingly good idea there, Doctor.
[from Dr. Strangelove (1964)]
All these comments about propulsion systems, has everyone forgotten about the Nerva project, TESTED SUCCESSFULLY in the 60's??? Do a google search, you'll see what I mean...
UNIX advocates can now be smugly confident in saying "UNIX systems won't have a Y2K meldown in 2038"
There will be no eulogy. Humanity will die quickly.
Denial will reign, as no preparations are done to evacuate the planet. Some will say there is no way to evacuate everyone. Others will say there's nowhere else to go. The real thinkers will know, if we had started years ago, we would have had a chance.
Most will die from the intial impact.
The impact will crack the planet's crust, resulting in volcanos, earthquakes, and tsunamis, which continue for years.
Many will die due to the dependance on transportation systems, or more specifically the failure of them.
A very few will survive in the cold dust and ash filled atmosphere, through the shaking ground, and giant destroying the costal areas. They will survive for many months on their preserved food reserves, and filtered air. Alone, they will consider themselves the lucky ones.
In the end, none will survive.
Many millennia later, other civilizations will have grown in far outlying areas of the universe. They will look at the dry and barren planet, covered by rocks and dirt, and say "nothing could have ever lived here. It's always been a dead planet"
Eventually, despite taunts, archeologists will find disputed traces of life on the planet. Some artifacts will be found. They will be found frozen in the ice of the polar ice caps, or burried in the sands of the vast deserts. Still others will be below hundreds of feet of dirt, on the iced tops of frozen oceans.
The artifacts will be carefully examined for many years. There will be many theories to what they are, and what the markings may mean. Could there have been life on this far distant planet? Could a civilization have thrived in this desolate place? Maybe these creatures could be a clue to our ancestory?
In the end, their markings will be considered random discolorations. The artifacts will be labeled as "common rocks", and thoughtfully put into storage well away from public sight.
No, as egotistical as we are, there will ne eulogy. There will be no memory of anything we've accomplished. We will be part of the dust on a barren planet, spinning slowly around a dying star.
Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.
bring on the impact! knock us back a few centuries again.
Star Trek's main strength is its willingness to unabashedly steal the best material in science fiction and adapt it. It's main weakness is that it the writers (or perhaps their editors) are often such incompetent thieves.
//Information does not want to be free; it wants to breed.
underrated is what you use on posts that are already classified properly... good to see the normal slashdot mentality, or lack thereof, remains!
Any takers on where it will hit?
The 2029 near-collision is a warning shot regarding American's immigration problem.
Take a look at this projected immigration graph: http://numbersusa.com/overpopulation/posters.html
In 2029 the "domestic" Americans will be just crossing their maximum point, and if we cannot figure the situation out after that, god will swing back around in 2036 or so when everything is out of control, and completely annilate his pathetic creation and start over.
It's the thing what starts the Man in Black-syndrome; it's their answer for the airwaves they saw for the X-files, roswell stuff, men-in-black, ET, Aliens, and all those crap movies...
...
...
...
They just cannot take it anymore, and they have sent this asteroid with a bumper sticker "married with earth in 2040"
I wouldn't be suprised it would introduce some weird disease which turns all male into female and all female into male
You'd never know, it's running out of hand and shit has hit the fan
--- I am known for the ones who want to find me on the net. Is that a privacy risk or a privilege? One might wonder..
I totally agree with you.
Isn't it nice that this news comes just after we again discussed here another anniversary of Apollos? And some argued viciously that, for example, we should postpone human space travel until it is completely safe.
Don't you see we are already all engaging in space travel that is not safe in the long run? Time to wake up, the clock is ticking.
The Overrateed/Underrated mods are a little interesting.
:).
If you read the Mod FAQ about them (last bullet) you'll see that you can get some odd (but unlikely I guess) combos like +5 Flamebait (that would be cool though
Also, and I don't know this for fact but I've seen others discuss it, if you mod using Under/Overrated too much, you may eventually be given fewer/no mod points. The reason being is that Under/Overrated mods cannot be metamoderated so you get trolls with mod points using them to mod people down without valid reason (political, whatever). There's some big discussions about users getting hit by tons of Overrated mods because they have enough Foes with mod points. Basically there's no way to "balance out" Under/Overrated mods.
Anyone know more about this?
"What do you despise? By this are you truly known." --Princess Irulan, Manual of Muad'Dib
/)
That happened to me a while back too.
Then I realized, while the guy had some good points about the present, it was most likely complete bullshit.
But, indeed, insightful bullshit.
"Your effort to remain what you are is what limits you."
