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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!
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."
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
What? Next you're going to claim this photo is real!
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
I agree with you and almost always get the same thought's especially watching mythbusters episodes recently, still like the show but I wish they would just leave movies alone.
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.
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?..
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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.
And in other news, failed hockey players can't play golf either.
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.
There was an asteroid in the film. You're thinking of Deep Impact: the same movie, cornier, with Elijah Wood, the homely-looking love interest and a comet.
Chewbacon
The Bible is like Wikipedia: written by a bunch of people and verifiable by questionable sources.
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.
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."
... 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!
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.
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.
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 !
Very doubtful. But we could potentially build such a bomb if the Earth depended on it for some reason; the Teller-Ulam configuration scales indefinitely. The problem is it'd be way too massive to get off the ground.
Of course, these students were simply calculating the (very unrealistic) scenario found in the movie, of the asteroid right about to impact, and of deflection involving splitting it in half and having one half go each way around the Earth. As they note, more realistic deflection scenarios involve hitting it much earlier and simply trying to alter it's trajectory intact (but that's not fitting for Hollywood)
Also it should be noted that the Tsar Bomba mentioned in the article was deliberately cut down to half of its design yield (replacing the uranium tamper with a lead one) to make it burn cleaner. It was not only the biggest atomic bomb ever detonated on Earth, but also the cleanest per unit of energy output.
Sometimes I doubt your commitment to Sparkle Motion.
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.)
... was Liv Tyler.
No, I'd love to make a Deep Impact in Liv Tyler before Armageddon. [/groan]
Donte Alistair Anderson Roberts - hi son!
Karma: Chameleon
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.
Yeah and Bruce Willis was in it too, it was called Hudson Hawk.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
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.
If a planet killer asteroid was coming for the earth, I don't think it would be too difficult to get a pass on making an Orion space craft to act as a heavy lifter.
And I'm not talking about the NASA Orion I'm talking about the DARPA project
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 students found it would take a bomb about a billion times stronger than the biggest bomb ever detonated on Earth."
We have those!
Admittedly I did not actually RTFA, but, assuming "the biggest bomb" refers to The Tsar Bomb, then no, no we don't.
Think the largest nuclear weapons in service today are in the 100 - 500 kT range, with the posibility of dialing them up into the low MT range.
Admit nothing. Deny Everything. Make Counter-accusations.
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."
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.
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.
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.
OK. I think I've had this discussion before, but maybe people need a fucking refresher on basic newtonian motion.
BLOWING UP AN ONCOMING ASTEROID will ABSOLUTELY NOT 'MOVE' IT TO EITHER SIDE. My fucking GOD did the entire planet fucking fail basic physics? It WILL guarantee that we are, instead of being slammed with one giant rock, showered with millions of smaller rocks, but WE'LL STILL BE FUCKED SIDEWAYS in that scenario.
We could, yes, potentially build a really big bomb. It's not the fact that it's too "heavy" that is why it is impractical. It's because IT CAN NEVER, EVER, FUCKING EVER POSSIBLY WORK as a solution to an oncoming asteroid. That's because making a big rock into littler rocks is not how you stop it.
Diverting the asteroid is a LOT less expensive and though it is disappointingly big hardon-creating explosion-free, (Sorry Mr. Teller, your pyro days are in fact over as I recall) it actually has an advantage over just blowing up the asteroid in that it is a solution created by an adult and not the world's most-respected Beavis-inspiring physicist child who just liked to blow shit up, and that it would work
Sorry, had to get that one off my chest. Mr. Teller and his pyromaniac fantasies have caused a mighty disturbance in a conversation that needs to be deadly serious. We do not have time for the sniggering little Beavises of the world to fantasize about making great big fire. Jesus.
One day I feel I'm ahead of the wheel / the next it's rolling over me / I can get back on / I can get back on
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?
We would still need a ragtag band of misfits and renegades and a chainsmoking Russian refueling station attendant.
This is mostly correct, the vast majority of the current US nuclear arsenal is comprised of variants of the B61 with selectable yields between 100-450kt, the remaining large yield weapons are the B83 bombs with a maximum yield of ~2.1MT.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
I liked Hudson Hawk you insensitive clod!
