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No Bomb Powerful Enough To Destroy an On-Rushing Asteroid, Sorry Bruce Willis
coondoggie writes "Maybe it's the doom predictions about the end of the Mayan calendar this year, or maybe these guys are obsessed with old Bruce Willis movies. Either way a class of physics students from the University of Leicester decided to evaluate whether or not the premise of Willis' 1998 'Armageddon' movie — where a group of oil drillers is sent by NASA to detonate nuclear devices on an asteroid that threatens to destroy Earth — could actually happen. The students found it would take a bomb about a billion times stronger than the biggest bomb ever detonated on Earth."
Armagedon is not that old at all.. uhmm.. ohmm...
Fuck, get of my lawn
We have a bomb that big! OoooOOOOOooh!
Sounds like a great plot for an action comedy. What is the release date?
The students found it would take a bomb about a billion times stronger than the biggest bomb ever detonated on Earth."
We have those!
That's a chance that we'll have to take! :0)
The purpose of existence is to make money.
is it me or did the class get it wrong, it was never about destroying an asteroid, it was about splitting it up in pieces or nudging it out of the earth direction
I'm not exactly for challenging the Department of "Defense" on this one.
It has been well known we can't just blow it up for a while. However all we need is to bump it off course. Something a very powerful nuclear bomb may be able to do
"The biggest bomb ever detonated on earth" is a damn sight smaller than the biggest one ever built... Just sayin'.
Gosh, thanks. That must be why the other ships call me Meatfucker -- GCU Grey Area (Eccentric)
The students devised a formula to find the total amount of kinetic energy needed in relation to the volume of the asteroid pieces, their density, the clearance radius (which was taken as the radius of Earth plus 400 miles), the asteroid's pre-detonation velocity, and its distance from Earth at the point of detonation. Using the measurements and properties of the asteroid as stated in the film, the formula revealed that 800 trillion terajoules of energy would be required to split the asteroid in two with both pieces clearing the planet. However, the total energy output of Big Ivan "only comes to 418,000 terajoules. The asteroid is approximated as a spherical object 1000km in diameter
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Have they never heard of the phrase "willing suspension of disbelief"?
Here's some news for them: the teenage mutant Ninja turtles weren't real either.
The definition of "big enough" is apparently "big enough to split a 1000km diameter spherical asteroid in two, and with enough force that the trajectory of both pieces misses the earth". I haven't seen the movie - is that what they did?
It seems to me, though, that the goal should be to break up an approaching asteroid into small enough pieces so the atmosphere can do most of the dirty work for us. Deflecting the asteroid doesn't seem very feasible unless we detect it long before it approaches earth (and then there's the issue of reaching it...).
#DeleteChrome
So what other plausible scenarios can there be to get Bruce Willis off this planet permanently?
1950's juvenile science fiction novel with exactly that plot, but instead of trying to blow up the asteroid, they use small nukes to deflect its orbit slightly, sending it where they want it to go.
I seem to remember that the object in the film was a comet (which was starting to fall apart) and possibly a little bit more fragile than a rocky asteroid. Probably still require a hefty bomb though.
Phil.
We ssoooo need to develop bigger bombs. What if the asteroid comes??
Forget Bruce Willis, you just have to land Chuck Norris up there and have him stomp his foot once.
or in a night. She is definitely one of the biggest shells ever made! There were always two big reasons to explode for her. (http://www.google.com/search?q=young+sophia+loren)
Plot points based in hard science aren't exactly Michael Bay's MO...
This is the real paper, coming in at only 2 pages it's a light read: https://physics.le.ac.uk/journals/index.php/pst/article/viewFile/390/243
You weren't going to RTFA anyway, now were you?..
--
P1_1 Could Bruce Willis Save the World?
Back A, Brown G, Hall B and Turner S
Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of Leicester, Leicester, LE1 7RH.
November 1st, 2011
Abstract
The film Armageddon (1998) puts forward the possibility of using a nuclear weapon buried deep within an Earth-bound asteroid to split the asteroid in two, each half clearing opposite sides of the Earth with only relatively minor damage. This article investigates the feasibility of such a plan and shows that even using the largest nuclear weapon made to date, the bomb comes over 9 orders of magnitude short of the yield required.
[...]
We've known for a long time that the guys in Hollywood have been pretty bad at math, though usually they are only out by a factor of a million.
Scenario : there is 5 years warning, and the asteroid is 10 km is diameter (the size of the one that wiped out the dinosaurs).