Ok, I hate to tell you all this, but that date was not 2029, it was supposed to be the 29th of THIS MONTH! That's right, it is gonna hit us on the same day that 'Hitchiker's Guide to the Galaxy' comes out. Coincidence? I think not!
Now that you kow, "Don't Panic!"
-- Should there be smoke coming out of my CPU?
It's distinctly possible the combined repulsive force would repel the asteroid completely.
Blank until
Not that I disagree, but damn...
Perhaps someone should read a little less Nietzsche.
1q2w3e4r5t6y7u8i9o0pqawsedrftgthyjukilo;p'azsxdcf
As far as I know the latest data is that it has a lenght of 320m and a mass of 4.6E^10kg. These numbers are already assuming it's spherical so we get:
and
2681kg/m^3 is below most refined metals: a cubiq metre of solid gold weighs 19320kg, refined aluminum about 2600kg, but it would be likely that there's at least some heavy elements like metal, i.e. money.
One of the links talk about tagging the asteroid with a transponder on its first pass, this sounds like a perfect business opportunity for (the few) companies working towards space mining. Instead of going to the mountain the mountain is coming to them. First company to tag the asteroid claims ownership of mining rights (as well as sharing scientific and security information with the world of course). They also get ample opprtunity to test their technology, lots of free publicity, something to show present and potential shareholders etc.
2029 is the date of the first pass, if the solar sail launch of The Planetary Society proves to have merit this summer they should have ample time to prepare more than just a transponder: if it's possible to attach a solar sail to the asteroid they can gently slow it down both to avoid any danger of collisions as well as manouvering it and eventually stopping it at a suitable "harvesting spot". Even without solar sail technology 14 years is ample time to prepare a small fleet of vessels with ion drives as an alternative: either way a slow and controlled decceleration and orbital changes should be within reach (six years of ion thrusters should have some effect even if they're small - it's probably all that's needed), and then they have all the time the competition allows them to get the mining underway...
This could be big if only the opportunity is realized, who has the guts, the money, and the attitude?
this comment is provided "as is" and without any express or implied legibility or congruity [...]
http://tinyurl.com/45q26 Multiple attack missiles, radio-connected, one goes off the rest lose the link and go off as well. Asteroids don't have to get a direct hit. The military paid me $10 billion for it. Okay, all of it's true except that last sentence.
+1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 Funny
"The Milliard Gargantubrain? A mere abacus - mention it not."
That only depends on what the definition of "big" is.
For example our moon was formed during a collision with a Mars-sized object.
What would happen if this asteroid hits the moon.
Pop rocks! I like how they fizzle and pop in my mouth! :-D If you want some real fun, put them in your cat's/cats' litter box and watch the fun erupt. The next time your cat goes to bleed the lizard, watch his/her expressions... lol
Anyway, does anyone know where this thing is gonna hit yet? Yes, I RTFA, but still, is there a real, projected area where this thing is almost certain to land? I'd like to be as faaaaaar away from the splattering bodies as possible and even farther from the mushroom cloud and tsunami. Ha... and India thought they had it bad this year! Let's see how fast the world reacts when that sucker lands on Kansas. Relief Fund, my ass.
Why do I feel like Wyle E. Coyote holding an umbrella up over my head???
-- Game Developers: Stop porting badly-textured games from crappy console systems!
I say we make a TV special, about this. Yeah for SciFi, and then we could build a spaceship, you know to intercept the asteroid with thermo nuclear gigaton laser guided missiles, and then at the same time in the event we miss, or break the asteroid in to large chunks, we build an Space Ark which will house all of the genetic codes of all life on earth, in the event we can start over again. Yeah,...yeah...that sounds good.
Speculation here, but likely what ever condition we have on earth after an asteroid impact would still be better than the current conditions on the moon or on mars. If we can design a self sustaining mars colony, we can probably design a self sustaining post apocalype earth society as well.
Doesn't make sense. If you want Funny comments, define a +2 modifier for Funny posts in your user preferences. There is no need to abuse the moderation system.
Future Wiki -- If you don't think about the future, you cannot have one.
Many millennia later, other civilizations will have grown in far outlying areas of the universe. They will look at the dry and barren planet, covered by rocks and dirt, and say "nothing could have ever lived here. It's always been a dead planet"
Nah. You underestimate the ability of the bacteria, plants, insects and rats to survive. And crocodiles, never underestimate the crocodiles... Just a few millenia after such a disaster the Earth would again be covered in life.
sounds like We'll need an army of super virile men scoring 'round the clock!
before you shoot your mouth off. Oh, I guess that is why you are AC.
i nt ernationaltreaties.htm
http://www.unitedstatesgovernment.net/violating
Avoid Missing Ball for High Score
"widespread devastation" That would suck.
