Slashdot Mirror
Earth Under Threat From Dark Comets
An anonymous reader writes "Comets could be the most significant impact hazard to Earth, with sky surveys underestimating the number that are potentially devastating by a factor of between 10 and 100, UK astrophysicists say."
Already down. There goes my chance of calling FUD.
Posts not to be taken literally. Almost everything is sarcasm.
We need to destroy these communist comets before they damage our strong and beloved economy!
The dangers of knowledge trigger emotional distress in human beings.
C'mon, there are hundreds of ways for me to die everyday. If I have to start worrying about the sky falling on me, I might as well pack it in now.
Stay tuned for new sig...
"Comets could be the most significant impact hazard to Earth
Just what are the "other" impact hazards? I'm very curious about this.
Support NYCountryLawyer RIAA vs People
It's down for a sinister reason! They don't want us to READ the articles and become informed of the truth!!!
Also, why the racism? Just because the comets are DARK doesn't mean they are evil. RACISTS!
The dangers of knowledge trigger emotional distress in human beings.
What else is out there that might be an impact hazard?
Mod me down with all of your hatred and your journey towards the dark side will be complete!
My greatest fear is that people will view this as something that they have no control over, thus inducing a sense of complacency. Complacency kills!
But there is hope. I propose a Dark Comet Credit (DCC) trading system, whereby planets that are in danger of being struck by dark comets purchase dark comet credits from planets that aren't in danger.
It may not be a perfect plan, but it's better than doing nothing.
With the rate that things are colliding recently, any comet will be taken out by an asteroid, satellite or stray sub way before it gets near a population centre
Just because these comets hang out in the furthest, coldest reaches of the solar system, don't reflect light all that well and listen to cradle of filth, that doesn't make them all dark! Goth, maybe, but not dark. You just don't understand them.
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
if we discover a dark comet too late for the standard "shoot a nuke" at it solution to work, I propose we build a warp field around it and jump it THROUGH the planet... this idea is 100% original.
I believe the odds of being hity by a falling satelite, or other type of space junk, are approximately 1,000,000,000 times higher than the odds of being hit by dark comets. That and we can't do anything about it. I choose to live in my little bubble where nothing bad will ever happen :)
Hurry up! Find Bruce Willis!!!
That's because dark comets are composed of black ice, which is far more slippery and harder to see than regular ice.
I propose a Dark Comet Credit (DCC) trading system, whereby planets that are in danger of being struck by dark comets purchase dark comet credits from planets that aren't in danger.
What, you mean like carbon credits? Getting hit by a comet is not the same as pumping pollutants into your neighbor's air. I can't imagine what kind of diseased mind managed to make that connection.
You probably meant to propose an insurance scheme. Everyone pays proportionally to their risk factor as determined by some higher power. The higher power then arbitrarily decides which of the comet-stricken planets should get compensated. Those planets are then moved to the "ultra-high risk" category and charged ten times as much in the coming years, so they end up paying back everything and more. Oh, and the insurance is mandated (but of course not provided) by the interplanetary government.
are incredibly black, making the comet harder to see than a black cat in a coal cellar. At night with no torch.
Who uses torches in their "coal cellar"? What are you looking for, Frankenstein? ;-)
Shouldn't we put brown paper bags over our head or something?
If you like.
Will it help?
No.
I say don't drink and drive, you might spill your drink. Before you get behind the wheel just stop and think.
If we overrun our credit, we can blame everyone else, claim it is out of our control, and create a bail out strategy of DCCs.
The strategy will be created by a small group of elite people. The plan will take DDCs away from the people that planned for the events. The aquired DDCs will be given to the people making up the strategy, oh and possibly to the people that didn't any DDCs.
The people that saved their DDCs will be killed, and the people that did not or made up the plan will live.
It only seems fair. :)
TFA's headline is unnecessarily scary and the content is mostly speculative. Finally, at the end of the article some appropriate skepticism is given:
I knew it all along.
All the quarters spent in the arcade was really an investment in a space fighter pilot training program. Humanity will thank me when I show off my real comet busting mojo!
The perpetual worry-warts in the UK then shift to worrying about invisible asteroids instead of global warming.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/7891770.stm
The world is made by those who show up for the job.
I'm pretty sure that Howard Stern is still the most significant impact hazard to our Earth.
That's the second idiotic story from Cosmos Magazine. I wonder if someone from Cosmos is advertising via Slashdot story submissions
I can see 2 blatant problems with this right off the bat: 1) It is totally unenforceable (unless you monitor 100% of internet traffic in the state, and 2) It will force any internet retailers left in New York to relocate to another state. The cost of doing business in NY is already so high that it is driving companies out. Making up for the shortfall by taxing the remaining companies even more is a pretty short-sighted move.
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
My much longer summary didn't get used, so I'll pass out some relevant links.
NASA Near Earth Object program: http://neo.jpl.nasa.gov/index.html
Impact risks are within. Pertinent to this article are the size estimates which are based on albedo (visual reflectivity) and so the mass and impact damage estimates.
The UK research team calculated that there should be 300 to 3000 dark comet bodies in system. We know of about 25, so there may be up to 100 times more. Current known Near Earth Asteroids total around 6000, with a similar estimate of ratio of known to unknown (1 : 10 to 100). Thus dark asteroids might be around 1% of total impact threat. It's how easily they're located that's the subject of TFA. We know they exist. Deep Space 1 investigated one of them.
Comets are listed under by the NEO program as Near Earth Comets. TFA stresses that completely outgassed comets may not appear easily in visible light as they would be mostly carbonaceous at the surface and have little coma. These would be pretty much invisible to visible light telescopes which are what are used by the NEO program. They would be more easily detected in the infrared (absorbed visible light has to re-radiate, and does so as heat). Space telescopes such as Spitzer would work great. Figure the odds on getting such devices brought to task when there's more 'important' science to be done.
The mass of these objects would be far less than similarly sized rocky bodies, and they would tend to be smaller overall. Consider a spongey body made of soft, runny (with chunks), powdery carbonaceous materials (including hydrocarbons), light gasses such as methane and some water. Cram that sucker into the atmosphere at miles per second. It will deform and take on the shape of the bow shock. The materials will vaporize and the hot vapor will be forced into the oxygen of the atmosphere. Given the relative softness, there's a good chance such a body will explode as an air burst rather than impact the surface/ocean.
An air burst including rapid oxidation of the material at the bow shock would look much like a fuel/air bomb: rapid expansion followed by implosion due to oxygen depletion. Say, 100 square miles of trees knocked down around ground zero but no visible burning because the burst would be at altitude. No remenants to be found because it all burnt up. Tunguska. Mass estimate 1/3 that of a rocky body.
Fearmongering? Three points:
1. 2008 TC3 was discovered October 6 2008. It was predicted to impact the next day. It did, over Sudan. It happens, several times a century, and now we know we can predict them correctly.
2. Dark cometary bodies would be harder to detect, with larger bodies being discovered only this early, if at all. If limited to ground based telescopes, the 'if at all' applies.
3. Impact risks are calculated per body. As more are detected, total known impact risk grows. Sum down the 4th column (cumulative impact risk) of the tables at http://neo.jpl.nasa.gov/index.html to get the total cumulative impact risk over the next 100 years for the bodies presently known. As a rough estimate, multiply by 10 to include the bodies not yet detected.
It occurs to me that an individual might be responsible for causing an auto accident several times during their life time. Call it 'several times per century'. The risk is similar to that of an impact by a near earth object. If the combined cumulative impact risk estimate is, in your estimation, inconsequential, put your money where your math is -- drive around without insurance.
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
Of all the ways to go, at least here is one where you don't have to say, "Well, that was a bonehead thing to do..."
End anonymous moderation and posting on
It's unlikely, but not impossible that the Earth be struck by an astronomical object large enough to wipe out life as we know it today, tomorrow, or even in your lifetime. In the fullness of time however it's not just likely, it's certain.
That's what it's like when you play the odds. The likelihood of any two satellites colliding in orbit is very low, the odds of two submarines colliding in the vast ocean are also unlikely. But roll the dice long enough and they'll come up boxcars twelve times in a row.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Somebody else covered asteroids, so I'll touch on another risk: extrasolar objects. You see, a lot of discussion is made of object in our solar system because they are things we have to study for long periods of time; we can see them. However our solar system is orbiting the center of our galaxy in concert with a vast quantity of other material. Things can and do achieve escape velocity from our solar sytem, like the Voyager probes.
Not all the mass in our galaxy belongs to a star. Some of it - the remnants of supernovae, agglomerations of interstellar dust, stray comets ripped away but not captured by close passing stars - wanders the dark realm between the stars. This stuff is hard frozen and the vast majority of it is fine dust. Unfortunately not all of it is. The Earth is struck by extrasolar meteors every day, and some of them have good size. Because of their different origin they can be moving much faster relative to the Earth than an object that's been circling our common star for billions of years.
It would be unfortunate if we were struck by one of these objects that is a mile or more in diameter.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
If it weren't for this massive impact some 65k years ago we would still be voting for lizards
Yeah that's it, let's introduce more fear, so we can all buy stress relief pills, and go to our leaders for protection, regardless how lousy those leaders are.
TOP DSLR Cameras Reviews of the top DSLRs
I say that scientists underestimate the risk of the sky falling by a factor of 1e+10. Prove me wrong.
Quick sign up for your place on Ark Ship B.
Comets are COLD until they get near the sun.
Carbon conducts heat well, and the interior of a comet is a huge heat sink, so it may well take a long time to increase its temperature enough to see it in infrared.
Thus, larger objects approaching from the space side would be less visible.
It's the Comet Empire! Where the Argo when we need her?
Astrophysicist Dr. Louis Frank first proposed the existence of small dark comets in 1986. In 1990 he wrote 'The Big Splash' where he theorized that most of the Earth's oceanic water, and probably life itself, resulted from small comets that enter the atmosphere at the rate of more than 20 per minute. It's an intriguing read that needs to be taken with many large grains of salt. He was roundly criticized and ridiculed for his theory and these days he doesn't talk much about it anymore. His current profile at the University of Iowa makes no mention of his dark comet research.
The guy is no lightweight. He worked with James Van Allen and co-wrote with him several papers describing what we now know as the Van Allen radiation belts that circle the Earth. Is he about to be vindicated?
These are useful terms. A simile is where you say "this thing is like this other thing". A metaphor is where you say "this thing is this other thing". Hyperbole is when you say "I told you a billion times this was going to happen".
I doubt China needed to include a satellite killing device in a satellite that weighed half a ton that intersected the orbital path of another satellite at 6 kilometers per second. That would be redundant. The chinese are not famous for wasting money.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
"Comets could be the most significant impact hazard to Earth
Just what are the "other" impact hazards? I'm very curious about this.
Satellites.
They don't know where they are, when they are going to run into one another, nor where they are going to fall.
Just how did that crash in the sky last week get past these watcher groups ?
Or were 'They' not surprised ?
Also watch for falling aircraft.
happens a lot.
Well that's just perfect, now we have to face planet killing ninja comets.
I am fairly sure that the correct term is "extremely low albedo comets."