Could we deflect it? Assume that the mission to intercept the asteroid reached it 2 years before impact.
I kind of feel like there would be a way. In this scenario, ALL the resources are going to solving the problem. At least 50 trillion dollars or more. Most other activities are suspended in the western world and china. A salt-water fission rocket or something ought to be powerful enough to deflect the asteroid.
Everyone knows that in such an event Sam will open a hyperspace window and the asteroid will fall right through.
"You know, you blow up one sun and suddenly everyone expects you to walk on water."
Lt. Col. Samanth Carter
Time is what keeps everything from happening all at once.
Anti-Virus company proposes code for attacking any alien motherships which may appear over the US, and Korean graphics painters are put on alert to draw a huge steam roller in case Judge Doom somehow managed to survive that cauldron of dip....
The last thing you want is lots of pieces - there's something called gravity which would cause them to re-agglutinate on the rest of the journey. Breaking up an asteroid takes far more energy than deflection, as should be obvious-despite the current illiteracy, it takes far less energy to brake a car than it does to break it up. Of course Hollywood wouldn't want deflection because there's nothing to see on screen - but deflecting it into a safe orbit would be much safer because you only have to predict the track of one object, not millions of small ones with different trajectories.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
Blowing up asteroids is oldschool. All the cool kids these days just open a hyperspace window and fly them safely through the planet and then conveniently forget that we have a massive object rich with valuable minerals in orbit around Earth for the rest of the series.
If we invented a bomb that big we would probably be in more danger than we are from an asteroid hit.
its da biggest bomb ever i tell yea
Was far too classy ever to be mentioned on Slashdot.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
Correct me if I'm mistaken but as far I as can remember there's no upper limit to the power of an H-bomb besides the amount of hydrogen you're willing to use. Or it might have to be deuterium. Whichever it is, I'm quite confident there's a billion times more of that on earth than has ever been used. That also raises new questions about yield and such which the one-and-a-half page article doesn't get into. Would yield go up at low gravity? Would a bigger boom make for higher yield? The intersting question here would be what kind of bomb would do it, not that Armageddon isn't scientifically accurate.
I'm aware of the other ideas for astroid divertion, pulling it into a different orbit using a massive satellite. But if the Armageddon scenario would unfold, which seems more likely than early detection the way the world is spending money on that, would it be possible to blow it up?
I'm shocked, shocked to read that one of the premisses of the film Armageddon is scientifically incorrect !
... or so I misread the headline at first glance.
Why would we need to deflect it? The assumptions were that the movie was correct, not that the earth is rendered safe from planetary wide extinction. You wouldn't need to deflect the asteroid at all for that.
A sufficiently sized bomb drilled into the middle of the asteroid would with ease break it up into smaller chunks. All those chunks individually would still hit the planet, but if the chunks are sufficiently small you dramatically increase their surface area and the amount they burn up as they enter the atmosphere. The end result would be a few tsunamis eliminating a few coastal cities, maybe a nuclear disaster in Japan, and an otherwise enduring humanity.
I'm not a bomb geek but even I know that Big Ivan is not the largest bomb ever made.
And that relates how to an article quoting the "biggest bomb ever detonated on Earth."
Which is most definitely Big Ivan.
I bet we could shift an asteroid's course if we packed up all the copies of Battlefield Earth and launched them against it.
/Though I personally think the Mission Earth series was by far the longest series of crap books ever published.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
Why bother with bombs for a fast moving asteroids? Use a powerful laser.
How else can you explain the time dilation of the painfully drawn out scene while the timer is ticking down and the audience is screaming "it's been minutes and supposed to be seconds - just die!".
Either than or about the fiftieth continuity or stupidly ignored fact failure of the movie.
There were Highlander sequals that made more sense - even the one where the sword changed from claymore to katana and back again in the middle of a fight.
No problem. If it's one thing the human race is good at, it's making bigger and better bombs.
-- Its survival of the fittest...and we got the fucking guns!!!
A 1000 km asteroid is rather enormous; it's estimated that a 10 km asteroid killed off the dinosaurs. That's got a mass of roughly one millionth that of the 1000 KM asteroid.
Suddenly we go from a billion times more powerful than we've ever detonated, to only one thousand times. That would seem to put it in the realm of feasibility; you build multiple much bigger bombs.
If we need a thousand times more than Tsar Bomba, that means we need a total of 50,000 megatons. An as-designed Tsar Bomba was twice as powerful, and had a yield ratio of roughly 4 megatons per ton, meaning we'd need to deliver 12,500 tons to the asteroid. That's a lot of mass to get off the planet, but probably within the realm of possibility for a concerted worldwide effort.