Diverting the asteroid is a LOT less expensive and though it is disappointingly big hardon-creating explosion-free, (Sorry Mr. Teller, your pyro days are in fact over as I recall) it actually has an advantage over just blowing up the asteroid in that it is a solution created by an adult and not the world's most-respected Beavis-inspiring physicist child who just liked to blow shit up, and that it would work
Not necessarily. Even if you divert the asteroid from a predicted collision, it's still in an orbit that passes close to Earth's orbit. Unless, of course, you divert it into the moon or other massive target--in which case you do get the hardon-creating explosion the public is looking for.
Except that we've never built anything like that before, so it'd take a lot of time to design, build, and test it. If you have that much time, you'd be better off using an existing rocket and deflecting the asteroid early. Basically, with giant asteroids, if you've stupidly waited until the last minute (perhaps because you stupidly didn't bother to keep an eye out for them in the first place), then you're already screwed.
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.
I don't know about this. Depending on the composition of the asteroid, a bomb placed inside might possibly split it in half, and the force of that explosion would cause the two halves to move in opposite directions. If the bomb isn't powerful enough (quite likely with the size of a giant asteroid, and the size of our bombs), it won't cause the asteroid to be broken into "millions of smaller rocks", just two or so (again, this depends on the rock's composition). The problem is that it's unlikely the halves would be pushed apart enough to matter, so the whole thing is certainly quite unrealistic.
Yes, diverting the asteroid early is obviously a far better scenario. But there's a big problem here: doing this requires that you actually know about the asteroid well ahead of time, and it requires that you take measures well ahead of time to divert it. This requires a lot of funding. We humans are too cheap and stupid to do this. There's no telling how many asteroids are out there that might collide with us in the next two centuries, because we don't put much effort into looking for them (it seems to be mostly amateur astronomers that look for these, and their equipment isn't all that great). Heck, we even know about one sizable asteroid, named Apophis, that's going to make a close fly-by in 2029, and then depending on exactly how the gravitational interaction goes in that fly-by, might come around again in 2036 for a direct 510 megaton impact, but we aren't doing anything at all about it even though that's only 24 years away. Granted, the impact possibility is still quite low, but if we're wrong, we're looking at some pretty catastrophic effects, either tens of millions dead if it hits land, or who knows how many dead if it hits the ocean and causes a massive tsunami.
your saying there's a chance!
So many things wrong with your comically angry post. Some of the main ones:
1) Only asteroid fragments over a certain size make it to the ground. Blow it up enough and yes, it will not make it to the surface. It would add dust, of course, and impart a heating pulse to the surface, but spread out over however long between the furthest-forward pieces from the blast were and the furthest back ones.
2) Deflecting fragments of the asteroid from a collision course is precisely the point of an explosion, whether you're talking a bunch of small pieces that are now missing, or just two halves.
3) A bomb can do more than break up an asteroid; it can also move an asteroid, by radiation pressure, direct or indirect through surface heating.
Sometimes I doubt your commitment to Sparkle Motion.
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.
Which is why we have to attack the bug planet!
What? Do you apes want to live forever?! HooRah!
How far out realistically would we spot a killer asteroid? I recall some predictions years in advance of near misses. And how many years would it likely take to get a project orion nuclear propulsion working?
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
Hudson Hawk inspired me to time all of my tasks with Music.
It takes me 2 Bat out of Hell's to get to work in the morning.
. .
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.
If I recall the movie correctly, it was an asteroid that got knocked out of orbit by something else and went screaming hellbent for Earth, so it wasn't a predicted or noted asteroid. (I could be wrong, it's been a while) So basically it might just as well be an an extra-solar object time-period of warning. I.e.- we're screwed.
Vote monkeys into Congress. They are cheaper and more trustworthy.
Your logical post was much less funny that SlappyToad's, but also much less aggravating to read. :D
Vote monkeys into Congress. They are cheaper and more trustworthy.
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:
You are exactly fucking right. YOU DON'T.
And of course we will risk the whole of humanity on someone whose entire understanding of physics comes from watching The Empire Strikes Back.
Jesus, I already said it so I'm not gonna fucking repeat it.
One day I feel I'm ahead of the wheel / the next it's rolling over me / I can get back on / I can get back on
Are you sure? What are your credentials? How do you know that a solid iron asteroid isn't going to be split in half by a massive fictional bomb with the two pieces sent in opposite directions? Why should I believe some random asshole on Slashdot?