Slashdot Mirror
What To Do About an Asteroid That Has a 1 In 625 Chance of Hitting Us In 2040?
The Bad Astronomer writes "The asteroid 2011 AG5 is 140 meters across: football-stadium-sized. Its orbit isn't nailed down well enough to say yet, but using what's currently known, there's a 1 in 625 chance it will impact the Earth in 2040. It's behind the Sun until September 2013, and more observations taken then will probably reduce the odds of impact to something close to 0. But does it make sense to wait until then to start investigating a mission to deflect it away our planet? Astronomers are debating this right now, and what they conclude may pave the way for how we deal with an asteroid threat in the future."
Praying it hits. That would be so awesome!
Just threaten to sue it out of existance.
There is a 1 in 625 chance that I will be taking a long holiday and be unavailable for comment in 2040...
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
It's far too distant to deal with now. Let's re-evaluate the situation when it's a couple years out, and hope Bruce Willis hasn't retired if our odds haven't improved.
How are sites slashdotted when nobody reads TFAs?
If it hits, it wipes out the major cause of habitat destruction, global warming and talk radio. If it misses, the sales of tinfoil hats and doomsday billboards will restore the global economy.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
We should definitely consider putting Bruce Willis, Ben Affleck and Aerosmith into cryo right now. Without them, we won't have a chance.
Decisions of how to deal with the massive asteroid are best left to the individual.
http://www.theonion.com/articles/republicans-vote-to-repeal-obamabacked-bill-that-w,19025/
Yes it makes sense to wait. Why waste 18 months coming up with solutions to deflect it only to find out it won't strike 27 years from now? If September 2013 rolls around and it looks like it will hit in 2040, 27 years is practically as much time as 28 years to develop a solution.
I always liked the plans that involved speeding the asteroid up, or slowing it down just slightly.
I saw a recent idea that involved painting it white in order to decrease absorptivity.
Plan a party. Get wasted, and get laid.
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
Wherever it hits, those are the people that God hates most. End of debate.
It's another year before we can get data, it'll be another 27 years before it'll hit if it does. Don't you think it'd be better to wait a year, see what the odds are. If they start coming closer to hitting us in a decade etc, then we should looking into it. At this point in time, it'd be a complete waste of time. Even if we waited 20 years before knowing it's going to hit us, our level of tech will be much greater then, then it is now and it'll basically obsolete any work we do on it before then - making it a waste of time and resources, isn't there better things we can be doing with our science dollars?
I'll take those odds. I bet my life savings we survive.
Ignore it.
Look I agree, only 1 in 625?! That hardly seems like a threat at all. Anyway, gotta run, I'm off to by a lottery ticket.
Better to be despised for too anxious apprehensions, than ruined by too confident a security. --Edmund Burke
And let the solar wind push it out. You only need to alter its orbit by 5 minutes in the next 22 years to miss completely.
Slashdot's rate-of-post filter: Preventing you from posting too many great ideas at once.
Whoa! I had a dream about something like this last night. In my dream, a meteor/asteroid hit the water and caused a flood and I thought I was going to die. However, I survived and the water receded. Due to the flood, all electrical/electronic stuff basically died and people basically had to survive without technology.
Dropbox drops it like it's hot.
I got this.
*shakes fist at sky*
Do statements like "The coin has a 1 in 2 chance of coming up heads" also bother you?
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
Build a spaceship and put in all the telephone sanitisers, hairdressers, advertising account executives, MPAA executives, RIAA executives, and politicians and send them into space.
Fight Spammers!
The Mayans didn't factor in the leap year, so by their calculations the world should have ended months ago.
The Mayan calendar was more accurate... 365.2420 days, vs. Gregorians 365.2425, when the actual value was 365.2422.
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
The right question is: Who launched it at us?
After all, Putin is back! He'll certainly deal with it - shoot it, wrestle it, somehow force it to submit to his iron will.
#DeleteChrome
We drill. We send in the worlds best deep core driller.
To offset political mods, replace Flamebait with Insightful.
There's no probability here - the asteroid either will or will not hit. Why can't they say just say this is the measure of uncertainty in the curve fit rather than a "chance to hit"?
Actually.... quantum characteristics do effect the motion of objects relatively low in mass (like asteroids) over sufficient time and space.
But there are other probalistic things that will effect the path of an asteroid as well, such as the motion of other unobserved bodies, actions of humans and other high-entropy phenomena which do not have a deterministic defined outcome; it's an intractible problem, so the outcome is really not a binary thing; there really is a certain probability of a collision.
How precisely we can know what that probability actually is, is another matter altogether. The fact that 1 in 625 is what has been indicated so far, does not mean 1 in 625 is as precise a number as possible for that probability. Methodological improvements in the future will likely improve the accuracy of the prediction of the probability of a collision
Do statements like "The coin has a 1 in 2 chance of coming up heads" also bother you?
The coin has a 50% chance of coming up heads, unless a butterfly flaps her wings at the behest of an EMACS programmer with the right shortcut key.
by then i will be 81 years old if i am still alive so it wont make any difference to me, maybe my children or grandchildren will be concerned about it
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
2023 is the year that the asteroid will either pass through the "keyhole" and be bent into an orbit that will strike the earth, or it won't and we're safe for the foreseeable future.