Besides, it would seem to me that you'd be better off spending the energy nudging the course of the asteroid rather than wasting energy trying to split the thing. A sufficiently large number of nuclear explosions on the same vector ought to do the trick far more cheaply.
That's okay. No need to be so radical and split it up to pieces, we could just beef up our sky crane and simply drag it out of the way.
Another big point missed in the movie is that the Space Shuttle is only capable of going to Low Earth Orbit. Bruce Willis wouldn't have even been able to get the bomb there even if it was big enough.
Oh, yeah! Wise guy, huh? Woob woob woob woob! Nyuk! Nyuk!
I know this is a fault of the movie, not the paper, but there aren't any asteroids 1000 km in diameter (Ceres is just a little bit smaller).
The only way that the movie could be even remotely plausible would be if this were an extra-solar body coming from interstellar space. Otherwise it would have been detected centuries ago. (Actually, I think the movie indicated something like this). It would also probably be traveling at a high rate of speed since it would have been dropped almost all the way down the Sun's gravity well.
Still, such a large object would have likely been detected months, if not years (decades)? before impact; even it it were coal black. (I believe the large nightly deep sky surveys would've caught it way in advance). Astronomers have recently been finding much smaller objects way beyond the orbit of Pluto; even if headed directly headed to earth they would take more than a century to get here. But since that would've allowed NASA to train its astronauts how to use the drilling gear used by Bruce Willis et al. the writers made the time very short (I think it was 14 days).
Far more likely would be the scenario in "Deep Impact" a much more scientifically accurate (boring?) movie. Here the asteroid was only about 10 km or so in diameter, or less than a millionth the size (volume, mass) of the one in "Armageddon". Also, I think, they intercepted it deeper in space and were just trying to deflect it, so a realistically sized nuke would have been able to do the job. And they carried more than one! (So no super heroics requiring Bruce to stay behind).
Obviously the size and speed of the asteroid in "Armageddon" was only to impress the audience; "Texas-sized is a lot more awesome than "Manhattan-sized". (Both would've been "ELE"- Extinction Level Events). The only possible way any realistically sized nuke (remember, those 1950s super H-Bombs were BIG, I don't think the very largest could be carried by plane), could do the job described in the film would be if the asteroid was shaped like a bow tie and the bomb placed in the fragile center (yes underground would also be important). Oh, and it should be (rapidly?) spinning to counteract its own self-gravity so that it would fly apart (and also perhaps be structurally weaker).**
I seem to remember there being something in the movie about it being shaped like this (not spinning though). The writers evidently sought to make their story just a little more plausible by adding even more implausibility to it. So what else is new (in Hollywood)?
*I don't know if any of the recently found Kuiper belt objects are larger, Ceres was the largest asteroid listed in Wikipedia.
** Actually, if the asteroid WAS in some sort of bow-tie or dumbbell kind of shape, it MUST have been spinning. Otherwise it would've collapsed under its own weight into a (rough) sphere.
Most realistic scenarios involve intercepting the rock a long time before it gets that close to the earth. If you try to move it at the eleventh hour then yeah the amount of energy to get that sort of delta v is going to be absurd.
However, if you intercept it quite a bit earlier then bomb could be of reasonable size. Does this meet the criteria of blowing it apart? Depends. If you buried it in the middle of asteroid and we assumed the bomb fractured the rock and caused all the bits to drift slowly in various directions then wouldn't that qualify? It wouldn't recoalese at least not before the intercept with the earth.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
It's just a fucking movie.
THE HONOUR OF THE KNIGHTS - CC Licensed Sci-Fi Novel
If they cannot destroy even a small asteroid?
The students found it would take a bomb about a billion times stronger than the biggest bomb ever detonated on Earth."
We have those!
On Slashdot ?
o_0 You sure?
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
instead of drilling a hole and dropping a bomb in it, the bomb was pushed to relativistic speeds before impact and detonation? Would it still need to be 9 orders of magnitude larger, or would the energy from the bomb's momentum help split up the asteroid?
The largest cities in the USA are in coastal areas, and the plan was to build 500MT bombs, mount them on submarines, and explode them a few kilometers off the coast.
The resulting tsunami would have wiped out most of a city like New York.
... was Liv Tyler.
