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Large-ish Meteor Hits Earth... But No One Notices (discovery.com)
According to data released by the Fireball and Bolide Reports page of NASA's Near Earth Object Program, a large meteor exploded far off the coast of Brazil on February 6, 2016. The meteor was the largest atmospheric impact recorded since the famous Chelyabinsk bolide that exploded over Russia in 2013. Although the Feb 6 meteor didn't cause any structural damage, the meteor unleashed an energy equivalent of 13,000 tons of TNT exploding instantaneously.
Someone noticed, or we would be reading about it here...
It is interesting seeing the food prices from 1985 on this newspaper page in contrast to today's prices. Also the mushroom cloud reporting is cool.
Yes, this was incidentally why ballistic missiles launched from subs off the coast of the US were a huge concern. By the time you knew they were coming, you had about ten minutes or less to react. And there wasn't really anything short of other nuclear missiles that could shoot down an ballistic missile until recently, and nothing that could probably be activated on that sort of a notice even now.
A meteor would probably come in as fast as a ballistic missile, and we wouldn't even have the advantage of knowing where the launch sites are and monitoring them.
The big advantage over ICBMs is that they generally come from farther away and so there is more time to see them coming, but that assumes that you get lucky and find it before it enters the atmosphere. If you didn't see it coming, there's going to be zero chance of tracking it long enough to do anything about it, if you even saw it coming. At that point, even if you hit it with something, unless you atomized it the debris are going to impact and do a similar amount of damage.
Not that long ago, I was looking up how much energy is in a lion.
Did they just go with mass of lion times speed of light squared? ;)
I do not want your cheap brainburning drugs. They are useless for work. And I am a working man today.