Deflecting the asteroid so that it misses the keyhole (~300km) is much easier than deflecting it so that it misses the earth (~13000km).
In that timeframe, 18 months can matter.
Also, the time spent developing solutions is anything but a waste. We never know when we'll discover an asteroid that's on a collision course with earth on a much smaller time frame than 28 years. Eventually we will need this capability. I don't see any effort spent getting ready now as a waste.
On the other hand I'm not arguing too hard that we need to start working now. Odds are very good that in 2013 we'll look closer and realize that there's 0 chance of it passing through the keyhole.
Still, we need to take the problem of asteroid impact seriously. It is only a matter of time before it kills us all if we aren't prepared.
The enemies of Democracy are
Man those guys were smart. Too bad no one living today is that smart. I bet anything they wrote down must be more true than anything modern people write down. Too bad they didn't actually write down when the earth was going to end and it is only stupid modern people who misinterpret those smart Mayan overlords.
A coin flip is exactly as probabilistic an event as this possible impact.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
90% of Asteroids are "hidden" and we have only started to become more sophisticated and active in trying to detect them. We do not know where these 100 meter asteroid's orbits are in relation to Earth.
We know that some asteroids which travel such that the Sun obscures them most of the time (rocky ones with no "comet tails"), are EXTREMELY hard to detect.
Given that we have a Tunguska size (100 meter) impact about once per century, I would give a 1 in 4 chance of an impact or aerial explosion inside of 2040. It is all statistics with a fairly high degree of certainty. Am I an astrophysicist? No, but as an engineer, I read what they write and it is pretty well settled on the information with which to judge chances of an impact of something "sizable",
But does it make sense to wait until then to start investigating a mission to deflect it away our planet?
Well lets see, a potential catastrophe is 28 years away and there is 1/625 odds based on the data we do have that it will happen. We will know evidently with much better certainty what that odds are when its a mere 26-27 years away. Given we are talking about altering the path of a massive object in space, I say wait.
If we can't solve the problem in 26 years we mostly likely could not solve it in 28. The odds are already quite low, the cost to do anything about it quite high. If the numbers change after we can see and measure it better thats different. If we had to wait until it was much closer to get the better data that would be different. I don't see any advantage in getting a 12-24 month jump on this, given the time scales, and the complexity of solutions to the problem and risk.
Repeal the 17th Amendment TODAY! Also Please Read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
But if video games have taught me anything, it's that the timer doesn't start until you actually begin the last mission. We could wait a year or a decade or a century, that LED countdown timer won't start until we actually land a team on the asteroid. In which case, I propose we simply never launch a team.
You can always turn a deterministic problem into a probabilistic one if enough variables are hidden. But this doesn't mean that the underlying mechanics of the situation are necessarily probabilistic.
The gasoline example you gave above is inherently probabilistic, because you do expect that, given the same perceived initial conditions many times, the outcomes would vary each time the "experiment" is carried out.
When it comes to orbital mechanics, the variability comes not in being inherently unsure of what will change, but from a known error based on number and quality of measurements. This is why the probability of collision numbers change over time - they are really confidence numbers, not probability of occurrence numbers. No matter how many times you measure a fair die roll, the probabilities will always come up the same.
More measurements won't help you with a coin toss, quantum mechanics, or your gasoline example, because it's not possible to gain enough measurements (or in QM's case, there is strong evidence that no such parameters even exist to measure in the first place).
"There are a dozen opinions on a matter until you know the truth. Then there is only one." - CS Lewis (paraprhase)
Remembering it has a 624/625 chance of NOT hitting us?
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
Hiding in their space ship.
The Mayan calendar was more accurate... 365.2420 days, vs. Gregorians 365.2425, when the actual value was 365.2422.
Ugh. Every time I see garbage like this modded insightful, I loose a little more hope for my fellow slashdotters. Goddammit people, when you read something and think "huh, I didn't know that!", your first reaction should be to look it up, NOT to hit the "mod insightful" button!
Here's a link to a book that talks about where that claim originated, and why it's wrong. Link should take you to the relevant page, but, just in case, it's "Early Astronomy" by Hugh Thurston, page 202/203.
For those too lazy to read it, here's the tl;dr version: the Mayan calendar is 365 days. It has no leap days or leap years. While there's evidence that the Mayans knew that the solar year was longer than 365 days, their calendar doesn't reflect that knowledge. The original claim was made by a guy who died in 1931, and he got his conclusion by making some silly mathematical mistakes.
A coin flip is exactly as probabilistic an event as this possible impact.
Erm, nope. A coin flip is an exact statement about the probability of a random event, the chance of an asteroid impact represents our ignorance of the true state. One is frequentist probability, the other is a Bayesian posterior probability.
Nothing (at least nothing I know) beats the Iranian calender in accuracy. But then again, it might be a tad bit space consuming to implement a calender with a 2.8 millennia cycle in a computer. Still, an error of one day in 3.8 million years (or 0.022 seconds a year) is quite impressive.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.