The velocity of the bits relative to the original asteroid is going to be nothing like 5km/s. To do that, the energy required would be many times that of actually fracturing it. I can't be bothered to work it out because my latest install will be finished soon, but let's say that it is a pretty big impact and the average speed of the bits is around 200M/s.
Relative to the earth, the velocity of the exploded bits is in a range around 5km/s, with most of them in the range 4.7-5.3. They are still coming towards us. Since the original center of the asteroid is still in the same trajectory (remember we blew it up from the middle, see TFA) gravity will gradually pull most of those bits towards that center. After a while, we will have a very heavy comet, still on exactly the same path.
Now, how about the earth impact? The original asteroid was 1000km dia. Interestingly, if it missed Earth by as little as a few hundred km, we would lose satellites, coastal cities and places like Bangladesh, but we would survive. But now we have approaching us a comet maybe 20 000km across. It is far more likely to hit us. Even if the particles were dust grains, what do you think would be the effect on the atmosphere of dumping all that mass into it at high velocity? Correct: the atmosphere would be stripped off instantly and everybody would die. Even lumps a few meters across will create sizeable craters.
So, by blowing up the asteroid, we would more or less guarantee our extinction, and after blowing it up failed we would have no other course of action. Whereas sending a succession of deflectors would give us a reasonable chance of success.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
The largest bomb was in fact carried by a plane ... that just about managed to escape from the blast in time. I think it had a mass of 30 tons or so. It was supposed to be carried by what later became known as the Proton rocket. Which is why the Proton is using less efficient, more expensive and much more poisonous storeable fuels (UDMH and NTO) instead of kerosine and liquid oxygen.
While the Soyuz rocket is using kerosine and LOX, this was also the reason why it was discontinued from service as an ICBM after just 2 years. The time to fill the LOX tanks was just too long to respond. As an ICBM the R-7 had a carrying capacity of 6 tons or so. (The Soyuz is an R-7 with a third stage, instead of a nuke, put on top of it.)
Is it just me, or is this paper, whether correct or incorrect, sign of a pretty poor performance considering it took 4 university-grads to come up with a 2 page paper containing 3 known equations and some history?
from article Students asumed "A series of assumptions must be made due to limited information in the film. First, the asteroid is approximated as a spherical object 1000km in diameter " and the biggest asteroid has just 1000 km size https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ceres_(dwarf_planet) and we know this asteroid does not pose threat. - all others are much less in size http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_notable_asteroids#Largest_by_diameter and these too do not pose threat too. and no known big asteroid larger than 1000 meters threatens earth in near future http://www.newser.com/story/129849/nasa-weve-ided-most-killer-asteroids-out-there.html so there is not only a such a bomb exists - there is no such a threat. and for real asteroids the humanity might encounter - the existing bombs are more than enough to destroy them
An asteroid 1000km across? That's larger than Ceres, the largest asteroid in the asteroid belt!
Wouldn't it be more realistic to do the calculation for, say, a 10km asteroid like the Chicxulub impact?
Let's not forget that human beings have experience making "bomb(s) about a million times stronger than the biggest bomb ever detonated on Earth".
You could almost say it's one of our specialties.
You are welcome on my lawn.
That means that we can use bombs to nudge its orbit without the damned thing falling apart into a bunch of planetary buckshot.
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
The student's analysis is based on the asteroid as described in the movie... estimated at 1000km diameter. This is a ridiculous plot device that the movie makers threw in, since if there was anything that big out there, we would know about it a LOT sooner than predicted by the movie (this is as big as Ceres, which we've known about for hundreds of years!).
A more useful analysis would be to think about something of a size that we might actually see at a late stage... say 1 - 2 km diameter. This would still be a global killer, and might very well not be seen until it was only a week or three out. Could an nuke effectively be used to nudge one this size out of an Earth impacting trajectory?
If the kids want to play with calculations like this, fine... but do something realistic, rather than goof off with Hollywood fantasy.
NOW get off my lawn!
âoeAny society that would give up a little liberty to gain a little security will deserve neither and lose both.
Eris is larger than Pluto; Pluto is larger than Ceres. Before the IAU's demotion of Pluto, a 1000 km diameter was often seen as the rough boundary between "asteroid" and "planet."
I'd volunteer to go into space and blow the thing up.
Saunapro
Assuming that Bruce Willis is physically fit and weighs 85kg, we can annihilate him with an equivalent mass of antimatter.
170kg of mass converted directly to energy gets us 15.3 exajoules of energy (1.53x10^19), or appx 72 Tsar Bombas (each at 2.1x10^17)..
