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Fifty Meter Asteroid Might Hit Earth In 2098
eldavojohn writes "The Bad Astronomer brings word of an asteroid discovered with a tiny chance of hitting Earth. While it's only 50 meters wide, it could have the impact of a 20 megaton bomb. It's still twenty million miles away so if it hits us, it won't happen until 2098. The real story here is how a remarkable telescope, dubbed Panoramic Survey Telescope & Rapid Response System, that went operational in May found its first potential target in our growing impact alert system for Earth."
"...might... ...tiny chance... ...could... ...if..."
Steamboat Willie will still be copyrighted.
Not fair smoking something that good and gloating about it.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
They JUST found this thing. The amount of data available to determine it's orbit isn't enough to know exactly where it is going. HOWEVER when they dig up some old sky photos they will find earlier positions of this thing. The more earlier data points the better they will be able to predict it's path. Usually this means that the odds of an Earth impact will go down. It's happened before with other newly discovered objects.
It always intrigues me when people say we will have never-ending war. Have you actually looked at the statistics to see what has happened to war in the past three decades, or the past century? The number of wars has dropped dramatically and consistently. I know it is hard sometimes for a person from the US to see this, since it feels like we've become more warlike since the 90s, but if you actually look at the numbers that's more of an illusion.
As the remaining fighters realize they have more to gain from trade than from fighting, then wars will continue to cease.
Qxe4
I was thinking recently that we were lucky that most of the ecosphere-killing events in our history were astoundingly long ago and that our local space should be pretty clear by now. And then I realized that the dinosaur extinction event that happened 65 million years ago took place when the Earth was about 98.6% as old as it is now. If the Earth was now a day old, the dinosaurs were wiped out at 11:40PM. Suddenly those past catastrophes seemed not as comfortingly ancient.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?