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1-in-1,000 Chance of Asteroid Impact In ... 2182?
astroengine writes "Sure, we're looking 172 years into the future, but an international collaboration of scientists have developed two mathematical models to help predict when a potentially hazardous asteroid (or PHA) may hit us, not in this century, but the next. The rationale is that to stand any hope in deflecting a civilization-ending or extinction-level impact, we need as much time as possible to deal with the threatening space rock. (Asteroid deflection can be a time-consuming venture, after all.) Enter '(101955) 1999 RQ36' — an Apollo class, Earth-crossing, 500 meter-wide space rock. The prediction is that 1999 RQ36 has a 1-in-1,000 chance of hitting us in the future, and according to one of the study's scientists, María Eugenia Sansaturio, half of those odds fall squarely on the year 2182."
172 years people, geeze.
We won't even be alive by then.. why be concerned about something that has a 0.1%chance of happening?
You know this is going to be just like Y2K. Once the chance is realized to be 30% or higher, people will start working on the fix in 2181.
Begin the cloning process of Bruce Willis and a rag-tag team of loveable roughnecks.
There's a spot in User Info for World of Warcraft account names? Really?
Nobody cared about global warming and burnt any kind of coal they found.
In soviet Russia, God creates you!
NASA can finally have a mission...
or more precisely 0.00054 = 1 in 1852 according to TFA.
Call this 1-in-1000 only if you can't do math.
Even if the odds were 100% that it would hit it would be 171.5 years before any bureaucrat does anything.
So you are saying I shouldn't worry about it then.
I was going to see what I could do to help man kind, but you convinced me it would be a meaningless gesture.
"You should always go to other people's funerals; otherwise, they won't come to yours." -- Yogi Berra
I seriously doubt it. Humans are adaptable. Sure, we may go into another Dark Age in the next century or so, but the issues you show concern over would fall pathetically short of causing our extinction.
Statistically, we've probably discovered 1% of the potentially hazardous asteroids. Now we have a data point for an interesting occurrence: one of the ones we know about has a good chance of hitting us. What about the rest of them?
How we know is more important than what we know.
Not only you. The whole human species would be extinct by then. We have global warming, pollution, fuel shortage, wars, corruption. These are enough to finish us by 2100.
Humans have been doing that for a lot longer then the 90 years to 2010, more -1 Pessimist then +1 Insightful.
2182 - 2010 = 172 years
Subtract 42 ( Life the universe and everything ) And you get 130 ( Hold this thought )
In 1951, Bobby Thomson hit the "Shot heard round the world" (i.e The Asteroid)
Against the Brooklyn Dodgers...(i.e Earth trying to "dodge")
Take 1951 and turn it into a repeating Decimal .1951951951........ ( this is wrong but who cares )
Then take the above 130 and divide by the repeating decimal and you get....
666 !
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Actually there are many objects we are monitoring, please see http://neo.jpl.nasa.gov/risk/.
This object's impact probability is 7.1*10E-4. That's 0.00071, and not 1/1000.
The Torino Scale Color says white, which means impact is almost impossible.
Most of the times even if the probability is increased, it is quickly reduced after some investigation.
Currently the most dangerous object is 2007 VK184 (2048-2057) which gets green rating. This article is nothing more than sensationalist and stupid.
Not only you. The whole human species would be extinct by then. We have global warming, pollution, fuel shortage, wars, corruption. These are enough to finish us by 2100. What happens in 2182 is irrelevant.
Dammit, and 2182 was finally going to be the year of Linux on the desktop!
Want to improve your Karma? Instead of "Post Anonymously", try the "Post Humously" option.
As long as it isn't a million to one shot...
A rock like this heading to our planet and we've got plenty of time to not just deflect the thing, but to move it into Earth orbit where it can be mined, turned into an outpost, and be used as a tether for a space elevator.
We cannot predict the course of asteroids over 200 years to within an Earth diameter. I have worked on this area, and the masses and positions of bodies (particularly all of the other asteroids) are simply not well enough known. So, it will come near the Earth, but we won't know if it is a true threat for at least a century.
Not only you. The whole human species would be extinct by then. We have global warming, pollution, fuel shortage, wars, corruption. These are enough to finish us by 2100. What happens in 2182 is irrelevant.
Not really. The human race started off as a primitive ape like species. We managed to survive living in jungles, deserts and caves. How is "global warming, pollution, fuel shortage, wars, corruption" going to kill ~7bn people. Sure it might kill 3 billion or even 4 billion at the very worst (which is still unlikely) But there is no way any of the things you mentioned will kill every single human being.