There are appx 116 members of the cast, credited and uncredited according to IMDB.
We could detonate the cast members with equivalent masses of antimatter in succession a la "Orion" to steer the asteroid if it is far enough out. This gives us 177x10^19 joules, evenly divided up into 116 separate bombs, assuming the rest of the cast weighs the same.
For larger asteroids, we could use the casts of Troll 2, Biodome, Battlefield Earth, Ballistic: ecks vs sever (even the title is bad), Battle Los Angeles, Independence Day, The Day After Tomorrow, etc.
We could then have JJ Abrams add lens flare.
--
BMO
Idiots. Size of Texas means area of asteroid equals area of texas.
So Diameter of asteroid is only about 150 miles. (260,000 / 4 / Pi ) ^ 0.5
Which means mass is overstated by around 200 times.
Jeez. What sorta engineering students are they doing nowadays? USA might as well quit being a superpower right now.
You've got the brackets in the wrong place.
It's not an old (Bruce Willis movie), it's an (old Bruce Willis) movie.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
The best way for us to save ourselves from an asteroid flying toward Earth is to explode an atomic bomb in its way to deflect the asteroid from its path. Of course it has to be properly calculated to plan ahead where the asteroid would be redirected to, so that it does not cause major harm. This is probably the best use of atomic bombs for us as a humanity.
The smaller the fragments are, the more likely they are to burn up in the atmosphere.
Also, the explosion will scatter them a bit. Most probably won't hit.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
There is no theoretical limit to the yield of a thermonuclear device. So, let's build a Terra-ton weapon, just in case.
Why would you want to blow up a giant asteroid headed towards earth? One asteroid the size of New York vs 100 the size of Rhode Island seems like a pointless distinction to me. Unless you can "vaporize" it, that will be one hell of a debris storm headed our way. Keep the thing in one piece and nudge it in a different direction.
When I watch a Bruce Willis movie I crack open a beer, dump the chips in a bowl and not only do a "willing suspension of disbelief" but lock that sucker away in a dark corner of the basement. Nothing close to reality and definitely not scientific reality enters my mind for the next two hours. That's how you enjoy a Bruce Willis movie.
Back in the early 90's it nearly destroyed the known universe.
Now, queue the defenders...
You don't have to blow it up. You just have to divert it enough to prevent it from hitting the earth. At the time of the original study, the plan involved Saturn rockets, which we no longer have. Now, I guess we'd have to rely on the Falcon Heavy.
So in other words--we'd need an anti-matter explosion :)
I misread that as "No Bomb Powerful Enough to Destroy On-Rushing Android," so you can imagine my confusion.
> The students found it would take a bomb about a billion times stronger than the biggest bomb ever detonated on Earth
No kidding. They even have an onscreen argument in the movie about this where the guy that later plays Lucious Malfoy eviscerates the President's science advisor over his college grades.
The whole point of the movie was to split the asteriod into 2 pieces rather than trying to destroy it.
That's the whole point of having the maverick drillers.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Why would we just use one bomb? If its necessary, start hitting it with everything we have in an orderly fashion, hell we can probably change trajectory enough to prevent catastrophe with multiple detonations at a particular area, think Project Orion with the asteroid as the space craft (and we don't care if the craft disintegrates in the process).
Cheers.
This is my sig. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
If there was an asteroid that big heading for us, we would have seen it already.
A video of Feck diving in the 2012 Olympics would help. It was a "huge bomb".
And even if that doesn't help deflect the asteroid, maybe the swarm of Olympic lawyers demanding the video be taken down would nudge it a bit.
I only look human.
My mother is a halfling and my dad is an ogre, so that makes me an Ogreling
It was more about where they put the bomb than anything else. Now if you want to argue that such a place doesn't exist and if it did you would never be able to analyze and find it in time.
That sounds like a challenge......
A nuclear powered reaction mass engine suitably placed would use the mass of the asteroid itself for the fuel. Given enough leverage by putting it on early enough and no more problem.
Funny how nobody I think has mentioned that we now have professional asteroid miners, as opposed to the amateurs in the movie.
My idea calls for a swarm of autonomous drills and planes that can cut and shave an asteroid into ribbons that will quickly disperse and burn up in the atmosphere. In other words cutting something into cold bits and pieces instead of trying to blow it up.
By the way I am wondering how long it would take for a giant bandsaw to cut through 100 m of rock?