Clear my schedule!
Well, mining may be a bit expensive, apart from concentrations of some iron-paritioning elements (i.e. Iridium). It will be mainly silicate rock, and we have plenty of that on earth.
However.. if we could steer this thing into a stable Earth orbit (Geosynchrinous would be ideal), then we have suddenly created a very big space station indeed; just tunnel in.. Given enough voltiles, there would be enough volume and mass to create a more or less self sustaining system. The real value is the fact that you now have a source of mass in space - you could harvest a million tonnes of iron, for instance, for building further craft or satellites, without having to pay to get the stuff into orbit.
is it me or dose everything seem to be going along the lines of C&C thses dyas?
I haven't found any information about composition nor if it's solid or granular, what I have found is that it has not been given any taxonomy yet (C/S/M-type etc.) except that it belongs to the Aten group/class (which says nothing about its composition), so where did you find that "It will be mainly silicate rock" or how did you deduce it? (links appreciated).
Regardless it should be a nice target for something like Spacedevs NEAP which should be easy to use as a transponder as well.
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For what it's worth: Journal Entry: The Slashdot Dream! "Score: 5, Troll"
Stressed? Me? Of course not. Stress is what a rubber band feels before it breaks, silly.
There's a fault in that logic. Just because they've survived before, doesn't mean that they'll survive in the future.
200 million years ago, you could have argued that the dinosaurs had survived several extinction events, so they'd survive. 65 million years ago, you would have lost that bet.
If the planet became very volcanic again, and the atmosphere was filled with ash and poisonous gasses, it could be possible nothing survives.
It's ok, people make that fault in logic all the time. For example, every time a hurricane blows through Florida, you always hear about someone who had told his friends "I've lived here all my life, and I've survived every hurricane, I'm not afraid of these storms", and after that storm passes, they find his body.
Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.
Well, they can terraform mars. They could terraform the earth, after a major disaster. The question would be, how many people would survive in the time it would take to do it?
Anyone reading this site should understand how important redundancy is. Why do we prefer RAID5 over single hard drives? Why do we put up server clusters, rather than single servers. Why are backups suppose to be kept off-site? Because there can always be a single point of failure.
As humans, we have several single points of failure. The largest is that we're all on the same planet.
We speculate "what if", about asteroids crashing into the earth; about black holes; about the life cycle of a star. We understand that the time we can spend on this planet is finite.
If we were to expand beyond this planet, not necessarly in our solar system, but beyond, the fate of this single planet wouldn't mean life or death for humanity.
Sure, we can plan for 25 years for that particular asteriod to hit. But it takes substantially less time for a solar discharge to reach earth. A huge solar flare could have already started. There would be no reason to report it, because if it was large enough in magnitude, there would be absolutely nothing we could do about it. Think, life on this planet wiped out in a matter of seconds.
Why did humanity disappear? It still has the single point of failure. It's our own fault. We've reached the stage of advancement to be able to do something about it. We *CAN* build spacecraft. But, we focus our energies on war and profit. How much more can I have rather than my neighbor, and how will I take his away from him.
Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.
Earth is so impregnated with (bacterial) life, that to kill it all, you'd need to raise the temperature of entire surface to +100C for extended perioid of time.
Sure it could happen, but it's very unlikely it'll happen any sooner than the Sun is about to go red giant.
Because the bacteria haven't survived just "a few" extinction events, they've survived *every* extinction event in last 4000+ million years. They've survived time when large asteroid impacts probably still were rather a common phenomenon. They must have survived multiple close-by supernovas. They've survived the appearance of more advanced life forms, actually feasted on them.
I have great confidence that at least the bacteria will carry on the legacy of life on Earth, even if all Eukaryotes fail.
There are three type of people..
1) Optimistic. Those that are hopeful for a good outcome
2) Pessimistic. Those that are doubtful anything but bad can happen.
3) Realistic. Those that recognize that the optimist and pessimist are wrong some of the time.
The optimist will say "Something will survive"
The pessimist will say "nothing will survive"
The realist will say "In these circumstances, some will survive, in other circumstances, none will survive. What these circumstances are need need to be fully evaluated."
There was a guy who was hit by lightning seven times.
An optimist would conclude he was immortal.
A pessimist would say he was close to death.
A realist would research it, and find he killed himself over lost love.
Just because he survived 7 deadly events, he wasn't invincible.
Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.