The odds are based on the accuracy of the orbit of the asteroid. Every observation has an error and the orbit can be any orbit that fits in these errors. The errors in the future positions of the asteroid increase exponentially and it is not that exceptional that they can predict this event. Another impact candidate is 1950 DA, which has a 1/300 chance of hitting Earth on March 16, 2880.
The come up with these odds by running tons of simulations taking into account the gravity of the Sun, all planets and some of the larger asteroids. This gives a set of possible paths of the asteroid through the Solar System in the future. The odds of the impact are then the number of possible orbits intersecting the surface of the Earth (including the lower atmosphere) divided by the total number of orbits. This is not magic nor arbitrary, but applied physics.
C3-PO's odds would probably be based on the number of ships ever entering an asteroid field and coming out again. In the real world, flying through our asteroid belt isn't that tricky. Current estimates put the odds of a probe traversing the asteroid belt and accidentally hitting something at around 1 in a billion.
If you think that's enough to completely wipe out our species, I have a bridge to sell you.
It may not be life as we know it, but whether you like it or not humans as a species will survive ALL of that, AND more. All we need is some percentage of newborns to make it to, oh, let's be generous and say age 17. They breed. There's more of us.
You don't need cars, or computers, or even a houses to have humans. All you need is sharp, pointy sticks, a few friends, and some of those friends to be of the opposite sex. That's it.
... still waiting for this free-as-in-beer free beer I keep hearing about.
Image 13 boxes each containing 13 revolvers.
One revolver has one bullet in it.
Now imagine being offered $100,000 to pick a box, and then pick a revolver and then shoot yourself with it.
That 1000:1 odds.
-paul
Better telescopes is moot. Figuring out the position and velocity of any specific detectable object in the solar system has been trivial for a long time now. The problem is our ability to predict how it will interact with every other body in the next hundred years. If it was a comet, and ignoring any potential flybys of smaller planets, just calculating how it will interact with Jupiter and the Sun every year for 100 passes adds more than a few earth diameters of uncertainty to the results.
THat is what pointy sticks are for. And "friends" in a pinch.
> Also didn't we have all those things about 100 years ago?
Exactly. If anything, it could almost be argued that the pollution in late 19th-century Britain, France, and Germany (and parts of America, for that matter) were noxious/toxic enough to make the most badly-polluted square mile of China look like the Garden of Eden by comparison. At least people in China don't have to rely on wood and coal-burning stoves & fireplaces for cooking and heating ON TOP of the pollution being produced by factories (at least, urban factory workers who live amidst the worst pollution) don't.
As a species, humans are easy to kill individually, but surprisingly difficult to effectively exterminate. The dinosaurs didn't have preserved food, hydroponics, artificial lighting, and global distribution networks, so when the skies went dark and 99% of photosynthesis shut down for a few years after the impact event, they were screwed. A similar event would be an unprecedented human tragedy, but the likelihood of enough humans surviving to repopulate the Earth eventually is practically assured.
Not immediately but quite possibly it could indirectly. All the trivially accessible minerals, oil etc have been consumed. Another dark age and we're likely stuck there indefinitely, possibly forever since we wouldn't be able to boot strap through the equivalent of the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries.
Getting stuck in that state may prevent our ability to overcome the next hurdle. We're smart but we need resources.
Yes Cryo might even work, in a few years it might even be possible to bring back those that are now frozen... but why should we bring them back?
keep them frozen till 2999 dec 31
I'll certainly be dead; I'll be 230 in 2182. Actually, barring some fantastic breakthroughs in medicine and biochemistry, nobody alive now will be alive then.
But you have to die from something; dying from a meteor impact would be a way cool way to go. Imagine the fireworks! Talk about going out with a bang...
Free Martian Whores!
It's hard to imagine a pre-industrial world being able to make (or even discover) ethanol fuel without oil-powered industry behind them. Keep in mind that humans have been around for many thousands of years and only in the last few decades have we discovered that all this corn lying around is good for fuel. It takes an advanced level of technology to exploit more subtle resources like ethanol.
1) The "business as usual" scenario is 3.5C rise by 2100, not 1C in a few hundred years. In fact, there's enough inertia out there just from what we've already emitted to rise more than 1C by 2100.
2) The primary "end of all life" concern is that we'll trigger what happened on Venus here on Earth -- a runaway system with self-feedback mechanisms, wherein we reach a tipping point from adding more carbon that leads to continually more to enter the atmosphere and/or less to leave the atmosphere. At this point, nobody really knows for sure whether that's possible, but there are a number of prominent scientists who are extremely concerned about this. While our current CO2 levels are unprecedented within the last ~15 million years, and our "business as usual" forecast levels much higher still, carbon dioxide levels were extremely high in the early Earth without such a runaway effect. However, the planet was a very different place back then; a *lot* of things are different.
I hate to bring up our imminent arrest during your crazy time, but we gotta move.