Bandsaw either being tangential to surface, or perhaps like a chain wrapped tightly around it and automatically getting smaller as it cuts in..
How would Planetary Resources do it?
Seriously. The number of assumptions necessary to work out the detail they provided is simply staggering, and has no place in a scientific paper. The students should learn this lesson now, rather than being allowed to take away from this any sense of accomplishment, and gods forbid apply it later in their professional life.
We would still need a ragtag band of misfits and renegades and a chainsmoking Russian refueling station attendant.
A) It was a movie.
B) FTA:
First, the asteroid is approximated as a spherical object 1000km in diameter (the asteroid is quoted as being the size of Texas) that splits into two equal sized hemispheres
Yet, in the movie it is clearly not a spherical object.
C) In the movie, it is clearly stated they are going to use the bombs to split the asteroid on a natural frature plain. This would decrease the required force significantly.
D) It was a fucking movie. It was fiction, not a factual account of an actual event. They use movie physics. They flew the space shuttle to the asteriod and it behaves like an airplane in space for crying out loud. They had a chamber that simulated weightlessness in space by creating a vaccuum.
There is no "-1 offended" or "-1 you don't agree with me" mod options for a reason.
ZOMG the physics in a michael bay movie were wrong, I'm truly astounded that something this unusual happened.
your saying there's a chance!
Nintendo of America has its problems too. Bob's Game anyone?
My kids dragged me to that piece of crap. I managed to get out to the parking lot, afterwards, before I began a screaming rant about how many things were wrong with that movie. Perhaps it would have been much, much, much shorter, shorter than this post, to say what was right about it.. *
And that was having missed the assertion that it was the size of Texas.
Now, having lived in Texas, I can tell you that if you drive east on I-10, as you're leaving, the sign reads mile 899. That makes it not much less than the diameter of the Moon. You *think* astronomers, amateur or professional, might have noticed something that big careening through the solar system. The biggest asteroids are about 1/3 that size.
If an asteroid the size of Texas was headed earthward, there's a fine old set of instructions from the Cold War as to what to do: go away from all windows, then bend over, and kiss your ass goodbye.
mark
* Fun anecdote, which I got from my late ex, who was an engineer there: when they were filming the scenes at KSC (that's Cape Canaveral to the ignorant), one of the idiot starts climbed up on the Crawler treads, WHILE IT WAS MOVING. A tech yelled at him to get off. He replied, "do you know who I am?"
The tech responded no, and if he didn't get off and slipped, they'd need DNA analysis to figure out who he was.
Just wrap the bomb in Naquadah... easy peasy!
Which is why we have to attack the bug planet!
What? Do you apes want to live forever?! HooRah!
Fiction is not Fact!
Seriously, it's a movie. For the record: "House" is full of bullshit if you're in medicine, forensics is not like "CSI", hacking is nothing like the movie "Hackers."
What really makes me sad, is someone is planning on giveing them a degree.
Next they'll be trying to say guns can't have infantittie bullets!
There were at least two disaster by asteroid/comet movies that came out in 1998. Both of them employed STS on steroids, but Armageddon had more scientifically inacurrate information per second than the other one. And it had NASA trademarks plastered all over it.
Just because they gave an answer doesn't mean they got the math right or, more importantly, even asked the right question. I'm incline to go with Bruce on this one. :)
We've only been able to see things in the Oort Cloud for a decade or so, and even then only really, really big things on the inner fringes of the cloud. We haven't yet seen anything sailing through the Solar System from interstellar space, although we know there has to be a lot of junk out there. Declaring that there can't possibly be anything heading for us is a bit presumptuous then, don't you think?
"Think about how stupid the average person is. Now, realise that half of them are dumber than that." - George Carlin
If asteroids approach earth, we should simply have them form a committee. Five hundred meetings later where they're still arguing what to name themselves, the asteroids will probably fly right by us and forget to slam into the planet entirely.
Thats why he had to fly to the asteroid.
If there is enough warning that an object is inbound/on a collision course then you add a propulsion system to it and park it in a earth orbit. There is your anchor for a space elevator or something you can colonize as a spacebase, mine it and return the precious materials to earth. Even start small with known NEOs. Ideas borrowed from "The Reality Dysfunction" "The Neutronium Alchemist" and the "Nano Flower" although there will be better examples out there.
So, what part of "the asteroid would need to be split" are you not understanding? They've stated that the movie's scenario, especially is distance, would need a massive explosion. They're giving the distance that the movie's bomb would need to work. If you read the actual paper linked in the article they say: